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No. AI is a must for software development. It's non-negotiable. The productivity gains are too great. The era of 100% human-written code is over. People will st

by bitwize 6mo ago

No. AI is a must for software development. It's non-negotiable. The productivity gains are too great. The era of 100% human-written code is over. People will still do it as an idle curiosity, for personal projects only they intend to use. But even those open source projects with significant user bases that forbid the use of AI (like, afaik, NetBSD) will be eclipsed by those that support it in terms of features, capability, and security. And the commercial world? Forget it. You cannot keep pace with your employer's expectations unless you learn to use these tools well. This is not up for debate. It's reality. Plenty of accomplished devs are getting good results and accomplishing tasks with unheard-of speed using AI, so if you're still not, that's a PEBKAC. You are not using the tools correctly. Figure it out before you complain.

mrhottakes 6mo ago
LLMs may be a must for programming, but not for engineering. Writing code is the easy part once you figure out what actually needs to be built in the first place.
- bitwize 6mo ago
  Indeed. But figuring out what actually needs to be built is the systems analyst's job, not the programmer's. It takes people skills and holistic thought, something programmers are generally poor at (and AI certainly is no good at, at least not today).
anthk 6mo ago
https://smsk.dev/2026/04/26/ai-cannot-self-improve-and-math-behind-proves-it https://smsk.dev/2026/04/26/ai-cannot-self-improve-and-math-... >You are not using the tools correctly. Stop being deluded, man. When this crap collapses into itself you will be in tears back asking for the knowledge you failed to get without the fancy Clippys. Now, stop that fancy Megahal chatbot and learn to do things by hand.
- bitwize 6mo ago
  I know how to do things by hand, man. But the writing is on the wall: that skill is going the way of writing programs on punchcards. And there's little we can do about it because the economics in favor of LLMs are like laws of physics. Yes, model collapse is gonna suck. But LLMs are not just left to self-train, they are guided by human researchers who are going to find ways to groom and direct the models to avoid collapse. They can make billions by shipping better models, so why wouldn't they invest a lot of effort in that?
  - anthk 6mo ago
    This is not terminals vs punchcards. This is like Windows ME over Windows 98. Or, maybe, the 286 over a 8086 when a 386 it's the proper path.
  - vor_ 6mo ago
    One of the amusing things about AI bros is how naively over-enthusiastic they are about the technology and its inevitability.
    - bitwize 6mo ago
      You still don't get where I'm coming from. The AI takeover of programming is inevitable, and I hate it. But my feelings don't make the brutal economics go away. A skilled developer can now accomplish in days what used to take weeks or months with proper use of these tools. Period. I know this because of the absurd number of skilled developers here, on X, Mastodon, and elsewhere—including OP's author—saying "with AI I'm accomplishing in days what used to take me weeks or months". And if you have the opportunity to make use of the tools, you have to be stupid, or you're cutting off your nose to spite your face, not to.
      - NoGravitas 6mo ago
        You know, economics are made by people and can be changed by them. They're historically contingent, not laws of physics.
spankibalt 6mo ago
> "No. AI is a must for software development. It's non-negotiable." Absolutist rubbish. > "But even those open source projects with significant user bases that forbid the use of AI [...] will be eclipsed by those that support it in terms of features, capability, and security." As is this. If a language model is relevant to a project, open source or otherwise, is of course heavily dependent on its nature (ethics, use case, deployment, working environment/culture, et cetera).
vor_ 6mo ago
> No. AI is a must for software development. It's non-negotiable. ???
wiseowise 6mo ago
> You cannot keep pace with your employer's expectations unless you learn to use these tools well. This is not up for debate. It's reality. So the issue isn’t LLM productivity but unrealistic expectations that skyrocketed in the last years? Makes sense. > Plenty of accomplished devs are getting good results and accomplishing tasks with unheard-of speed using AI I don’t see any major business impact.

by bitwize 6mo ago

mrhottakes 6mo ago

LLMs may be a must for programming, but not for engineering. Writing code is the easy part once you figure out what actually needs to be built in the first place.

bitwize 6mo ago
Indeed. But figuring out what actually needs to be built is the systems analyst's job, not the programmer's. It takes people skills and holistic thought, something programmers are generally poor at (and AI certainly is no good at, at least not today).

anthk 6mo ago

https://smsk.dev/2026/04/26/ai-cannot-self-improve-and-math-behind-proves-it https://smsk.dev/2026/04/26/ai-cannot-self-improve-and-math-... >You are not using the tools correctly. Stop being deluded, man. When this crap collapses into itself you will be in tears back asking for the knowledge you failed to get without the fancy Clippys. Now, stop that fancy Megahal chatbot and learn to do things by hand.

bitwize 6mo ago
I know how to do things by hand, man. But the writing is on the wall: that skill is going the way of writing programs on punchcards. And there's little we can do about it because the economics in favor of LLMs are like laws of physics. Yes, model collapse is gonna suck. But LLMs are not just left to self-train, they are guided by human researchers who are going to find ways to groom and direct the models to avoid collapse. They can make billions by shipping better models, so why wouldn't they invest a lot of effort in that?
- anthk 6mo ago
  This is not terminals vs punchcards. This is like Windows ME over Windows 98. Or, maybe, the 286 over a 8086 when a 386 it's the proper path.
- vor_ 6mo ago
  One of the amusing things about AI bros is how naively over-enthusiastic they are about the technology and its inevitability.
  - bitwize 6mo ago
    You still don't get where I'm coming from. The AI takeover of programming is inevitable, and I hate it. But my feelings don't make the brutal economics go away. A skilled developer can now accomplish in days what used to take weeks or months with proper use of these tools. Period. I know this because of the absurd number of skilled developers here, on X, Mastodon, and elsewhere—including OP's author—saying "with AI I'm accomplishing in days what used to take me weeks or months". And if you have the opportunity to make use of the tools, you have to be stupid, or you're cutting off your nose to spite your face, not to.
    - NoGravitas 6mo ago
      You know, economics are made by people and can be changed by them. They're historically contingent, not laws of physics.

spankibalt 6mo ago

> "No. AI is a must for software development. It's non-negotiable." Absolutist rubbish. > "But even those open source projects with significant user bases that forbid the use of AI [...] will be eclipsed by those that support it in terms of features, capability, and security." As is this. If a language model is relevant to a project, open source or otherwise, is of course heavily dependent on its nature (ethics, use case, deployment, working environment/culture, et cetera).

vor_ 6mo ago

> No. AI is a must for software development. It's non-negotiable. ???

wiseowise 6mo ago

> You cannot keep pace with your employer's expectations unless you learn to use these tools well. This is not up for debate. It's reality. So the issue isn’t LLM productivity but unrealistic expectations that skyrocketed in the last years? Makes sense. > Plenty of accomplished devs are getting good results and accomplishing tasks with unheard-of speed using AI I don’t see any major business impact.