44 ms·

My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

• davidgerard 1y ago
  fly.io is of course closed source, right? so we can't look at the code and see the demonstrable engineering excellence trust me bro, you fool, you poltroon,
  • simonw 1y ago
    Their client application (written in Go) is open source: https://github.com/superfly/flyctl https://github.com/superfly/flyctl They have a few other notable open source components, I think these two are particularly interesting: - https://github.com/superfly/corrosion https://github.com/superfly/corrosion - https://github.com/superfly/litefs https://github.com/superfly/litefs (Disclosure: they sponsor some of my work.)
• dburkland 1y ago
  Really enjoyed this article and how it was written, especially the “tookr-jerbs” part.
• sneak 1y ago
  THANK YOU. I was a 3-4x programmer before. Now I’m a 9-15x programmer when wrangling LLMs. This is a sea change and it’s already into “incredible” territory and shows no signs of slowing down. > Think of anything you wanted to build but didn’t. You tried to home in on some first steps. If you’d been in the limerent phase of a new programming language, you’d have started writing. But you weren’t, so you put it off, for a day, a year, or your whole career. I have been banging out little projects that I have wanted to exist for years but always had on the back burner. Write a detailed readme and ask the agent to interrogate you about the missing parts of the spec then update the README. Then have it make a TODO and start implementing. Give it another code base for style guide. I’ve made more good and useful and working code in the last month than I have in the last two years.
  • FridgeSeal 1y ago
    That’s nothing, I was a 4X programmer and now I’m a 500x programmer! I don’t just run one agent, I run all of them! My time to close tickets is measured in minutes! I don’t even review code, I have a different agent review it for me!
    • ofjcihen 1y ago
      And to make sure that agent doesn’t make mistakes I have a different agent review that agents work!
      • tptacek 1y ago
        Why would you do this and not just read the code yourself?
        • yifanl 1y ago
          Because at thats what you need to do to get a 943x coder black belt
        • grey-area 1y ago
          Well given reading code is more tedious than writing it and the author of this article claims gai is most useful for tedious or repetitive code, why would you want to read it? Since this AI agent understands and reasons about the text it writes and reads it should be pretty infallible at checking the code too, right? Just get another agent to review it and merge it, job done.
          • tsimionescu 1y ago
            Plus, the sales agents are running to promote the finished product to other companies and close deals, and the accounting agents are checking that all expenses are being accounted for and we have a positive cash flow. Obviously, the audit agents are checking that no errors sneak into this process, according to a plan devised by the legal agents.
• retrac 1y ago
  Machine translation and speech recognition. The state of the art for these is a multi-modal language model. I'm hearing impaired veering on deaf, and I use this technology all day every day. I wanted to watch an old TV series from the 1980s. There are no subtitles available. So I fed the show into a language model (Whisper) and now I have passable subtitles that allow me to watch the show. Am I the only one who remembers when that was the stuff of science fiction? It was not so long ago an open question if machines would ever be able to transcribe speech in a useful way. How quickly we become numb to the magic.
  • dmonitor 1y ago
    Old TV series should have closed captions available (which are apparently different from subtitles), however the question of where to obtain aside from VHS copies them might be difficult.
    • worble 1y ago
      And of course, a lot of modern "dvd players" do not properly transmit closed captions as subtitles over HDMI, so that sure isn't helping A slightly off topic but interesting video about this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OSCOQ6vnLwU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OSCOQ6vnLwU
    • anotherevan 1y ago
      Many DVDs of old movies and TV shows may contain the closed captions, but they are not visible through HDMI. You have to connect your DVD player to your TV via the composite video analogue outputs. This video explains all about it: https://youtu.be/OSCOQ6vnLwU https://youtu.be/OSCOQ6vnLwU
      • crtasm 1y ago
        Yes they need to be "burned in" to the picture to work with HDMI (he shows a couple of bluray players towards the end that do this. there's also some models mentioned in the comments)
  • 1y ago
• kerryritter 1y ago
  A well articulated blog, imo. Touches on all the points I see argued about on LinkedIn all the time. I think leveling things out at the beginning is important. For instance, I recently talked to a senior engineer who said "using AI to write programming is so useless", but then said they'd never heard of Cursor. Which is fine - but I so often see strong vocal stances against using AI tools but then referring to early Copilot days or just ChatGPT as their experience, and the game has changed so much since then.
• gdubs 1y ago
  One thing that I find truly amazing is just the simple fact that you can now be fuzzy with the input you give a computer, and get something meaningful in return. Like, as someone who grew up learning to code in the 90s it always seemed like science fiction that we'd get to a point where you could give a computer some vague human level instructions and get it more or less do what you want.
  • jumploops 1y ago
    Computers finally work they way they were always supposed to work :)
  • csallen 1y ago
    It's mind blowing. At least 1-2x/week I find myself shocked that this is the reality we live in
    • FridgeSeal 1y ago
      [flagged]
      • oblio 1y ago
        Were you expecting builders of Dyson Spheres to drive around in Yugo cars? They're obviously all driving Ford F-750s for their grocery runs.
        • selimthegrim 1y ago
          This pretty much describes the bimodal distribution of cars in Louisiana modulo some Subarus
      • IshKebab 1y ago
        Some people are never happy. Imagine if you demonstrated ChatGPT in the 90s and someone said "nah... it uses, like 500 watts! no thank you!".
• ofjcihen 1y ago
  I feel like we get one of these articles that addresses valid AI criticisms with poor arguments every week and at this point I’m ready to write a boilerplate response because I already know what they’re going to say. Interns don’t cost 20 bucks a month but training users in the specifics of your org is important. Knowing what is important or pointless comes with understanding the skill set.
  • mrkurt 1y ago
    PLEASE write your response. We'll publish it on the Fly.io blog. Unedited. If you want.
    • kubb 1y ago
      Maybe make a video of how you're vibecoding a valuable project in an existing codebase, and how agents are saving you time by running your tools in a loop.
      • metaltyphoon 1y ago
        Seriously… thats the one thing I never see being posted? Is it because Agent mode will take 30-40 minutes to just bookstrap a project and create some file?
        • csallen 1y ago
          It takes like 2-6 minutes to do that, depending on the scope of the project
        • sensanaty 1y ago
          Well no, the reality of this workflow is the farcica, abject failures unleashed on the Dotnet codebase a week ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44050152 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44050152
      • andrepd 1y ago
        So they can cherry pick the 1 out of 10 times that it actually performs in an impressive manner? That's the essence of most AI demos/"benchmarks" I've seen. Testing for myself has always yielded unimpressive results. Maybe I'm just unlucky?
• cobertos 1y ago
  It's been so much more rewarding playing with AI coding tools on my own than through the subtle and not so subtle nudges at work. The work AI tools are a walled garden, have a shitty interface, feel made to extract from me than to help me. In my personal stuff, downloading models, playing with them, the tooling, the interactions, it all been so much more rewarding to give me stable comfortable workflows I can rely on and that work with my brain. The dialog around it is so adversarial it's been hard figuring out how to proceed until dedicating a lot of effort to diving into the field myself, alone, on my personal time and learned what's comfortable to use it on.
  • j-bos 1y ago
    Exactly, seems much skepticism comes from only scratching the surface of what's possible.
    • FridgeSeal 1y ago
      Is there a term for “skeptics just haven’t used it enough” argument? Because it frequently got rolled out in crypto-currency arguments too.
      • cloogshicer 1y ago
        It's "skill issue" or "git gud".
      • oblio 1y ago
        Now, now, be nice. There is value to obtain for the user from current gen AI tools. From cryptocurrencies... uh...
        • nawgz 1y ago
          [flagged]
      • steveklabnik 1y ago
        I do think that's a poor argument, but there's a better version: tools take skills to use properly. The other day, I needed to hammer two drywall anchors into some drywall. I didn't have a hammer handy. I used the back of a screwdriver. It sucked. It even technically worked! But it wasn't a pleasant experience. I could take away from this "screwdrivers are bullshit," but I'd be wrong: I was using a tool the wrong way. This doesn't mean that "if you just use a screwdriver more as a hammer, you'll like it", it means that I should use a screwdriver for screwing in screws and a hammer for hammering things.
• 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 1y ago
  Damn. Well I'll spend a few bucks trying it out and I'll ask my employer if they're okay with me using agents on company time, but But I'm not thrilled about centralized, paid tools. I came into software during a huge FOSS boom. Like a huge do it yourself, host it yourself, Publish Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere, all the power to all the people, borderline anarchist communist boom. I don't want it to be like other industries where you have to buy a dog shit EMR and buy a dog shit CAD license and buy a dog shit tax prep license. Maybe I lived through the whale fall and Moloch is catching us. I just don't like it. I rage against dying lights as a hobby.
  • renjimen 1y ago
    You can self host an open-weights LLM. Some of the AI-powered IDEs are open source. It does take a little more work than just using VSCode + Copilot, but that's always been the case for FOSS.
    • Philpax 1y ago
      An important note is that the models you can host at home (e.g. without buying ten(s of) thousand dollar rigs) won't be as effective as the proprietary models. A realistic size limit is around 32 billion parameters with quantisation, which will fit on a 24GB GPU or a sufficiently large MBP. These models are roughly on par with the original GPT-4 - that is, they will generate snippets, but they won't pull off the magic that Claude in an agentic IDE can do. (There's the recent Devstral model, but that requires a specific harness, so I haven't tested it.) DeepSeek-R1 is on par with frontier proprietary models, but requires a 8xH100 node to run efficiently. You can use extreme quantisation and CPU offloading to run it on an enthusiast build, but it will be closer to seconds-per-token territory.
  • jay_kyburz 1y ago
    Yeah, I'm ready to jump in, but I need an agent running on my hardware at home without internet access. How far away are we from that? How many RYX 50s do I need? This is a serious question btw.
• mouse_ 1y ago
  > Extraordinarily talented people are doing work that LLMs already do better, out of spite. So what, people should just stop doing any tasks that LLMs do subjectively better?
  • tptacek 1y ago
    I don't know the full answer to this question, but I have a partial answer: they should at least stop doing tedious tasks that LLMs do better.
    • asadotzler 1y ago
      Some of us thrive in tedium, and also do it better than bots.
      • pixl97 1y ago
        And then sit in shock when you're replaced with an auto-loom.
    • p-o 1y ago
      Unrelated to your friends, but a big part of learning is to do tedious tasks. Maybe once you master a topic LLMs can be better, but for many folks out there, using LLMs as a shortcut can impede learning.
      • tptacek 1y ago
        I'm ~8,000 XP into MathAcademy right now, doing the calculus stuff I skipped by not going to college. I'm doing a lot, lot, lot of tedious practice. But I know why I'm doing it, and when I'm doing doing it, I'm going to go back to using SageMath to do actual work.
• metalliqaz 1y ago
  Can someone explain to me what this means? > People coding with LLMs today use agents. Agents get to poke around your codebase on their own. They author files directly. They run tools. They compile code, run tests, and iterate on the results. ... Is this what people are really doing? Who is just turning AI loose to modify things as it sees fit? If I'm not directing the work, how does it even know what to do? I've been subjected to forced LLM integration from management, and there are no "Agents" anywhere that I've seen. Is anyone here doing this that can explain it?
  • adamgordonbell 1y ago
    you are giving it instructions but it's running a while loop with a list of tools and it can poke around in your code base until it thinks it's done whatever you ask for. See Claude Code, windsurf, amp, Kilcode, roo, etc. I might describe a change I need to have made and then it does it and then I might say "Now the tests are failing. Can you fix them?" and so on. Sometimes it works very great. sometimes you find yourself arguing with the computer.
  • williamcotton 1y ago
    I run Cursor in a mode that starts up shell processes, runs linters, tests etc on its own, updates multiple files, runs the linter and tests again, fixes failures, and so on. It auto stops at 20 iterations through the feedback loop. Depending on the task it works really well.
    • metalliqaz 1y ago
      This example seems to keep coming up. Why do you need an AI to run linters? I have found that linters actually add very little value to an experience programmer, and actually get in the way when I am in the middle of active development. I have to say I'm having a hard time visualizing the amazing revolution that is alluded to by the author.
      • williamcotton 1y ago
        Static errors are caught by linters before runtime errors are caught by a test suite. When you have an LLM in a feedback loop, otherwise known as an agent, then iterative calls to the LLM will include requests and responses from linters and test suites, which can assure the user, who typically follows along with the entire process, that the agent is writing better code than it would otherwise.
• jsheard 1y ago
  > But all day, every day, a sizable chunk of the front page of HN is allocated to LLMs: incremental model updates, startups doing things with LLMs, LLM tutorials, screeds against LLMs. It’s annoying! You forgot the screeds against the screeds (like this one)
• philosophty 1y ago
  "they’re smarter than me" feels like false humility and an attempt to make the medicine go down better. 1. Thomas is obviously very smart. 2. To be what we think of as "smart" is to be in touch with reality, which includes testing AI systems for yourself and recognizing their incredible power.
  • mrkurt 1y ago
    It's not false. He's talking about people smarter than him (at writing and shipping infrastructure code). Thomas is the smartest at other things.
    • philosophty 1y ago
      It is false and you're proving it. Smarter means smarter. Smarter does not mean "better at writing and shipping infrastructure code." Some of the smartest people I know are also infra engineers and none of them are AI skeptics in 2025.
• bitpush 1y ago
  A writing for the ages. I've found most of the LLM skeptics are either being hypocritical or just being gate-keepy (we dont want everyone to write code)
  • superconduct123 1y ago
    I find the AI proponents have an insane level of egocentrism They cannot possibly imagine someone has a different use case where the AI didn't work "I crank out shitty webapps all day, therefore every single other dev does. Everyone obviously has the same use case as me because I am the center of the universe"
• fellowniusmonk 1y ago
  I think the hardest part is not spending the next 3 months of my life in a cave finishing all the hobby/side projects I didn't quite get across the line. It really does feel like I've gone from being 1 senior engineer to a team that has a 0.8 Sr. Eng, 5 Jrs. and one dude that spends all his time on digging through poorly documented open source projects and documenting them for the team. Sure I can't spend quite as much time working on hard problems as I used to, but no one knows that I haven't talked to a PM in months, no one knows I haven't written a commit summary in months, it's just been my AI doppelgangers. Compared to myself a year ago I think I now PERSONALLY write 150% more HARD code than I did before. So maybe, my first statement about being 0.8 is false. I think of it like electric bikes, there seems to be indication that people with electric assist bikes actually burn more calories/spend more time/go farther on an electric bike than those who have manual bikes https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2214140516303930 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S22141....
  • halpow 1y ago
    > I haven't written a commit summary in months I don't know what you're posting, but if it's anything like what I see being done by GitHub copilot, your commit messages are junk. They're equivalent to this and you're wasting everyone's time: // Sets the value const value = "red"
    • fullstackchris 1y ago
      this behaviour is literally removable with proper prompting. this is a strawmans argument... of whatever your are arguing
      • fellowniusmonk 1y ago
        One of the most interesting things in all of this is it is clear some people are struggling with the feeling of a loss in status. I see it myself, go to a tech/startup meetup as a programmer today vs in 2022 before ZIRP ended. It's like back to my youth where people didn't want to hear my opinion and didn't view me as "special" or "in demand" because I was "a nerd who talked to computers", that's gotta be tough for a lot of people who grew up in the post "The Social Network" era. But anyone paying attention knew where the end of ZIRP was going to take us, the fact that it dovetailed with the rise of LLMs is a double blow for sure.
• gigel82 1y ago
  What this boils down to is an argument for slop. Yeah, who cares about the quality, the mediocrity, the craft... get the slop, push it in, call it done. It mostly works in the golden path, it's about 6 or 7 orders of magnitude slower than hand-written software but that's ok, just buy more AWS resources, bill the client, whatever. I can maybe even see that point in some niches, like outsourcing or contracting where you really can't be bothered to care about what you leave behind after the contract is done but holy shit, this is how we end up with slow and buggy crap that no one can maintain.
  • trinix912 1y ago
    It's not much different without the AI. Managers don't care about efficient code, they care about code that meets the business goals - whether that's good or bad is debatable. Agencies duct-taping together throwaway code isn't new. The classic "just buy more AWS resources" & such have been around for quite a while.
  • pixl97 1y ago
    >Yeah, who cares about the quality, the mediocrity, the craft.. Just about no-one in the F100 unless they are on very special teams. If you care about the craft you're pushed out for some that drops out 10x LOC a day because your management has no ability to measure what good software is. Extra bonus points for including 4GB of node_modules in your application.
• mattwad 1y ago
  There's a huge caveat i don't see often, which is that it depends on your language for programming. IE. AI is reallllly good at writing Next.js/Typescript apps, but not so much Ruby on Rails. YMMV
  • el_memorioso 1y ago
    I agree with this. People who are writing Python, Javascript, or Typescript tell me that they get great results. I've had good results using LLMs to flesh out complex SQL queries, but when I write Elixir code, what I get out of the LLM often doesn't even compile even when given function and type specs in the prompt. As the writer says, maybe I should be using an agent, but I'd rather understand the limits of the lower-level tools before adding other layers that I may not have access to.
    • dgb23 1y ago
      My hunch is that to exploit LLMs one should lean on data driven code more. LLMs seem to have a very easy time to generate data literals. Then it's far less of an issue to write in a niche language. Not familiar with Elixir but I assume it's really good at expressing data driven code, since it's functional and has pattern matching.
    • skydhash 1y ago
      I think for some languages like Clojure and Elixir, it's just so easy to get to the level of abstraction you need to write your business logic that everyone does so. So the code does not have any commonalty with each other. Even when using the same framework/library. But for Python, JS, etc,... it's the same down to earth abstraction that everyone is dealing with, like the same open a file, parse a csv, connect to the database patterns.
• stopachka 1y ago
  tptacek, curious question: what agent / stack do you currently use?
  • bloat 1y ago
    Seconded. I am very much still in the mode of copying from the chat window and then editing. I would like to have whatever she is having.
  • tptacek 1y ago
    I use Codex CLI for casual stuff, because of the ergonomics of just popping open another terminal tab. I use Zed as my primary interface to "actually doing project work" LLM stuff, because it front-ends both OpenAI and Google/Gemini models, and because I really like the interface. I still write code in Emacs; Zed is kind of like the Github PR viewer for me. I'm just starting to use Codex Web for asynchronous agents because I have a friend who swears by queueing up a dozen async prompts every morning and sifting through them in the afternoon. The idea of just brainstorming a bunch of shit --- I can imagine keeping focus and motivation going long enough to just rattle ideas off! --- and then making coffee while it all gets tried, is super appealing to me.
    • stopachka 1y ago
      Thank you!
    • mrmansano 1y ago
      > I'm just starting to use Codex Web for asynchronous agents because I have a friend who swears by queueing up a dozen async prompts every morning and sifting through them in the afternoon Bunch of async prompts for the same task? Or are you parallelizing solving different issues and just reviewing in the afternoon? Sounds intriguing either way.
      • kasey_junk 1y ago
        I _think_ I’m the friend being referenced. I’m parallelizing solving different issues. Basically I keep an internal swim lane of a variety of projects and just kick off the next task in the lane I think the agent can handle. Then I do my “real” work, there’s the stuff I don’t trust the agent with, or is more exploratory or whatever. As I think of more agent tasks doing that I write them down. When I take a break, say for lunch or winding down at the end of the day I check back in on previous tasks and fire off the new ones. My flow is very similar to what I did with junior eng except I’m willing to fire off even more trivial tasks at the agent because I don’t care if it sits idle. Similarly if it gets way off base I’m happy to kill the pr more aggressively and start over, what do I care if it wasted its time or if it learns a valuable lesson from the experience?
• guywithahat 1y ago
  I develop space-borne systems, so I can't use the best LLM's for ITAR/etc reasons, but this article really makes me feel like I'm missing out. This line in particular makes me wonder if my skills are becoming obsolete for general private industry: > People coding with LLMs today use agents. Agents get to poke around your codebase on their own. They author files directly. They run tools. They compile code, run tests, and iterate on the results. They also: Every once in a while I see someone on X posting how they have 10 agents running at once building their code base, and I wonder if in 3 years most private industry coders will just be attending meetings to discuss what their agents have been working on, while people working on DoD contracts will be typing things into vim like a fool
  • ghc 1y ago
    > while people working on DoD contracts will be typing things into vim like a fool Forget LLMs, try getting Pandas approved. Heck I was told by some AF engineers they were banned from opening Chrome Dev Tools by their security office. FWIW I think the LLM situation is changing quite fast and they're appearing in some of our contracts. Azure-provided ones, of course.
  • fellowniusmonk 1y ago
    Frankly, as someone who is engaged in fields where LLMs can be used heavily. I would stay in any high danger/high precision/high regulation role. The speed at which LLM stuff is progressing is insane, what is cutting edge today wasn't available 6 months ago. Keep up as a side hobby if you wish, I would definitely recommend that, but I just have to imagine that in 2 years a turnkey github project will get you pretty much all the way there. Idk, that's my feeling fwiw. I love LLMs but I'm much less confident that people and regulation will keep up with this new world in a way that benefits the very people who created the content that LLMs are built on.
    • threeseed 1y ago
      > The speed at which LLM stuff is progressing is insane You clearly haven't been following the space or maybe following too much. Because the progress has been pretty slow over the last years. Yes modals are cheaper and faster but they aren't substantially better.
• bloat 1y ago
  So we replace the task of writing tedious boilerplate with the task of reading the AI's tedious boilerplate. Which takes just as long. And leaves you with less understanding. And is more boring.
  • Philpax 1y ago
    You are either a very fast producer or a very slow reader. Claude and Gemini are much faster at producing code than I am, and reviewing their code - twice over, even - still takes less time than writing it myself.
    • ckiely 1y ago
      But you definitely don't understand it nearly as well as if you wrote it. And you're the one that needs to take responsibility for adding it to your codebase.
    • oblio 1y ago
      Are you, though? Reading code is harder, potentially much harder.[1] And I suspect the act of writing it yourself imparts some lower level knowledge you don't get by skimming the output of an AI. [1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/05/26/reading-code-is-like-reading-the-talmud/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/05/26/reading-code-is-li...
      • KyleBerezin 1y ago
        I think he is specifically referring to boilerplate code. It is not hard to understand boilerplate code.
    • seadan83 1y ago
      Reviewing code is often slower than writing it. You don't have to be an exceptionally fast coder or slow reviewer for that to be true.
      • thegeomaster 1y ago
• stock_toaster 1y ago
  > pull in arbitrary code from the tree, or from other trees online, into their context windows, I guess this presupposes that it is ok for 3rd parties to slurp up your codebase? And possibly (I guess it ostensibly depends on what plan you are on?) using that source code for further training (and generating that same code for others)? I imagine in some domains this would not be ok, but in others is not an issue.
• thousand_nights 1y ago
  i feel like surprisingly, front end work which used to be viewed by programmers as "easier" is now more difficult of the two, because it's where LLMs suck the most you get a link to a figma design and you have to use your eyes and common sense to cobble together tailwind classes, ensure responsiveness, accessibility, try out your components to make sure they're not janky, test out on a physical mobile device, align margins, padding, truncation, wrapping, async loading states, blah blah you get it LLMs still suck at all that stuff that requires a lot of visual feedback, after all, you're making an interface for humans to use, and you're a human in contrast, when i'm working on a backend ticket ai feels so much more straightforward and useful
  • simonw 1y ago
    Programmers who think front end is "easier" than backend have been wrong for well over a decade. https://simonwillison.net/2012/Feb/13/why-are-front-end/ https://simonwillison.net/2012/Feb/13/why-are-front-end/
• smy20011 1y ago
  > Often, it will drop you precisely at that golden moment where shit almost works, and development means tweaking code and immediately seeing things work better. That dopamine hit is why I code. Only if you are familiar with the project/code. If not, you were throw into a foreign codebase and have no idea how to tweak it.
  • ofjcihen 1y ago
    And potentially make incredibly risky mistakes while the AI assures you it’s fine.
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• leoh 1y ago
  >but it’s bad at rust I have to say, my ability to learn Rust was massively accelerated via LLMs. I highly recommend them for learning a new skill. I feel I'm roughly at the point (largely sans LLMs) now where I can be nearly as productive in Rust as Python. +1 to RustRover as well, which I strongly prefer to any other IDE.
  • sleepy_keita 1y ago
    Me too -- actually, I'd say that the LLMs I use these days (Sonnet 4 and GPT4.1, o4, etc) are pretty good at rust.
  • reaperducer 1y ago
    I have to say, my ability to learn Rust was massively accelerated via LLMs. How would you know? If you didn't know Rust already, how would you know the LLM was teaching you the right things and the best way to do things? Just because it compiles doesn't mean it works. The world is full of bad, buggy, insecure, poor code that compiles.
    • metaltyphoon 1y ago
      No only this, but I would challenge the OP to see if he really knows Rust but turning off LLM and see “how much you truly know”. This is akin to be on tutorial hell and you “know the language “
      • leoh 1y ago
        Well, I coded at Google (in addition to other places) for over 10 years without LLMs in several languages and I feel like I’m about at par with Rust as I was with those languages. I’m open to being humbled, which I have felt by LLMs and ofc other folks — “good” is subjective.
    • empath75 1y ago
      I've been writing Rust code in production for 4+ years, and I can write Rust pretty well, and I've learned a lot from using chatgpt and co-pilot/cursor. In particular, it helped me write my first generic functions and macros, two things that were pretty intimidating to try and get into.
• ckiely 1y ago
  The argument that programmers are into piracy and therefore should shut up about theft is nonsensical. Not defending piracy, but at least an artist or creator is still credited and their work is unadulterated. Piracy != plagiarism.
  • hello_computer 1y ago
    [flagged]
  • grose 1y ago
    It's also ignoring the fact that much plagiarized code is already under permissive licenses. If Star Wars or Daft Punk were CC-BY-SA nobody would need to pirate them, and there may even be a vibrant remix culture... which is kind of the whole point of open source, is it not?
    • mkfs 1y ago
      These LLMs don't respect those permissive licenses, though. Especially the GPL, but even MIT requires attribution through inclusion of a copyright notice.
      • grose 1y ago
        Yes, exactly, that is my point.
  • nickpsecurity 1y ago
    I'll add it's not true for programmers with morality. For instance, people who follow Jesus Christ are commanded to obey the law and treat people right. Many think respecting copyright is both. While I oppose copyright law, I do uphold it and like supporting content creators. Also, I think there's an argument similar to cryptocurrency companies that run like pyramid schemes. I could've made easy money doing security work for them. Yet, I felt like I'd be participating in helping them rob people or advancing their con. (Some jobs, like building assurance tools, might be OK.) Likewise, using tools built on massive, copyright infringement might be supporting or promoting that. So, I gotta use legally-trained models or wait for legal reforms that make LLM training legal. Especially the data sets they distribute which is currently illegal, file sharing.
• iLoveOncall 1y ago
  I simply do not get this argument about LLMs writing tedious code or scaffolding. You don't need or want LLMs for that, you want libraries and frameworks. I barely write any scaffolding code, because I use tools that setup the scaffolding for me.
  • halpow 1y ago
    If you're lucky to work in such an environment, more power to you. A lot of people have to deal with React where you need so much glue for basic tasks, and React isn't even the worst offender. Some boilerplate you can't wrap.
    • iLoveOncall 1y ago
      I use React at work, there is barely any boilerplate. I actually started a brand new project based on React recently and the initial setup before working on actual components was minutes.
• TrackerFF 1y ago
  My take is: It is OK to don't buy into the hype. There's a lot of hype, no denying that. But if you're actively avoiding everything related to it, you might find yourself in a position where you're suddenly being left in the dust. Maybe not now, not next month, not next year, but who some time in the future. The models really are improving fast! I've talked with devs that (claim they) haven't touched a model since ChatGPT was released - because it didn't live up to their expectations, and they just concluded it was a big nothingburger. Even though I don't follow the development religiously anymore, I do try to get acquainted with new releases every 3 months or so. I hate the term "vibe coding", but I personally know non-tech people that have vibe coded products / apps, shipped them, and make more money in sales than what most "legit" coders are making. These would be the same "idea people" that previously were looking for a coder to do all the heavy lifting. Something is changing, that's for sure. So, yeah, don't sleepwalk through it.
  • FridgeSeal 1y ago
    The counter-argument as I see it is that going from “not using LLM tooling” to “just as competent with LLM tooling” is…maybe a day? And lessening and the tools evolve. It’s not like “becoming skilled and knowledgeable in a language” which took time. Even if you’re theoretically being left behind, you can be back at the front of the pack again in a day or so. So why bother investing more than a little bit every few months?
    • abdullin 1y ago
      It takes deliberate practice to learn how to work with a new tool. I believe that AI+Coding is no different from this perspective. It usually takes senior engineers a few weeks just to start building an intuition of what is possible and what should be avoided. A few weeks more to adjust the mindset and properly integrate suitable tools into the workflow.
      • breuleux 1y ago
        In theory, but how long is that intuition going to remain valid as new models arrive? What if you develop a solid workflow to work around some limitations you've identified, only to realize months late that these limitations don't exist anymore and your workflow is suboptimal? AI is a new tool, but it's a very unstable one at the moment.
• pie_flavor 1y ago
  I have one very specific retort to the 'you are still responsible' point. High school kids write lots of notes. The notes frequently never get read, but the performance is worse without them: the act of writing them embeds them into your head. I allegedly know how to use a debugger, but I haven't in years: but for a number I could count on my fingers, nearly every bug report I have gotten I know exactly down to the line of code where it comes from, because I wrote it or something next to it (or can immediately ask someone who probably did). You don't get that with AI. The codebase is always new. Everything must be investigated carefully. When stuff slips through code review, even if it is a mistake you might have made, you would remember that you made it. When humans do not do the work, humans do not accrue the experience. (This may still be a good tradeoff, I haven't run any numbers. But it's not such an obvious tradeoff as TFA implies.)
  • sublinear 1y ago
    I have to completely agree with this and nobody says this enough. This tradeoff of unfamiliarity with the codebase is a very well understood problem for decades. Maintaining a project is 99% of the time spent on a successful project. In my opinion though, having AI write the initial code is just putting most people in a worse situation with almost no upside long term.
    • CurrentB 1y ago
      I agree I'm bullish on AI for coding generally, but I am curious how they'd get around this problem. Even if they can code at super human level, then you just get rarer super human bugs. Or is another AI going to debug it? Unless this loop is basically fail proof, does the human's job just becoming debugging the hardest things to debug (or at least a blindspot of the AI)
      • ethagnawl 1y ago
        I haven't seen enough mention of using these tools to generate formal verification specs for their output, like TLA+. Of course, you're stuck with the same problem of having to verify the specs but you'll always be playing this game and it'd seem like this would be one of best, most reassuring ways to do so. I'll have the look into this some more but I'm very curious about what the current state of the art is. I'm guessing it's not great because so few people do this in the first place -- because it's so tedious -- and there's probably not nearly enough training data for it to be practical to generate specs for a JavaScript GQL app or whatever these things are best at generating.
• Arainach 1y ago
  >pull in arbitrary code from the tree, or from other trees online, into their context windows, run standard Unix tools to navigate the tree and extract information, interact with Git, run existing tooling, like linters, formatters, and model checkers, and make essentially arbitrary tool calls (that you set up) through MCP. ....for the vast majority of my career, anyone who suggested doing this - much less letting code that no one in the world (much less the company) truly understands the logic flow of do this - would be fired.
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• jsnell 1y ago
  > Almost nothing it spits out for me merges without edits. I’m sure there’s a skill to getting a SOTA model to one-shot a feature-plus-merge! How does this section fit in with the agent section just after? In an agentic model, isn't the merge getting done by either the model or a tool, and the retry-loops on failures would be mostly invisible? E.g. when using Aider + Gemini Flash 2.5, probably 90% of the changes apply cleanly from my perspective (maybe half actually apply cleanly, the other half after a couple of roundtrips of Aider telling the model that the patch didn't apply). The 10% that only apply partially I usually throw away and redo the prompt, it's really rare that I start merging the code manually.
• computerfan494 1y ago
  Maybe it's only me, but I just don't write that much code. I try to change less than 100ish lines per day. I try to keep codebases small. I don't want to run a codebase with hundreds of thousands of lines of code in a production environment.
• kakadu 1y ago
  A hammer hammers. It hammers 100% of the time, with no failure. It requires the same amount of labour from my part but it delivers the same outcome every time. That is what tools do, they act as an extension and allow you to do things not easily done otherwise. If the hammer sometimes hammers, sometimes squeaks and sometimes screws then it requires extra labour from my part just to make it do what purpose specific tools do, and that is where frustrations arise. Make it do one thing excellent and we talk then.
  • IshKebab 1y ago
    This is the kind of non-serious argument he's talking about. There are plenty of tools that require supervision to get good results. That doesn't make them useless. My 3D printer sometimes prints and sometimes makes spaghetti. Still useful.
    • bawolff 1y ago
      There is a big difference between "not entirely useless" and best tool for the job.
    • threeseed 1y ago
      They never said it was useless. You just invented that straw man in your head. 3D printing is largely used for prototyping where its lossy output is fine. But using it for production use cases requires fine tuning it can be 99.9% reliable. Unfortunately we can't do that for LLMs hence why it's still only suitable for prototyping.
      • Philpax 1y ago
        But you can adjust the output of a LLM and still come out ahead in both time and mental effort than writing it by hand. Unlike a 3D printer, it doesn't have to be right the first time around to still be useful.
        • bigstrat2003 1y ago
• voxl 1y ago
  I have a very simple counter argument: I've tried it and it's not useful. Maybe it is useful for you. Maybe even the things you're using it for are not trivial or better served by a different tool. That's fine, I don't mind you using a tool far away from my codebase and dependency tree. It has not been useful for me, and it's very unlikely it's ever going to be. Except that's not the argument people are making. They are arguing it will replace humans. They are arguing it will do research level mathematics. They are arguing this is the start of AGI. So if you want to put your head in the sand and ignore the greater message that is plastered everywhere then perhaps some self reflection is warranted.
  • IshKebab 1y ago
    > I have a very simple counter argument: I've tried it and it's not useful. Maybe it is useful for you. Indeed but the tedious naysaying that this is arguing against is that AI isn't good full stop. They aren't saying "I tried it and it's not for me but I can see why other people would like it".
  • simonw 1y ago
    You have to learn to filter out the people who say "it's going to replace human experts" and listen to the people who say "I'm a human expert and this stuff is useful to me in these ways".
• meroes 1y ago
  > LLMs can write a large fraction of all the tedious code you’ll ever need to write. But, you still have to read it: > Reading other people’s code is part of the job...I have to read the code line-by-line anyways. So instead of writing the tedious code, I only have to read it. Oh but don't worry, I don't have to read it too carefully because: > Agents lint. They compile and run tests. If their LLM invents a new function signature, the agent sees the error But remember... > You’ve always been responsible for what you merge to main. So now I have to oversee this web of agents and AI ontop of coding? Am I doing more now for the same pay? Am I just speedrunning myself toward lower pay? Is AI adoption a prisoner's dilemma toward lowing my wages hardest? Because is good at coding compared to many other disciplines (e.g. math), it makes the internal AI politics among programmers more of an issue. Add fuel to that fire baby!
• fooqux 1y ago
  > "For art, music, and writing? I got nothing. I’m inclined to believe the skeptics in those fields." You've already lost me, because I view programming as an art form. I would no more use AI to generate code than I would use it to paint my canvas. I think the rest of the article is informative. It made me want to try some things. But it's written from the perspective of a CEO thinking all his developers are just salt miners; miners go into the cave and code comes out. I think that's actually what my hangup is. It's the old adage of programmers simply "copying and pasting from stack overflow" but taken to the extreme. It's the reduction of my art into mindless labor.
  • tptacek 1y ago
    Woodworking is also an art form. But most people just need furniture, fixtures, and structures. Nobody would take seriously the idea that new construction all be done with sashimono joinery in order to preserve the art form, but somehow we're meant to take seriously the idea of hand-dovetailed CRUD apps.
    • deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
    • layer8 1y ago
      I don't think that analogy matches very well. Most software is bespoke, the domain requirements, usage aspects, and architectural trade-offs are subtly, or often non-subtly, different each time, and take different trajectories over time. It's not like you're producing the same software 10,000 times, like a piece of furniture. And AI isn't able to produce the exact same thing reproducibly anyway. A better argument would be that AI is actually approaching the craftsmanship/artisanal capabilities.
      • sneak 1y ago
        Most line of business apps and business logic are only bespoke and custom insofar as field names and relations and what APIs they trigger on which events. Just because software is “bespoke” doesn’t mean it’s complicated or special.
• dannyobrien 1y ago
  This is also where I am, and I guess it has been a source of mild and growing consternation since I first blagged an OpenAI GPT account when they were private, in an attempt to get ahead of what was coming -- both the positive and negative sides of the advances. Most people either ignored the advances, or quickly identified and connected to the negative side, and effectively filtered out the rest. As somebody who comes from a politically left family, and was also around in the early days of the Web, let me tentatively note that this issue has a particular political slant, too. The left has strong roots in being able to effectively critique new developments, economic and social, that don't come from its own engines of innovation which have revolved around those critiques, plus solidarity, organization, and sociopolitical action. The movement's theorists work far more slowly on how to integrate the effect of those changes into its vision. That means when something like this comes along, the left's cultural norms err on the side of critique. Which is fine, but it makes any other expression both hard to convey, and instantly suspect in those communities. I saw this in the early Web, where from a small group of early adopters of all political slants, it was the independents, heterodox leftists, and the right, -- and most vocally, the libertarians -- who were able to most quickly adapt to and adopt the new technology. Academic leftists, and those who were inspired by them took a lot longer to accomodate the Net into their theses (beyond disregarding or rejecting it) and even longer to devise practical uses for it. It wasn't that long, I should say -- a matter of months or years, and any latent objections were quickly swamped by younger voices who were familiar with the power of the Net; but from my point of view it seriously set back that movement in practicality and popularity during the 80s and 90s. I see the same with AI: the left has attracted a large generational of support across the world from providing an emotionally resonant and practical alternative to the status quo many people face. But you quickly lose the mandate of heaven if you fail to do more than just simplistically critique or reject a thing that the average person in the world feels they know better, or feels differently toward, than you do. This is something to consider, even if you still strongly believe yourselves to be correct in the critiques.
  • steveklabnik 1y ago
    Hey, thanks for this. It helps with some stuff I've been thinking about. I appreciate it a lot, gonna do more thinking.
• baobun 1y ago
  The privacy aspect and other security risks tho? So far all the praise I hear on productivity are from people using cloud-hosted models. Claude, Gemini, Copilot and and ChatGPT are non-starters for privacy-minded folks. So far, local experiements with agents have left me underwhelmed. Tried everything on ollama that can run on my dedicated Ryzen 8700G with 96GB DDR5. I'm ready to blow ~10-15k USD on a better rig if I see value in it but if I extrapolate current results I believe it'll be another CPU generation before I can expect positive productivity output from properly securely running local models when factoring in the setup and meta.
  • oblio 1y ago
    This is probably the biggest danger. Everyone is assuming optimization work reduces cost faster than these companies burn through capital. I'm half inclined to assume optimization work will do it, but it's far from as obvious as they want to portray it.
  • BeetleB 1y ago
    Privacy is not binary, and it would make it easier if you outlined specific scenarios. Most providers promise not to train on inputs if used via an API (and otherwise have a retention timeline for other reasons). I'm not sure the privacy concern is greater than using pretty much any cloud provider for anything. Storing your data on AWS: Privacy concern?
    • baobun 1y ago
      > Storing your data on AWS: Privacy concern? Unencrypted? You bet.
  • simonw 1y ago
    Almost all of the cloud vendors have policies saying that they will not train on your input if you are a paying customer. The single biggest productivity boost you can get in LLM world is believing them when they make those promises to you!
    • 1y ago
• homefree 1y ago
  Yes! It's amazing how even in a field that tends to lean more early adopter than average you still get a lot of the default knee-jerk dismissal and cynicism - even when it's something clearly amazing and useful as thinking machines. We're in the middle of a major shift - there will benefits to those that adapt first. People outside the field have no idea what's coming, even those of us in the field are underestimating the shift. There were a few outliers in the 60s who understood what the computing revolution meant and would mean, but most did not. This is likely an even bigger change than that.
• AnotherGoodName 1y ago
  This happened with the introduction of smartphones too. Every slashdot post had a haughty and upvoted ‘why would i want such a thing!!!’. It was obviously huge. You could see it taking off. Yet a lot of people proudly displayed ignorance and backed each other up on it to the point that discussion around the topic was often drowned out by the opposition to change. Now today it takes minutes of playing with ai coding agents to realise that it’s extremely useful and going to be similarly huge. Resistance to change is not a virtue!
  • ceejayoz 1y ago
    Sometimes it works that way. Sometimes it’s more like NFTs.
    • postalrat 1y ago
      Sometimes. Most people with an opinion of NFTs thought they were a joke. Hardly anyone thinks LLMs are a joke.
      • jsheard 1y ago
        I have bad news about our illustrious hosts: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies?query=web3 https://www.ycombinator.com/companies?query=web3 They're not alone either, a bunch of the AI bankroll is coming from people who were also sold on crypto taking over the world.
    • Karrot_Kream 1y ago
      Slashdot then and HN now, predicted 100 out of the last 10 recessions.
  • oblio 1y ago
    Smartphones were financially viable from day 1, though. I think LLMs will be used a lot and in a lot of places but the current level of investment they're getting right now feels out of line to me. Kind of like what I expect them to get in 10 years from now, when they're mature.
• storus 1y ago
  Soon all coding will look like L3 support - debugging something you've never seen before, and under pressure. AI is really taking away the fun parts from everything and leaving just the drudgery in place.
  • FridgeSeal 1y ago
    “What do you mean you want to think about our architecture? Just get the LLM to do it, and we’ll get it to fix it if anything goes wrong” “No we’re not allocating any time to thinking about the design, just get the LLM to do it” I’m so excited for the bleak future.
  • threeseed 1y ago
    People said the same about VB style coding then low-code and now AI. They have been wrong every time and will continue to be wrong.
    • storus 1y ago
      This feels different; I asked DeepSeek R1 to give me an autoregressive image generation code in pytorch and it did a marvelous job. Similar for making a pytorch model for a talking lip-synced face; those two would take me weeks to do, AI did it in a few minutes. Autoregressive LLMs still have some major issues like over-dependency on the first few generated tokens and the problems with commutative reasoning due to one-sided masked attention but those issues are slowly getting fixed.
      • threeseed 1y ago
        People used to tell me all the amazing things no-code and low-code was able to do as well. And at the end of the day they went nowhere. Because (a) they will never be perfect for every use and (b) they abstract you from understanding the problem and solution. So often it will be easier to just write the code from scratch.
        • sanderjd 1y ago
• mjburgess 1y ago
  Can we get a video of a workday conducted by these people? Unless there's a significant sense of what people are working on, and how LLMs are helping -- there's no point engaging -- there's no detail here. Sure, if your job is to turn out tweaks to a wordpress theme, presumably that's now 10x faster. If its to work on a new in-house electric motor in C for some machine, presumably that's almost entirely unaffected. No doubt junior web programmers working on a task backlog, specifically designed for being easy for juniors, are loving LLMs. I use LLMs all the time, but each non-trivial programming project that has to move out of draft-stage needs rewriting. In several cases, to such a degree that the LLM was a net impediment.
  • jsnell 1y ago
    Not exactly what you're asking for, but https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44159166 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44159166 from today is not a junior web programmer working through the backlog, and the commit history contains all the prompts.
    • mjburgess 1y ago
      Sure, thanks. I mean it's a typescript OAuth library, so perhaps we might say mid-level web programmer developing a library from scratch with excellent pre-existing references, and with a known good reference API to hand. I'd also count that as a good use case for an LLM.
      • ramraj07 1y ago
        [flagged]
        • mjburgess 1y ago
          I think you mistook my comment. Insofar as its anything, it was a concession to that use case. I gave an example below: debugging a microservice-based request flow from a front-end, thru various middle layers and services, to a back-end, perhaps triggering other systems along the way. Something similar to what I worked on in 2012 for the UK olympics. Unless I'm mistaken, and happy to be, I'm not sure where the LLM is supposed to offer a significant productivity factor here. Overall, my point is -- indeed -- that we cannot really have good faith conversations in blog posts and comment sections. These are empirical questions which need substantial evidence from both sides -- ideally, videos of a workday. Its very hard to guess what anyone is really talking about at the level of abstraction that all this hot air is conducted at. As far as i can tell the people hyping LLMs the most are juniors, data scientists who do not do software engineering, and people working on greenfield/blank-page apps. These groups never address the demand from these sceptical senior software engineers -- for obvious reasons.
• bsder 1y ago
  Here's what to do: Show me a video of LLM fixing four filed issues in the KiCad codebase. If you do that, I'll swallow my AI skepticism. I would love to have an LLM that I can turn loose on an unfamiliar codebase that I can ask questions of. I would love to have an LLM that will fill in my Vulkan boilerplate. etc. I use emacs and Mercurial. You can demonstrate magic to me and I can be convinced even if it's not mainstream. Rewriting Javascript slop to StackOverflow standards is not convincing me. Get to it. (The OAuth stuff posted earlier certainly moved my needle, but the fact that they needed a gaggle of reviewers as well as hand holding when the LLM got stuck mutes the impact significantly.)
• sarchertech 1y ago
  This article feels incredibly defensive. If you have really have a technique that makes you 100x, 50x, or even just 2x more productive, you don’t need to write an article calling people who don’t agree with you nuts. You keep using that tool, to your advantage. I’d you’re really altruistic you post some videos of how productive you can be like DHH did with his blog in 15 minute videos. If you’re really that much more productive, the skeptics won’t be able to keep up and it should only take 6 months or some for that to become self evident.
• capnrefsmmat 1y ago
  The argument seems to be that for an expert programmer, who is capable of reading and understanding AI agent code output and merging it into a codebase, AI agents are great. Question: If everyone uses AI to code, how does someone become an expert capable of carefully reading and understanding code and acting as an editor to an AI? The expert skills needed to be an editor -- reading code, understanding its implications, knowing what approaches are likely to cause problems, recognizing patterns that can be refactored, knowing where likely problems lie and how to test them, holding a complex codebase in memory and knowing where to find things -- currently come from long experience writing code. But a novice who outsources their thinking to an LLM or an agent (or both) will never develop those skills on their own. So where will the experts come from? I think of this because of my job as a professor; many of the homework assignments we use to develop thinking skills are now obsolete because LLMs can do them, permitting the students to pass without thinking. Perhaps there is another way to develop the skills, but I don't know what it is, and in the mean time I'm not sure how novices will learn to become experts.
  • kulahan 1y ago
    > If everyone uses AI to code, how does someone become an expert The same way they do now that most code is being copied/integrated from StackOverflow.
    • groos 1y ago
      I had this conversation with a friend: HIM: AI is going to take all entry level jobs soon. ME: So the next level one up will become entry level? HIM: Yes. ME: Inductively, this can continue up to the CEO. What about the CEO? HIM. Wait...
      • kulahan 1y ago
        I simply don’t believe all the jobs will go away; it feels much more like the field will just be significantly pared back. There will be more opportunities for juniors eventually if it turns out to be too high of a barrier to entry and elder programmers start to retire.
• timewizard 1y ago
  > You’ll only notice this happening if you watch the chain of thought log your agent generates. Don’t. "You're nuts!" says the guy with his head intentionally buried in the sand. Also way to tell me your business model is a joke without telling me your business model is a joke. Enjoy it while it lasts.
• d--b 1y ago
  Yeah, and it’s progressing so fast. Singularity is definitely on the table. Whoever says otherwise should read their own comments from 2 years ago and see how wrong they were about where AI is today. Not saying singularity will happen for sure, but is it a possibility? Hell yeah.
  • suddenlybananas 1y ago
    It's not really that different than 2 years ago. Better but not qualitatively so.
  • yahoozoo 1y ago
    Tell me you don’t understand LLMs without telling me you don’t understand LLMs.
    • rxtexit 1y ago
      [flagged]
    • d--b 1y ago
      I definitely don’t understand LLMs. Kind of the point though.
• bawolff 1y ago
  Sometimes i feel like people who really like AI have a very different experience programming then i do. They are constantly talking about AI doing all the tedious boilerplate bullshit. Don't get me wrong, some of my code is that too and its not fun. However the pro-AI people talk as if 80% of your day is dealing with that. For me its simply a rare enough occurence that the value proposition isn't that big. If that is the killer app of AI, it just doesn't sound that exciting to me.
  • FridgeSeal 1y ago
    When I see someone talk about the reams of boilerplate they’re getting the LLM to write for them, I really do wonder what godawful sounding tools and tech-stack they’re being subjected to.
    • JoshTriplett 1y ago
      Exactly. Back in the day, people talked about "design patterns". It took a while for (some of) the industry to recognize that "design patterns" are a sign that your libraries and tools aren't good enough, because you're having to write the same patterns repeatedly.
    • rudedogg 1y ago
      Anything where you’re doing basic CRUD apps. Yes there are generators, but not for everything. For me that’s where LLMs have been the most useful.
  • emseetech 1y ago
    Unpopular opinion, boilerplate is good for you. It's a warmup before a marathon. Writing it can be contemplative and zen-like and allows you to consider the shape of the future.
    • Mofpofjis 1y ago
      Strongly agreed. And, your wording is excellent.
• alkonaut 1y ago
  I can’t even get copilot to autocomplete 5 working lines consistently. I spend hours every day arguing with ChatGPT about things it’s hallucinating. And Agents? It took me a year to convince anyone to buy me a copilot subscription. It’s not good enough now? But it was the bees knees just a year or two ago? See I hate the thing where the JS-framework tempo thing happens to the part of the software world I’m in.
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• darepublic 1y ago
  I do use LLMs for coding and the newer models have definitely been a blessing. I don't know about using coding agents (or agentic coding) though. I personally do not find this better than chatting with the llm, getting the code back and then copy / pasting it and grokking / editing it. The author of this seems to suggest that.. there is one correct flow, his flow (which he doesn't entirely detail) and everything else is not appropriate. He doesn't go into what his process is when the LLM hallucinates either. Not all hallucinations show up in static analysis.
• 1970-01-01 1y ago
  Everything works right until it doesn't. LLMs are trained on things that have worked. Let's revisit in 2027 when things are insanely faster, but not much better.
• timr 1y ago
  As someone who has spent the better part of today fixing the utter garbage produced by repeated iteration with these supposedly magical coding agents, I'm neither in the camp of the "AI skeptic" (at least as defined by the author), nor am I in the camp of people who thinks these things can "write a large fraction of all the tedious code you’ll ever need to write." Maybe I'm doing it wrong, but I seem to have settled on the following general algorithm: * ask the agent to green-field a new major feature. * watch the agent spin until it is satisfied with its work. * run the feature. Find that it does not work, or at least has major deficiencies [1] * cycle through multiple independent iterations with the agent, doing something resembling "code review", fixing deficiencies one at a time [2] * eventually get to a point where I have to re-write major pieces of the code to extract the agent from some major ditch it has driven into, leading to a failure to make forward progress. Repeat. It's not that the things are useless or "a fad" -- they're clearly very useful. But the people who are claiming that programmers are going to be put out of business by bots are either a) talking their book, or b) extrapolating wildly into the unknown future. And while I am open to the argument that (b) might be true, what I am observing in practice is that the rate of improvement is slowing rapidly, and/or the remaining problems are getting much harder to solve. [1] I will freely grant that at least some of these major deficiencies typically result from my inability / unwillingness to write a detailed enough spec for the robot to follow, or anticipate every possible problem with the spec I did bother to write. T'was ever thus... [2] This problem is fractal. However, it's at least fun, in that I get to yell at the robot in a way that I never could with a real junior engineer. One Weird Fact about working with today's agents is that if you threaten them, they seem to do better work.
  • therealmarv 1y ago
    Results can vary significantly, and in my experience, both the choice of tools and models makes a big difference. It’s a good idea to periodically revisit and re-evaluate AI and tooling. I’ve noticed that many programmers tried AI when, for example, GPT-3.5 was first released, became frustrated, and never gave it another chance—even though newer models like o4-mini are now capable of much more, especially in programming tasks. AI is advancing rapidly. With the latest models and the right tools, what’s possible today far exceeds what was possible even just a short time ago (3-12 months ago even). Take a look at Cursor or Windsurf or Roo code or aider to "feed" AI with code and take a look at models like Google Gemini 2.5 Pro, Claude Sonnet 4, OpenAI o4mini. Also educate yourself about agents and MCP. Soon that will be standard for many/every programmer.
• ddoolin 1y ago
  I have been using agentic AI to help me get started writing an OpenGL-targeted game from scratch (no engine). I have almost no background experience with computer graphics code, but I understand most of the fundamentals pretty well and I have almost 13 years of software experience. It's just that the exact syntax as well as the various techniques used to address common problems are not in my arsenal yet. My experience has been decent. I don't know that it has truly saved me much time but I can understand how it FEELS like it has. Because it's writing so much code (sometimes), it's hard to vet all of it and it can introduce subtle bugs based on faulty assumptions it made about different things. So, it will dump a lot of code at once, which will get me 90% of the way there, but I could spend an hour or two trying to nudge it to fix it to get it to 100%. And then I will probably still need to go back and reorganize it, or have it go back and reorganize it. And then sometimes it will make small adjustments to existing, committed code that will subtly break other things. Something that has surprised me (in hindsight, it isn't surprising) is that sometimes when I feel like it misunderstood something or made a faulty assumption, it was actually me that had the misunderstanding or ignorance which is humbling at times and a good learning experience. It is also pretty good at bug hunting and DEFINITELY very good at writing unit tests. I count myself as pretty lucky that this domain seems to be very well covered in training. Given the law of averages, most people's domains will probably be covered. I'm not sure how it would fare with a niche domain.
  • jandrese 1y ago
    > which will get me 90% of the way there This is roughly my experience as well. The AI is great at the first 90% of the work and actively counterproductive for the remaining 90%
    • shinycode 1y ago
      And wait until there is 500 million of generated loc no one read and the product needs to evolve every week.
      • ddoolin 1y ago
        I think it's for this and other reasons that this kind of tool is not great for beginners. I can personally vet all of those LoC to make sure they are organized in a way that makes sense as it grows (limited to my own skill, lets assume I'm a master) but obviously someone with low XP won't have that ability. Given what I've seen in this project, that will CERTAINLY happen. Even telling it to reorganize code, you have to be specific.
• pmdrpg 1y ago
  [flagged]
• root_axis 1y ago
  The problem with LLMs for code is that they are still way too slow and expensive to be generally practical for non-trivial software projects. I'm not saying that they aren't useful, they are excellent at filling out narrow code units that don't require a lot of context and can be quickly or automatically verified to be correct. You will save a lot of time using them this way. On the other hand, if you slip up and give it too much to chew on or just roll bad RNG, it will spin itself into a loop attempting many variations of crap, erasing and trying over, but never actually coming closer to a correct solution, eventually repeating obviously incorrect solutions over and over again that should have been precluded based on feedback from the previous failed solutions. If you're using a SOTA model, you can easily rack up $5 or more on a single task if you give it more than 30 minutes of leeway to work it out. Sure, you could use a cheaper model, but all that does is make the fundamental problem worse - i.e. you're spending money but not actually getting any closer to completed work. Yes, the models are getting smarter and more efficient, but we're still at least a decade away from being able to run useful models at practical speeds locally. Aggressively quantized 70b models simply can't cut it, and even then, you need something like 10k tps to start building LLM tools that can overcome the LLM's lack of reasoning skills through brute force guess and check techniques. Perhaps some of the AI skeptics are a bit too harsh, but they're certainly not crazy in the context of breathless hype.
  • dyauspitr 1y ago
    What are you talking about? It’s $20/month.
    • danielbln 1y ago
      OP is talking about API usage, and yes if you let Claude 4 Opus crunch on a long task it'll eat tokens/money like nothing else. Those $20/month plans usually come with throttling, or other type of service degradation once you max out their allotment.
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• kopecs 1y ago
  > Meanwhile, software developers spot code fragments seemingly lifted from public repositories on Github and lose their shit. What about the licensing? If you’re a lawyer, I defer. But if you’re a software developer playing this card? Cut me a little slack as I ask you to shove this concern up your ass. No profession has demonstrated more contempt for intellectual property. Seriously? Is this argument in all earnestly "No profession has been more contemptuous therefore we should keep on keeping on"? Should we as an industry not bother to try and improve our ethics? Why don't we all just make munitions for a living and wash our hands of guilt because "the industry was always like this". Seems a bit ironic against the backdrop of <https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=tptacek https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=tptacek>: > All comments Copyright © 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2015, 2018, 2023, 2031 Thomas H. Ptacek, All Rights Reserved. (although perhaps this is tongue-in-cheek given the last year)
  • panorama 1y ago
    It's a fib sequence
• holoduke 1y ago
  "If you’re making requests on a ChatGPT page and then pasting the resulting (broken) code into your editor, you’re not doing what the AI boosters are doing" I am actually doing this the whole day long. For example i have setup today a fresh new debian vps for some interns. U had to provide them with a docker system, support for go, nginx stuff and i made a quick hello world app in angular with a go backend. I could have done it myself. But i asked chatgpt to provide me with all the commands and code. No idea how an agent could do this for me. I got everything running in like 30 minutes.
• panny 1y ago
  Every time I read one of these it feels like I'm reading an AI generated sales pitch for AI.
• popalchemist 1y ago
  This guy may be right about a lot of things said here but he's smug and it's off-putting. preaching to the choir.
• user94689879999 1y ago
  [flagged]
• JoshTriplett 1y ago
  > but the plagiarism This entire section reads like, oddly, the reverse of the "special pleading" argument that I usually see from artists. Instead of "Oh, it's fine for other fields, but for my field it's a horrible plagiarism machine", it's the reverse: "Oh, it's a problem for those other fields, but for my field get over it, you shouldn't care about copyright anyway". I'm all for eliminating copyright. The day I can ignore the license on every single piece of proprietary software as I see fit, I'll be all for saying that AIs should be able to do the same. What I will continue to complain about is the asymmetry: individual developers don't get to violate individual licenses, but oh, if we have an AI slurp up millions of codebases and ignore their licenses, that's fine. No. No, it isn't. If you want to ignore copyright, abolish it for everyone. If it still applies to everyone else, it should still apply to AIs. No special exceptions for mass-scale Open Source license violations.
  • mwcampbell 1y ago
    I think where tptacek is right, though, is that if we're going to hold this position without hypocrisy, then we need to respect copyright as long as it exists. He's right that many of us have not done that; it's been very common to violate copyright for mere entertainment. If we want the licenses of our own work to be respected, then we need to extend that respect to others as well, regardless of the size of the copyright holder.
    • Mofpofjis 1y ago
      There are things that "modulate" this. Violating copyright is never right, of course, some questions are however scale, and purpose. Taking others' creative output, unlicensed, for large-scale commercial gain, is about the worst.
  • Springtime 1y ago
    The whataboutism of that section was odd. The only non-handwavy argument presented is that due to the scale of LLM training that models' output should be treated like US-specific typeface forms' copyright, ie: non-applicable. It's interesting as typeface plagiarism became rampant beginning in the 70s when more accurate photo reproductions made it trivial. This was problematic for designers wanting to make a livelihood, which is something ITC sought to mitigate by better up-front payments (IIRC from U&lc's coverage) to incentivize quality typeface creation. There's a distinction though between literal plagiarism and just inspiration from elements. US copyright law doesn't protect either for typeface forms but ironically it does allow copyright for the code used in font files. I've seen OpenAI's o3-mini (their reasoning model) suggest verbatim code and comments that I found on Github predating LLMs by years. It seems the more times the same code and comment appears online the more likely this is to occur. I'd imagine there would be studies looking into the scope and frequency this occurs and how much is considered fair use.
• marginalia_nu 1y ago
  It's so all-or-nothing this debate. If you're drawing a benefit from using AI tools, great. If you aren't, then maybe don't use them, or try some other approach to using them. Personally I find AI coding tools situationally useful. I certainly wouldn't use them to write all my code, but I also think I'd be a fool not to leverage them at all.
• user94687568987 1y ago
  [flagged]
• rorylaitila 1y ago
  I can sum it up like this: if I could know in advance the exact right thing to build, producing the physical code, has not for a long time, been the bottleneck. I've been vibe coding long before it was cool. It's sometimes called model driven development. For those that think only procedurally, I can see how it helps them. Because procedural first development has a lot of boilerplate logic. For those who think model first, the AI may help them rubber duck, but ultimately the physical writing of the characters is minimal. Most of my time is thinking about the data model. The AI writes almost all of my procedures against said data model. But that is about 20% speedup.
• rafavento 1y ago
  There's something that seems to be missing in all these posts and that aligns with my personal experience trying to use AI coding assistants. I think in code. To me, having to translate the into natural language for the LLM to translate it back into code makes very little sense. Am I alone in this camp? What am I missing?
  • ACCount36 1y ago
    I know what you mean. The thing is: if you already have the solution put together in your mind, it might be faster to just implement it by hand. But if you don't have the shape of a solution? Might be faster to have an AI find it. And then either accept AI's solution as is, or work off it.
  • simonw 1y ago
    If you think in code, try prompting them in code. I quite often prompt with code in a different language, or pseudo-code describing roughly what I am trying to achieve, or a Python function signature without the function body. Or I will paste in a bunch of code I have already written with a comment somewhere that says "TODO: retrieve the information from the GitHub API" and have the model finish it for me.
    • hiq 1y ago
      > a Python function signature without the function body. This, and for multiple functions that end up composing well together as per their signatures. Maybe there's one public function I want to document well, so I write the docstring myself, and it's the result for 3-4 other internal functions which I'd let the LLM implement. The nice part is that even if the LLM fails, all that is not lost, as opposed to some weird spec I'd feed an LLM but that's too verbose for a human reader, or a series of prompts.
  • Seb-C 1y ago
    I'm also in this camp, and that's why it does not work for me. Natural language is just a terrible interface and fundamentally not an appropriate one to communicate with a computer. I wonder if I'm in the minority here because I'm neurodivergent.
• davidclark 1y ago
  >If you were trying and failing to use an LLM for code 6 months ago †, you’re not doing what most serious LLM-assisted coders are doing. Here’s the thing from the skeptic perspective: This statement keeps getting made on a rolling basis. 6 months ago if I wasn’t using the life-changing, newest LLM at the time, I was also doing it wrong and being a luddite. It creates a never ending treadmill of boy-who-cried-LLM. Why should I believe anything outlined in the article is transformative now when all the same vague claims about productivity increases were being made about the LLMs from 6 months ago which we now all agree are bad? I don’t really know what would actually unseat this epistemic prior at this point for me. In six months, I predict the author will again think the LLM products of 6 month ago (now) were actually not very useful and didn’t live up to the hype.
  • simonw 1y ago
    tptacek wasn't making this argument six months ago. LLMs get better over time. In doing so they occasionally hit points where things that didn't work start working. "Agentic" coding tools that run commands in a loop hit that point within the past six months. If your mental model is "people say they got better every six months, therefore I'll never take them seriously because they'll say it again in six months time" you're hurting your own ability to evaluate this (and every other) technology.
    • JohnKemeny 1y ago
      But they say "yes, it didn't work 6 months ago, but it does now", and they say this every month. They're constantly resetting the goal post. Today it works, it didn't in the past, but it does now. Rinse and repeat.
      • Sebguer 1y ago
        this is only a compelling counter-argument if you are referring to a single, individual person who is saying this repeatedly. and there probably are! but the author of this article is not that person, and is also speaking to a very specific loop that only first truly became prevalent 6-9 months ago.
• hn_throwaway_99 1y ago
  I felt this article was a lot of strawman-ing. Yes, there are people who think LLMs are just a fad, just like NFTs, and I agree these people are not really serious and that they are wrong. I think anyone who has used an AI coding agent recently knows that they are highly capable and can enhance productivity in the right hands. But, as someone who gets a lot of value in AI coding agents, my issue is not with gen AI as a productivity enhancing tool - it's with the absolute torrent of BS about how AI is soon going to make coders obsolete, and the way AI has been shoved onto many engineering teams is like yet another incarnation of the latest management fad. My specific arguments: 1. As the author pretty much acknowledges, AI agents still basically suck at large, system-wide "thinking" and changes. And the way they work with their general "guess and check" method means they can churn out code that is kinda sorta right, but often leaves huge holes or outright laughable bugs. 2. Hallucinations are the worst possible failure modes - they look correct, which makes it all the more difficult to determine they're actually bullshit. I shudder to think about who will need to maintain the mountains of "vibe code" that is now being generated. Certainly not fucking me; I had a good career but I think now is definitely the right time to peace out. 3. Even if I could totally agree that there is a strong business case for AI, I can still, as an individual, think it makes my job generally shittier, and there is nothing wrong with having that opinion. I don't think I'd be so anti-AI if I saw a rational, cautious debate about how it can enhance productivity. But all I see are folks with a vested interest overselling its capabilities and minimizing its downsides, and it just feels really tiresome.
• sottol 1y ago
  I think another thing that comes out of not knowing the codebase is that you're mostly relegated to being a glorified tester. Right now (for me) it's very frequent, depending on the type of project, but in the future it could be less frequent - but at some you've gotta test what you're rolling out. I guess you can use another AI to do that but I don't know... Anyway, my current workflow is: 1. write detailed specs/prompt, 2. let agent loose, 3. pull down and test... usually something goes wrong. 3.1 converse with and ask agent to fix, 3.2 let agent loose again, 3.3 test again... if something goes wrong again: 3.3.1 ... Sometimes the Agent gets lost in the fixes but now have a better idea what can go wrong and you can start over with a better initial prompt. I haven't had a lot of success with pre-discussing (planning, PRDing) implementations, as in it worked, but not much better than directly trying to prompt what I want and takes a lot longer. But I'm not usually doing "normal" stuff as this is purely fun/exploratory side-project stuff and my asks are usually complicated but not complex if that makes sense. I guess development is always a lot of testing, but this feels different. I click around but don't gain a lot of insight. It feels more shallow. I can write a new prompt and explain what's different but I haven't furthered my understanding much. Also, not knowing the codebase, you might need a couple attempts at phrasing your ask just the right way. I probably had to ask my agent 5+ times, trying to explain in different ways how translate phone IMU yaw/pitch/roll into translations of the screen projection. Sometimes it's surprisingly hard to explain what you want to happen when you don't know the how it's implemented.
• mgraczyk 1y ago
  We are beyond the point of trying to convince naysayers. I will simply not hire anybody who is not good at using LLMs, and I don't think I would ever work with anybody who thinks they aren't very useful. It's like working with somebody who things compilers are useless. Obviously wrong, not worth spending time trying to convince. To anyone who reads this article and disagrees with the central point: You are missing the most important thing that will happen in your career. You should reevaluate because you will be unemployable in a few years.
  • andrepd 1y ago
    I don't think most people with mixed feelings in LLMs (or heretic naysayers as you put it) would want to work in a place like that, so perhaps you are doing everyone a favour!
    • mgraczyk 1y ago
      It reminds me of many of the people I worked with early in my career. They were opposed to C++ (they thought C was all you need), opposed to git (they used IBM clearcase or subversion), opposed to putting internal tools in a web browser (why not use Qt and install the tool), opposed to using python or javascript for web services (it's just a script kiddie language), opposed to sublime text/pycharm/vscode (IDEs are for people who don't know how to use a CLI). I have encountered it over and over, and each time these people get stuck in late career jobs making less than 1/3 of what most 23 year old SWEs I know are making.
      • SirHumphrey 1y ago
        They were probably also opposed to some other things that failed. But then hindsight is 20/20.
        • sanderjd 1y ago
          Yes, but honestly, I was this way at the beginning of my career, and I can't think of any examples of things I was right about. My most successful "this is doomed to fail" grouchiness was social media games (like Farmville). But I just can't think of any examples in the dev tooling space.
• dnoberon 1y ago
  This reads even more like an angry teenager than my angsty high school diary. I'm not sure how many more strawmans and dismissive remarks I can handle in one article.
  • puttycat 1y ago
    The language in this post is just terrible.
  • dang 1y ago
    "Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something." "When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. 'That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3' can be shortened to '1 + 1 is 2, not 3." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    • debugnik 1y ago
      Is there a similar rule for submissions, or are submitters exempt from adopting HN culture? "Please don't submit shallow arguments, specially criticizing other people's work?" Because we've recently been getting a series of low quality submissions which obviously drive low quality discussion, but for some reason it's only the commenters who get reprimanded, as if the submissions weren't ruining the mood one by one. (And to clarify, I haven't been warned, I'm not writing this out of spite.)
      • dang 1y ago
        You can flag submissions that you think don't belong on Hacker News. Other than that it's best to just turn your attention to other stories that do interest you.
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• thetwentyone 1y ago
  The author posits that people don't like using LLMs with Rust because LLMs aren't good with Rust. Then people would migrate towards languages that do will with LLMs. However, if that were true, then Julia would be more popular since LLMs do very well with it: https://www.stochasticlifestyle.com/chatgpt-performs-better-on-julia-than-python-and-r-for-large-language-model-llm-code-generation-why/ https://www.stochasticlifestyle.com/chatgpt-performs-better-...
  • tines 1y ago
    I mean, just to steelman the argument, the "market" hasn't had time to react to what LLMs are good at, so your rebuttal falls flat. I think the original statement is more a prediction than a statement of current affairs. Also, the author didn't say that "ease of use with LLMs" is the _only_ factor that matters. Julia could have other things wrong with it that prevent it from being adopted.
  • creata 1y ago
    Does the linked study actually check that the LLM solves the task correctly, or just that the code runs and terminates without errors? I'm bad at reading, but the paper feels like it's saying the latter, which doesn't seem that useful.
• slg 1y ago
  >We imagine artists spending their working hours pushing the limits of expression. But the median artist isn’t producing gallery pieces. They produce on brief: turning out competent illustrations and compositions for magazine covers, museum displays, motion graphics, and game assets. One of the more eye-opening aspects of this technology is finding out how many of my peers seemingly have no understanding or respect for the concept of art.
  • simonw 1y ago
    How do you mean?
    • slg 1y ago
      Whole libraries have been written over millennia about the importance and purpose of art, and that specific quote reduced it all down to nothing more than the creation of a product with a specific and mundane function as part of some other product. I genuinely feel bad for people with that mindset towards art.
      • zemo 1y ago
        art to them is a commodity, not a facet of expression or cultural participation.
      • jowea 1y ago
        I think that quote is talking about commercial art and there being a market willing to pay a large number of artists to do relatively mundane artworks. It does not exclude the possibility of artists doing art for art's sake as a hobby or a few elite artists doing paid high culture art. It's like when photography became a thing and there was a lot less paid work available to painters.
        • slg 1y ago
          I don't see that as a distinction worth making. Commercial art is still art. Music, for example, is an incredibly commercialized art. Replacing every song or album I have ever purchased with AI generated facsimiles is also an incredibly depressing thought. And let me tell you, my tastes aren't "a few elite artists doing paid high culture art". I would hope people still find value in painting, especially in a world with photography. That is even ignoring the strained nature of this analogy. The context of the original quote was in a discussion of the inherent plagiarism of AI. Photography wasn't invited by stealing painters work.
• pmdrpg 1y ago
  This op ed suggests that it’s easier to audit a huge amount of code before merging it in than is to write the code from scratch. I don’t know about anyone else, but I generally find it easier to write exactly what I want than to mentally model what a huge volume of code I’ve never seen before will do? (Especially if that code was spit out by an alien copypasta that is really good at sounding plausible with zero actual intelligence or intent?) Like, if all I care about is: does it have enough unit tests and do they pass, then yeah I can audit that. But if I was trying to solve truly novel problems like modeling proteins, optimizing travel routes, or new computer rendering techniques, I wouldn’t even know where to begin, it would take tons of arduous study to understand how the new project full of novel algorithms is going behave?
• DebtDeflation 1y ago
  > Some of the smartest people I know share a bone-deep belief that AI is a fad — the next iteration of NFT mania It's not that it's a fad. It's that the hype has gotten way ahead of the capability. CEOs laying off double digit percentages of their workforce because they believe that in 6 months AI will actually be able to do all those jobs and they want to get the message out to Wall St to juice the stock price today.
  • sanderjd 1y ago
    Both things can be true, and in my view, they are. I think there is a lot of "there" there with these tools, and increasingly so, and also that lots of people are out over their skis with the hype. The key is to learn the useful tools and techniques while remaining realistic and open-eyed about their limitations.
    • DebtDeflation 1y ago
      That's why I said AI is not a fad. It's everywhere and is providing real utility. It's just not going to let CEOs replace the majority of their workforce like they think it will.
      • sanderjd 1y ago
        Yeah. I'm not sure how many of them think this. I think they mostly are paying attention, making sure their businesses aren't falling behind competitors, but also hedging their bets.
  • diabllicseagull 1y ago
    things are way beyond hype at this point and calling skeptics who raised the alarms along the way nuts is nuts. I'll also leave this here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ovuMoW2EGk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ovuMoW2EGk
• keeganpoppen 1y ago
  this is one of those fascinating cases where i agree with none of the arguments, but vehemently agree with the conclusion… it ordinarily would give me pause, but in this case i am reminded that nonsense arguments are equally applicable to both sides of the debate. if the arguments actually had logical connection to the conclusion, and i disliked the arguments but liked the conclusion, that would be real cause for introspection.
• grey-area 1y ago
  I’d love to see the authors of effusive praise of generative AI like this provide the proof of the unlimited powers of their tools in code. If GAI (or agents, or whatever comes next …) is so effective it should be quite simple to prove that by creating an AI only company and in short order producing huge amounts of serviceable code to do useful things. So far I’ve seen no sign of this, and the best use case seems to be generating text or artwork which fools humans into thinking it has coherent meaning as our minds love to fill gaps and spot patterns even where there are none. It’s also pretty good at reproducing things it has seen with variations - that can be useful. So far in my experience watching small to medium sized companies try to use it for real work, it has been occasionally useful for exploring apis, odd bits of knowledge etc, but overall wasted more time than it has saved. I see very few signs of progress. The time has come for llm users to put up or shut up - if it’s so great, stop telling us and show and use the code it generated on its own.
  • sanderjd 1y ago
    What kind of proof are you looking for here, exactly? Lots of businesses are successfully using AI... There are many anecdotes of this, which you can read here, or even in the article you commented on. What else are you looking for?
    • Hammershaft 1y ago
      I'd like to see any actual case studies. So far I have only heard vague hype.
      • ewild 1y ago
        i mean i can state that i built a company wihtin the last year where id say 95% of my code involved using an LLM. I am an experienced dev so yes it makes mistakes and it requires my expertise to be sure the code works and to fix subtle bugs; however, i built this company me and 2 others in about 7 months for what wouldve easily taken me 3 years without the aid of LLMs. Is that an indictment of my ability? maybe, but we are doing quite well for ourselves at 3M arr already on only 200k expense.
• xyst 1y ago
  Ask me again in 15 years. Assuming the world hasn’t already entered a war for the remaining resources on this planet.
• forty 1y ago
  Why would anyone rather read and fix someone else code rather than writing the code themselves? I do a lot of code review for other human code and it use so much more energy than writing my own code (and surely, as I have competent colleagues, this is not even as bad as if I expected that the code that I'm reading could be totally random shit)
  • Mofpofjis 1y ago
    > Why would anyone rather read and fix someone else code rather than writing the code themselves? Because their own review standards are low (so they find reviewing "easy"), and/or because they can't appreciate the emotional & mental fulfillment that coding provides.
• pona-a 1y ago
  > It’s projection. People say “LLMs can’t code” when what they really mean is “LLMs can’t write Rust”. Fair enough! But people select languages in part based on how well LLMs work with them, so Rust people should get on that. How is it the responsibility of the Rust community that there weren't enough metric tons of free code for the machine to slurp up? And the phrasing makes it sound like it's the community's fault for not feeding OpenAI enough code to be stripped of its license and authorship and get blended into a fine latent soup. It's a lot like people coming to a one-man FOSS project with a laundry list of demands, expecting to be treated with the religious reverence of a major enterprise contract. The whole tone, the pervasive "use it or you'll be left behind"—where users saying they don't want or need it only proves further evidence of its imminent apotheosis—superficially reminds me of previous FUDs. And how is it not concerning that the thing described as intelligent needs billions of lines to generalize a language a human can learn from a single manual? Will it need hundreds of kLOC to internalize a new library, or even its new version, beyond in-context learning? The answer is yes; you are choosing to freeze the entire tech stack, when fixing its abstractions could actually save you from boilerplate, just so the machine can write it for you at $200 a month with a significant error rate.
  • benmmurphy 1y ago
    Is the problem with LLMs and Rust really a problem with the training data or a problem with it being harder to get something to compile in Rust? I presume its easier to get something to compile in the dynamically typed languages, and then slightly more difficult in statically typed languages and then a step up with Rust which also forces you to deal with the lifetime of objects. But maybe with LLMs its different and they can do static typing easier than dynamic but they just really struggle with structuring a program to properly deal with ownership.
    • nickpsecurity 1y ago
      They mostly copy and mix patterns in the training data. Lots of repetition with variations on them is helpful for their generalization. Languages like Python and Go have a ton of code in Github, etc like that. I saw that using Python with GPT 3.5/4. If it's a rarer language, the math doesn't do as good of a job on piles of random code. There's just not enough for it to learn from. I cant speak for Rust since I dont know the numbers but imagine it's much less than Python or Go. I have seen some evidence, though, that harder languages are harder for them to code in. GPT 3.5 used to struggle with C++ for something that it could easily produce in Python. It could actually produce things in C more easily than C++. It makes sense, though, because there's both more context needed for correctness and more behavioral patterns to write it. My solution, which I only prototyped in GPT due to leaving AI, was to use AI's to write code in languages like Python which non-AI tools transpiled to high-performance code in C++ or Rust. Think the Python to C++ compiler or maybe Nikita. Later, with hallucinations mitigated enough, add LLM's to those transpilers. As a side benefit, it let's you sell a product accelerating or increasing predictability of applications in that language. That's a non-AI investment. There's a few companies doing that, too. So, one could sell to the AI crowd, the "language X in business" crowd, or both.
• ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago
  I use AI every day, basically as a "pair coder." I used it about 15 minutes ago, to help me diagnose a UI issue I was having. It gave me an answer that I would have figured out, in about 30 minutes, in about 30 seconds. My coding style (large files, with multiple classes, well-documented) works well for AI. I can literally dump the entire file into the prompt, and it can scan it in milliseconds. I also use it to help me learn about new stuff, and the "proper" way to do things. Basically, what I used to use StackOverflow for, but without the sneering, and much faster turnaround. I'm not afraid to ask "stupid" questions -That is critical. Like SO, I have to take what it gives me, with a grain of salt. It's usually too verbose, and doesn't always match my style, so I end up doing a lot of refactoring. It can also give rather "naive" answers, that I can refine. The important thing, is that I usually get something that works, so I can walk it back, and figure out a better way. I also won't add code to my project, that I don't understand, and the refactoring helps me, there. I have found the best help comes from ChatGPT. I heard that Claude was supposed to be better, but I haven't seen that. I don't use agents. I've not really ever found automated pipelines to be useful, in my case, and that's sort of what agents would do for me. I may change my mind on that, as I learn more.
  • yeahwhatever10 1y ago
    I use it as a SO stand in as well. What I like about Chatbots vs SO is the ability to keep a running conversation instead of 3+ tabs and tuning the specificity toward my problem. I've also noticed that if I look up my same question on SO I often find the source code the LLM copied. My fear is that if chatbots kill SO where will the LLM's copied code come from in the future?
    • ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago
      That's an issue. It will likely turn into a Worm Ouroboros. There's usually some "iteration," with ChatGPT giving me deprecated APIs and whatnot.
    • __grob 1y ago
      I use Perplexity as my daily driver and it seems to be pretty good at piecing together the path forward from documentation as it has that built-in web search when you ask a question. Hopefully LLMs go more in that direction and less in the SO copy-paste direction, sidestepping the ouroboros issue.
• disambiguation 1y ago
  Man the redbull is oozing off this post, talk about sipping rocket fuel. I mean a tool is a tool, nothing wrong with that - but most of the resistence stems from AI being shoved down our throats at warp speed. Its already everywhere and I can't opt out, that stinks. As for the skepticism in terms of adoption and usefulness, its mainly a question of whether or not it will continue improving - there's no way to no what lies ahead, but if it came to a grinding halt today well then the high water mark just isn't all that impressive. > Yeah, we get it. You don’t believe in IPR. Then shut the fuck up about IPR. Reap the whirlwind. This is the point that matters, and I don't think everyone is on the same page that LLMs are essentially over glorified data laundering. The industry would get just as much "value" if we declared a jubilee and wiped out all licenses and allowed unlimited plagiarism (Looking at Zuckerburg and his 10 TB of pirated data). In fact, if AI owners published their training data sets with a capable search engine, I would bet money of it out performing LLMs in most cases. Why waste all that man power reinventing Netflix again? Just copy paste the code and give everyone their time back, sheesh. > Kids today don’t just use agents; they use asynchronous agents. They wake up, free-associate 13 different things for their LLMs to work on, make coffee, fill out a TPS report, drive to the Mars Cheese Castle, and then check their notifications. They’ve got 13 PRs to review. Three get tossed and re-prompted. Five of them get the same feedback a junior dev gets. And five get merged. I'm in a role that is behind the times, using a bespoke in-house framework that is immune to the benefits of LLMs, so I don't get to see what you see - so as a skeptic, I'm not convinced this isn't just the illusion of speed. I have not seen convincing results, show me the amazing things being made by AI (AI tooling itself does not count) - but yes, maybe that's because its all siloed into walled gardens. > But something real is happening. My smartest friends are blowing it off. Maybe I persuade you. Probably I don’t. But we need to be done making space for bad arguments. Yeah all the arguments have been made, good and bad, we're all waiting to see how it plays out. But I'd rather take the side of being a skeptic - if I'm right then I'm in the right place. If I'm wrong, that's cool too, I don't mind playing catch-up. But fully embracing the hype is, IMO, tantamount to putting all your eggs in one basket, seems like a needless risk but if that's worth it to you to get ahead then by all means, slurp up the hype.
• TheRoque 1y ago
  One of the biggest anti LLM arguments for me at the moments is about security. In case you don't know, if you open a file with copilot active or cursor, containing secrets, it might be sent to a server a thus get leaked. The companies say that if that file is in a cursorignore file, it won't be indexed, but it's still a critical security issue IMO. We all know what happened with the "smart home assistants" like Alexa. Sure, there might be a way to change your workflow and never ever open a secret file with those editors, but my point is that a software that sends your data without your consent, and without giving you the tools to audit it, is a no go for many companies, including mine.
  • noobermin 1y ago
    Sometimes I wonder if all the hype around being left behind and needing to try these things just to see how great they can be is being deliberately put out there to increase their training data. Too many vibe coders contribute trash code if any. They need more code from so called experts that isn't open source yet.
  • metaltyphoon 1y ago
    At day job while someone was trying out windsurf, it simply picked up an environment variable that contained sensitive data and used it in code. This is wild.
  • zmmmmm 1y ago
    It's why I use Aider, because it only operates on explicit files that you give it. Works great with OpenAI but if you are really worried, it interfaces perfectly with Ollama for local LLMs. A 12b model on my Mac does well enough for coding that it's serviceable for me.
    • MYEUHD 1y ago
      Which 12b model are you running?
      • zmmmmm 1y ago
        Gemma 12b quantized (gemma3:12b-it-qat in ollama)
• consumer451 1y ago
  I am just some shmoe, but I believe that devs fall into to major categories when it comes to LLMs: those with their own product ideas, and those without their own product ideas. The prior look upon Claude Code/Cursor/Windsurf much more favorably, as they are able to ship their ideas much faster. This is a bit of a hot take, so I would love any replies to bring me back down to earth.
• abdullin 1y ago
  My current workflow with Codex is (coding environment from OpenAI): (1) Ask to write an implementation plan for a specific change or a feature. It will go through the source code, look up references, make notes and produce a plan (2) Review the plan. Point out missing things, or stuff that needs improvement. (3) Once I'm satisfied with the plan - ask to draft PR. Launch a few attempts in parallel and pick the one that I like the most. (4) While drafting PR, Codex will run unit tests (even can run E2E tests in its container), linting and type checkers at every single step. This helps a lot with the stability. (5) I review the code and merge the PR if I like it. Ask to cleanup - if not. This feels like working with a remote team - very patient and diligent at that. Ultimately, I get to get more features done per day. But I also feel more tired by the end of the day due to a higher level of cognitive load. There are more decisions to make and less idle time (e.g. no more hours spent tidying up the code or doing relaxing and pretty refactoring). TLDR; this AI thing works really well at least for me. But it comes with trade-offs that might slow down its adoption by companies en masse.
• donatj 1y ago
  And this goes at least part of the way towards explaining why Fly.io has been the second least reliable cloud provider I've ever used, after Azure.
  • Mofpofjis 1y ago
    quick, the address of a burn clinic
  • dang 1y ago
    "Don't be snarky." "Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    • donatj 1y ago
      I apologize. I genuinely did not mean snark, nor to be dismissive. It was a sincere honest-to-god "oh wow this actually explains the situation over there" mixed with an expression of frustration with their service quality. A lot of their pages barely work and feel like first drafts, much of the UI is even labeled as a work in progress, and manytools regularly just fail to do what they're supposed to. Deployments are routinely broken, with Twitter lit up like a light bulb about it while their status page remains all services operational. I deploy three completely separate applications with Fly.io and have regular unscheduled downtime. I stick with them despite all this because they're cheap and easily scale regular Go apps down to zero which is wonderful for apps that see intermittent/irregular usage patterns. The fact that they are adamant defenders of vibe coding going so far in the post as to say "who cares about hallucinations" genuinely explains a fair deal about their unprofessional feeling service.
• CraigJPerry 1y ago
  That was a stellar read. I've had (at least parts of) many of these thoughts floating around my head over the past few weeks / months, but it'd have been beyond my ken to write them down as lucidly.
• blibble 1y ago
  > We’re not East Coast dockworkers; we won’t stop progress on our own. we could choose to be of course if you're a temporarily embarrassed billionaire like ptacek, you certainly don't want the workers doing this
  • tptacek 1y ago
    Kind of saying the quiet part loud here.
    • bowsamic 1y ago
      Why not?
      • tptacek 1y ago
        I mean, I appreciate it being laid out, so I don't have to worry about people saying "absolutely nobody is making that preposterous argument, nobody wants us to be like the east coast dockworkers, it's just...".
        • bowsamic 1y ago
          Why is it a bad argument?
  • candiddevmike 1y ago
    This is pretty terrible for the fly brand TBH. Yeesh, politics in a company blog...
  • dontlaugh 1y ago
    It’s the class interests that make it very obvious who is trying to lie to you about AI. The Luddites were of course correct, like most labour movements.
  • saghm 1y ago
    Yeah, this is where I went from being on the fence to just checking out entirely. Even if it did mean that the top earners make slightly less (which I'm dubious about) and I happened to be one of them (which I'm not confident in, but I could comfortably survive with a lower salary than I've actually received most of the time), I'd still be in favor of tech workers unionizing because the benefits outweigh the costs both personally and for the larger group. I've been hired to a fully distributed team only to have the company decide to force everyone to "return" to the office within a couple years despite the team never having been in any office in the first place; I've had managers promise me raises that don't appear, only for me to find out later that they never actually talked to their superiors about it like they claimed; I've seen teammates get hired and laid off six months later the same week that we have someone else we just hired join the team. None of this stuff is reasonable, and for some reason we collectively just throw up our hands and say there's nothing we can do, and then apparently some of us scoff and look down at lower-paid workers banding together to try to get a semblance of the advantages we take for granted in our industry because they're "stopping progress"? Even if I did accept the premise that workers collectively organizing to win rights affected "progress", there's no reason to assume there's no middle ground between the extremes of "no progress" and "full-throttle progress without regard for consequences". It's farcical.
• jongjong 1y ago
  I believe that AI is very useful in software development but I don't buy the narrative that AI is responsible for layoffs over the past few years (at least not most of them). I think that narrative is a convenient cover for systemic misallocation which created a need to contain inflation. I think big tech execs understood that, beyond increasing their company stock prices, they also need to work together to keep the monetary system itself under control. This is why they've been firing people whilst having record profits. They've reached such scale and the system has reached such fragility that they have to think and act like economists to keep the thing going. The economy itself has become the responsibility of big tech. But who knows, maybe AI will accelerate so rapidly that it will fix the economy. Maybe we'll have robots everywhere doing all the work. But I worry about the lack of market incentives for people to adapt AI to real world use cases. For example, I'm an open source developer who likes to tinker but I've been booted out of the opportunity economy. I can't afford to program robots. People like me are too busy using AI to parse spreadsheets and send targeted ads to even think about automating stuff. We work for companies and have no autonomy in the markets. If things had worked out differently for me, I'd probably own a farm now and I'd be programming robots to do my harvest and selling the robots or licensing the schematics (or maybe I'd have made them open source, if open source had worked out so well for me). I don't have access to such opportunity unfortunately. The developers who worked for big tech are good at politics but often disconnected from value-creation. Few of them have the skills or interest to do the work that needs to be done now... They will just continue leveraging system flaws to make money, so long as those flaws exist.
• aucisson_masque 1y ago
  > Professional software developers are in the business of solving practical problems for people with code. We are not, in our day jobs, artisans. Steve Jobs was wrong: we do not need to carve the unseen feet in the sculpture. Nobody cares if the logic board traces are pleasingly routed. If anything we build endures, it won’t be because the codebase was beautiful. I think it comes all down to that, do you have pride in what you do or you don’t ? I make a wall with bricks, even if it will be covered with coating i will do my best to have regular joints and pacing. Could make it faster, no one would notice the difference but me… i hate that feeling when you done something and you know it’s barely enough, just barely, it’s kind of shit and you really don’t want others to see it. On the opposite side, some people will take pride in building wall twice as fast as me and won’t care it’s horrendous. Both cases are valid, but me i know i can’t do a work I’m not proud of.
  • Mofpofjis 1y ago
    > I make a wall with bricks, even if it will be covered with coating i will do my best to have regular joints and pacing. Absolutely. This is at the core of it.
  • joshdata 1y ago
    Totally agree with you that pride is important, but there's definitely more. Being a good engineer is frequently a problem of design --- whether it's user experience or code abstractions. Design is partly art, and that makes us artisans at least some of the time. The code that I've written that has endured the longest --- decades --- has been code that was designed well.
• mattbrewsbytes 1y ago
  > This was the craftsman’s ‘Golden Age’ and much time and trouble was taken over the design of tools. Craftsmen were being called upon to do more skilful and exacting work and the use of tools and the interest in development had become very widespread. Above pulled from A Brief History of the Woodworking Plane [0]. A woodworking tool that has evolved over 2,000 years. Now there are electric planers, handheld electric planers and lots of heavy machinery that do the same thing in a very automated way. If a company is mass producing kitchen cabinets, they aren't hand planing edges on boards, a machine is doing all that work. I feel like with AI we are on the cusp of moving beyond a "Golden age" and into an "industrial age" for coding, where it will become more important to have code that AI understands vs. something that is carefully crafted. Simple business pressure will demand it (whether we like it or not). ^ A comment I made just yesterday on a different thread. For software developers AI is like the cabinet maker that gets a machine to properly mill and produce cabinet panels, sure you can use a hand plane to do that but you're producing a very different product and likely one that not many people will care about, possibly not even your employer when they see all the other wood shops pumping out cabinetry and taking their market share. [0] https://www.handplane.com/879/a-brief-history-of-the-woodworking-plane/ https://www.handplane.com/879/a-brief-history-of-the-woodwor...
  • daemin 1y ago
    The difference is that programming is creating the design for the furniture and the process to assemble it using machines. Compilation and deployment is the factory in this case. So you're trying to automate away the design aspect where we already have the other aspects automated.
• puttycat 1y ago
  > An LLM can be instructed to just figure all that shit out. Often, it will drop you precisely at that golden moment where shit almost works, and development means tweaking code and immediately seeing things work better. Well, except that in order to fix that 1% you'd need to read and understand whatever the LLM did and then look for that 1%. I get the shills just thinking about this, whether the original programmer was human or not. I'd rather just write everything myself to begin with.
  • nojito 1y ago
    Reading code is vastly quicker than writing it from scratch.
    • tines 1y ago
      But creating a mental model and then interacting with it is slower than interacting with a mental model you already have.
    • abenga 1y ago
      This is a lie, unless you are just speaking of the mechanics of cursorily skimming it. Reading code to understand it enough to commit it in my name is harder and slower than writing it myself.
      • dymk 1y ago
        Firstly, you are not the other poster, so I don't know how you can say it's a lie with conviction. Second, reading code to understand it is a skill that you need to practice to get better at. That might be your issue.
        • sarchertech 1y ago
          It’s not the OP’s issue. That reading code is harder than writing it is as close to a consensus belief as we get in this industry. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-never-do-part-i/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...
• nixpulvis 1y ago
  I keep talking to people who've had a good bit of success using gemini or cluade to build quick prototype front ends for some applications. I think theres some questions in my head of how well the process scales when you want to keep adding features, but according to them it's not been hard getting it to make the needed changes. My issue with it is that it gates software development behind paid services with various levels of context supported. Absolutely not the dream I have of how more software should be open source and everyone should be empowered to make the changes they need.
• keybored 1y ago
  Thankfully the uncrazy person is going to get us on that sane VC AI wavelength. > If you’re making requests on a ChatGPT page and then pasting the resulting (broken) code into your editor, you’re not doing what the AI boosters are doing. No wonder you’re talking past each other. They’re playing 3D chess while you’re stuck at checkers. I do things suboptimally while learning the ropes or just doing things casually. That doesn’t mean that I judge the approach itself by my sloppy workflow. I’m able to make inferences about what a serious/experienced person would do. And it wouldn’t involve pasting things through three windows like I would do. So of course I don’t judge AI by “ask chatty and paste the response”. Yes indeed: “deploying agents” is what I would imagine the Ask Chatty And Paste workflow taken to Perfection to look like. > LLMs can write a large fraction of all the tedious code you’ll ever need to write. And most code on most projects is tedious. LLMs drastically reduce the number of things you’ll ever need to Google. They look things up themselves. Most importantly, they don’t get tired; they’re immune to inertia. Most Rube Goldberg machines are very tedious and consist of fifty-too-many parts. But we can automate most of that for you— I could not have ever imagined a more Flintstones meets Science Fiction clash than AI According To Software Engineers. You’re using AI to generate code. And no one cares how much. It’s just so tedious in any case. A wortwhile approach would have been to aspire to make or generate technology artifacts that could be hidden behind a black box surface with a legible interface in front. Is the code tedious? Then make the AI come up with something that is well-designed, where the obvious things you want is given freely, where minor customizations are just minor tweaks, and larger deviations require only proportionally larger changes. Uh, how about no? How about generating 20KLOC line “starter” some-framework project with all the 20KLOC “tedious” bits hanging out, then we can iterate from there. The AI made a Git log and everything so it’s ya know audited. But maybe I’m being unfair. Maybe we are moving towards something not quite as stupid as Deploy ChatGPT 50X? Or maybe it’s effectively going to behind a black box. Because ya know the AI will deal with it all by itself? > Are you a vibe coding Youtuber? Can you not read code? If so: astute point. Otherwise: what the fuck is wrong with you? > You’ve always been responsible for what you merge to main. You were five years go. And you are tomorrow, whether or not you use an LLM. No!, and what the fuck is wrong with you? We are Flintstone technologists and I’ll be damned if I can’t get my AI brain chip-injected, genetically enhanced for speed horsey cyborg for my modern horse-drawn carriage patent.
• nitwit005 1y ago
  > Does an intern cost $20/month? Because that’s what Cursor.ai costs. > Part of being a senior developer is making less-able coders productive, be they fleshly or algebraic. Using agents well is both a both a skill and an engineering project all its own, of prompts, indices, and (especially) tooling. LLMs only produce shitty code if you let them. A junior developer often has negative value to a team, because they're sapping the time of more senior developers who have to help train them, review code, fix mistakes, etc. It can take a long while to break even. The raw cost of Cursor's subscription is surely dwarfed by your own efforts, given that description. The actual calculous here should be the cost to corral Cursor, against the value of the code it generated.
  • fud101 1y ago
    So what is the end game here, we don't have any juniors? That's what we're celebrating? This whole thing makes no damn sense, we're just becoming more efficient at producing bad code at scale, which will be maintained by a workforce that is growing less proficient at that with the increasing adoption of AI - skills will decline and eventually we'll be living with more buggy software, maintained by underpaid, unappreciated and overwhelmed grey beards and it will be too late to turn back.
    • elric 1y ago
      I had a call with a recruiter the other day, who told me that they had simply stopped hiring juniors at all, when not too long ago they would be camping out at colleges on graduation day to snipe fresh graduates. This is going to a problem real soon. There needs to be a realistic career path for software developers, or the entire field is at risk.
    • 620gelato 1y ago
      This. No more juniors, and the skills of the seniors is going to atrophy when all they're doing is review and "move around" code an LLM spat out.
  • YmiYugy 1y ago
    I don't think that's necessarily true. Some companies and seniors certainly invest into training and mentoring their juniors and this can take a long time and be expensive. But there are a lot of places offer 3-6 months internships for people that are barely out of high school. Others heavily rely on overseas contractors. So in a lot of scenarios it does seem possible to use less capable labor in a beneficial way for software engineering.
• omot 1y ago
  I think of programming languages as an interface between humans and computers. If anything, the industry expanded because of this abstraction. Not everyone has to learn assembly to build cool shit. To me AI is the next step in this abstraction where you don't need to learn programming languages to potentially build cool projects. The hard part of software engineering is scale anyways. My bet is that this will expand the industry in unprecedented ways. Will there be contraction of traditional programming jobs? Absolutely. The growth in tech jobs over the last 20 years weren't more assembly programmers. They were abstraction experts. I'm sure the next wave will be even bigger, professional prompting will explode in size.
  • TheRoque 1y ago
    The C abstracting the assembly or the GC a abstracting away memory management work because they were possible to implement in a deterministic and reliable way (well, in the case of garbage collection, not all the time) But I don't think that's a similar situation for LLMs, where the hallucinations or failure to debug their own issues are way too frequent to just "vibe code"
• deadbabe 1y ago
  I can’t wait for the day when people no longer manually write text messages to each other, but instead just ask LLMs to read and respond from a few prompted words.
  • Mofpofjis 1y ago
    next level: use AI agents in their dating apps on both sides to decide if they want to hook up
    • deadbabe 1y ago
      Just send AI agents on a simulated date and see how it turns out.
• Yossarrian22 1y ago
  Where is the counter argument to this not being sustainable?
• martythemaniak 1y ago
  At 0 temperature an LLM is a Map<String,String> - a string input (key) will give you the same string output (value) every time. Hypothesis: there exists a key whose value is a complete, working, fully-tested application which meets your requirements 100% and fulfills your business need. This key is the smallest, most complete description of what your application does. It is written in natural language and represents a significantly compressed version of your application code. My part-time obsession over the last few months has been trying to demonstrate this and come up with a method for finding these magic keys (I even tried to get the LLMs to search for me, lol). What I really want is to give the latest thinking models (200k input, 100k output) a 5-6 page design doc (4k words, 5k tokens) and have them produce a complete 5kloc (50k tokens) microservice, which would show a 10x compression. It's hard, but I haven't seen any reason to think it wouldn't work. For better or worse, I think this will be close to what IC jobs will be like in few years. Fundamentally, our jobs are to try work with other functions to agree to some system that needs to exist, then we talk to the computers to actually implement this. If we switch kotlin+compiler for design doc+llm, it still going to be somewhat the same, but far more productive. Agents and such are somewhat of a stop-gap measure, you don't want people giving tasks to machines, you want to accurately describe some idea and then let the computers make it work. You can change your description and they can also figure out their own tasks to evolve the implementation.
• nostrademons 1y ago
  Curious how he reconciles this: > If you build something with an LLM that people will depend on, read the code. In fact, you’ll probably do more than that. You’ll spend 5-10 minutes knocking it back into your own style. with Joel Spolsky's fundamental maxim: > It’s harder to read code than to write it. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-never-do-part-i/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...
  • layer8 1y ago
    You can invest more time in the writing to make code easier to read. It’s just that it typically would take much more time. It would be conceivable for LLMs to eventually reach a state where they can produce such easily readable and comprehensible code.
  • pyb 1y ago
    I'm sure no one reads LLM-produced code very carefully, especially if it "works". At best they skim.
    • furyofantares 1y ago
      For most things I'm not willing to accept faster code at the expense of being an expert in the code. So I am still trying to find the right amount of reading, editing, and reworking that gets the job done faster, where "the job" includes me being an expert in the produced code, not just the production of code. There are periods of skimming but I'm doing a lot more than skimming.
    • swalsh 1y ago
      I read LLM generated code like I review a PR. I skim for anything that stands out as a common pitfall, and dig into the details of area I expect issues.
    • jansan 1y ago
      The problem is that a lot of code works in general, but fails in edge cases. I would hate to be the guy who's job is only to find out why verbose AI generated code fails in one particular condition.
• fnordpiglet 1y ago
  FWIW with proper MDC/ rules I’ve found LLM programming agents excellent at rust. There’s a lot of complex and tedious minutiae in rust that I know but forget to apply everywhere it’s helpful while a SOTA LLM agent does well, especially with proper rule guidance to remember to use it. Generally though I find LLMs have a pretty rapidly diminishing return on what you can expect out of them. They’re like a 3-5 year senior programmer that has really learned their domain well, but doesn’t have the judgement of a principal engineer. You get to a point where you need to reach in and right things and really pay attention, and at that point the diminishing returns set it rapidly and you’re better off just doing the rest yourself. Refactors and stuff can be delegated but that’s about it. I find this true regardless of the language. None the less, I’ve been able to improve my overall velocity dramatically completing several projects in the last few months in the span of one typically. If tooling improves I hope to continue that but I’m already getting close to the limit of how fast I can conceive of useful creative things.
• morning-coffee 1y ago
  Check, please.
• ChicagoDave 1y ago
  There are many aspects to AI push back. - all creatives are flat against it because it’s destroying their income streams and outright stealing their intellectual property - some technical leaders are skeptical because early returns were very bad and they have not updated their investigations to the latest tools and models, which are already significantly ahead of even six months ago - a tech concern is how do we mentor new developers if they don’t know how to code or develop logic. LLMs are great IF you already know what you’re doing - talent is deeply concerned that they will be reduced and replaced, going from high paying careers to fast food salaries We have a lot of work to balance productivity with the benefits to society. “Let them eat cake,” is not going to work this time either.
  • gyomu 1y ago
    Yes, this is a solid succinct summary. I’d also extend the last point: > talent is deeply concerned that they will be reduced and replaced, going from high paying careers to fast food salaries The delta in that money going to the investor/tech exec instead. Yet another wealth transfer from the middle class to the 0.01%.
• eqvinox 1y ago
  > but the plagiarism […] Cut me a little slack as I ask you to shove this concern up your ass. No profession has demonstrated more contempt for intellectual property. Speeding is quite common too, yet if you get caught — especially overdoing it — you'll have a problem. Also, in this case, presumably everything produced with AI is fair game too? The argument being made here isn't even "it's not plagiarism", rather "it's plagiarism but I don't care" — why would anyone else respect such an author's copyrights?
• jjcm 1y ago
  The most important thing in this article in my mind is in the level setting section - if you are basing your perspective on the state of AI from when you tested it 6mo+ ago, your perspective is likely not based on the current reality. This is kind of a first though for any kind of technology. The speed of development and change here is unreal. Never before has a couple months of not being on top of things led to you being considered "out of date" on a tool. The problem is that this kind of speed requires not just context, but a cultural shift on the speed of updating that context. Humanity just isn't equipped to handle this rate of change. Historically in tech, we'd often scoff at the lifecycle of other industries - Airlines haven't changed their software in 20 years?? Preposterous! For the vast majority of us though, we're the other industry now.
• munificent 1y ago
  "Kids today don’t just use agents; they use asynchronous agents. They wake up, free-associate 13 different things for their LLMs to work on, make coffee, fill out a TPS report, drive to the Mars Cheese Castle, and then check their notifications. They’ve got 13 PRs to review. Three get tossed and re-prompted. Five of them get the same feedback a junior dev gets. And five get merged." I would jump off a bridge before I accepted that as my full-time job. I've been programming for 20+ years and I've never wanted to move into management. I got into programming because I like programming, not because I like asking others to write code on my behalf and review what they come up with. I've been in a lead role, and I certainly do lots of code review and enjoy helping teammates grow. But the last fucking thing I want to do is delegate all the code writing to someone or something else. I like writing code. Yes, sometimes writing code is tedious, or frustrating. Sometimes it's yak-shaving. Sometimes it's Googling. Very often, it's debugging. I'm happy to have AI help me with some of that drudgery, but if I ever get to the point that I feel like I spend my entire day in virtual meetings with AI agents, then I'm changing careers. I get up in the morning to make things, not to watch others make things. Maybe the kind of software engineering role I love is going to disappear, like stevedores and lamplighters. I will miss it dearly, but at least I guess I got a couple of good decades out of it. If this is what the job turns into, I'll have to find something else to do with my remaining years.
  • Mofpofjis 1y ago
    > I got into programming because I like programming, not because I like asking others to write code on my behalf and review what they come up with oh finally someone else who didn't enter programming because, as 7-10 year old child, they were into SOLVING PRACTICAL PROBLEMS FOR PEOPLE. > But the last fucking thing I want to do is delegate all the code writing to someone or something else Thank God there is at least one other person that understands that the ratio between creative and reactive work is crucial for wellbeing at the job. For crying out loud. > but if I ever get to the point that I feel like I spend my entire day in virtual meetings with AI agents, then I'm changing careers so am I. > but at least I guess I got a couple of good decades out of it Thanks for this perspective. Yes, at least we've got our memories, and the code locations and commits we recall from memory, from a distance of 10 or more years. >. If this is what the job turns into, I'll have to find something else to do with my remaining years Me too.
• mrbungie 1y ago
  You know what's nuts? How so many articles about supporting LLMs and against skeptics are so full of fallacies and logical inconsistencies like strawmans, false dichotomies, appeals to emotion and to authority when they have supposedly almost AGI machines to assist them in their writing. They could at least do a "please take a look at my article and see if I'm commiting any logical fallacies" prompt iteration session if they trust these tools so much. These kinds of articles that heavily support LLM usage in programming seem to FOMO you or at least suggest that "you are using it wrong" in a weak way just to invalidate contrary or conservative opinions out of the discussion. These are pure rhetorics with such an empty discourse. I use these tools everyday and every hour in strange loops (between at least Cursor, ChatGPT and now Gemini) because I do see some value in them, even if only to simulate a peer or rubber duck to discuss ideas with. They are extremely useful to me due to my ADHD and because they actually support me through my executive disfunction and analysis paralysis even if they produce shitty code. Yet I'm still an AI skeptic because I've seen enough failure modes in my daily usage. I do not know how to feel when faced with these ideas because I feel out of the false dichotomy (pay for them, use them every day, but won't think them as valuable as the average AI bro). What's funny is that I'm yet to see an article that actually shows LLMs strengths and weaknesses in a serious manner and with actual examples. If you are going to defend a position, do it seriously ffs.
  • dbalatero 1y ago
    Just for fun, I asked ChatGPT and it came up with 30+ fallacies + examples. I'm sure some is hallucinated, but woof: https://chatgpt.com/share/683e62ed-e118-800f-a404-bd49bec799db https://chatgpt.com/share/683e62ed-e118-800f-a404-bd49bec799...
  • chinchilla2020 1y ago
    As I said in another post. The article is pure rhetoric. It provides no actual numbers, measurements, or examples. It's just "AI did stuff really good for me" as the proof that AI works
• creativenolo 1y ago
  If you’re leaning out, spend two weeks leaning in. I did, and learned a ton, and likely not going back to how I was before, or how I used it a week ago. The comments in the article about not reading the agent is good but it’s more than that… Vibe coding is for non-coders. Yet, you get a feel for the vibe of the AI. With windsurf, you have two or three files open, and working in one. It starts smashing out the multi, interspersed, line edits and you know with a flutter of your eyes, it’s got your vibe and correctly predicted your next ten lines. And for a moment you forgive it for leading you astray when you read what it said.
• kevinsync 1y ago
  Not to derail, but NFT mania (part of the opening salvo in the article) was the giant shitshow that it was -not- because the concept of unique digital bits in the possession of a single owner was a bad idea (or, the concept of unique verification of membership in a club was a bad idea) -- it was a diarrhea-slicked nightmare because it was implemented via blockchains and their related tokens, which inherently peg fluctuating fiat value to the underlying mechanisms of assigning and verifying said ownership or membership, and encourages a reseller's market .. not to mention the perverse, built-in economic incentives required to get nodes to participate in that network to make the whole thing go. Had NFTs simply been deployed as some kind of protocol that could be leveraged for utility rather than speculation, I think the story would be a complete 180. No clue personally how to achieve that, but it feels like it could be done.. except that, too, would have been completely perverted and abused by centralized behemoths, leading to a different but terrible outcome. Can you imagine if all data became non-fungible? Convince all the big identity vendors (Google, Apple, etc) to issue key pairs to users that then get used by media companies to deliver audio and video keyed only to you that's embedded with maybe some kind of temporal steganographic signature that's hard to strip and can be traced back to your key? It's not just cracking AACS once and copying the bytes. It becomes this giant mess of you literally can't access anything without going through centralized authorities anymore. Then build more anti-patterns on top of that lol. Prolly better that it was mostly just monkey JPEGs and rug pulls. Anyways, I'm so far off topic from what's actually being discussed -- just couldn't help myself from veering into left field.
• bob1029 1y ago
  I am finding the most destructive aspect of LLM assistance to be the loss of flow state. Most of the time I can go faster than these tools if I have confidence in myself and allow the momentum to build up over the course of 20-30 minutes. Every time I tab out to an LLM is like a 5 minute penalty over what I could have done unaided on a good day. Getting the model prepared to help you in a realistic domain often takes a few minutes of arranging code & comments so that it is forced toward something remotely sane. I'll scaffold out entire BS type hierarchies just so I can throw a //TODO: .... line in the middle somewhere. Without this kind of structure, I would be handling unfiltered garbage most of the time. It's not that these tools are bad, it's that we need to recognize the true cost of engaging with them. ChatGPT is like a jackhammer. It will absolutely get you through that concrete slab. However, it tends to be quite obnoxious & distracting in terms of its operational principles.
  • Mofpofjis 1y ago
    > I am finding the most destructive aspect of LLM assistance to be the loss of flow state. Finally someone else mentions Flow!
  • samcat116 1y ago
    I find the opposite, I can stay in flow state much longer than I could before because tabbing out to an LLM is a tighter loop than me going out to google and searching through sites for smaller tidbits that I have to assemble and get through, rather than a full solution that might not be 100% correct, but most of the time I can get to the working solution quicker.
• imiric 1y ago
  > People coding with LLMs today use agents. Agents get to poke around your codebase on their own. They author files directly. They run tools. I'll be damned if I give up control of my machine to a tool that hallucinates actions to take using hastily put together and likely AI-generated "agents". I still want to be the primary user of my machine, and if that means not using cutting edge tools invented in the last 6 months, so be it. I don't trust the vast majority of tools in this space anyway. > I’m sure there are still environments where hallucination matters. Still? The output being correct matters in _most_ environments, except maybe art and entertainment. It especially matters in programming, where a 99% correct program probably won't compile. > But “hallucination” is the first thing developers bring up when someone suggests using LLMs, despite it being (more or less) a solved problem. No, it's not. It's _the_ problem that's yet to be solved. And yet every AI company prefers chasing benchmarks, agents, or whatever the trend du jour is. > I work mostly in Go. [...] LLMs kick ass generating it. I also work mostly in Go. LLMs do an awful job generating it, just as with any other language. I've had the same shitty experience generating Go, as I've had generating JavaScript or HTML. I've heard this excuse that the language matters, and IME it's just not the case. Sure, if you're working with an obscure and niche language for which there is less training data, I suppose that could be the case. But you're telling me that there is no good training data for Rust, the trendiest systems language of the past ~decade? C'mon. Comparing Rust to Brainfuck is comical. I won't bother responding to all points in this article. I will say this: just as AI doomsayers and detractors deserve criticism, so does this over-the-top praising. Yes, LLMs are a great technology. But it is also part of a wildly overhyped market that will inevitably crash as we approach the trough of disillusionment. Their real value is somewhere in the middle.
• lapcat 1y ago
  > If you were trying and failing to use an LLM for code 6 months ago, you’re not doing what most serious LLM-assisted coders are doing. This sounds like the "No true Scotsman" fallacy. > People coding with LLMs today use agents. Agents get to poke around your codebase on their own. That's a nonstarter for closed source, unless everything is running on-device, which I don't think it is? > Part of being a senior developer is making less-able coders productive Speak for yourself. It's not my job.
  • haiku2077 1y ago
    You can run the agents on your own infrastructure (all the way down to a Mac Mini sitting on your desk), or Microsoft, OpenAI and I'm pretty sure Anthropic can sell you an Enterprise service that guarantees a certain level of confidentiality. I work in aerospace, one of the most paranoid industries, and even we got a Copilot subscription that met our needs...
    • lapcat 1y ago
      > You can run the agents on your own infrastructure (all the way down to a Mac Mini sitting on your desk) How does that work exactly? Do you have a link? > Microsoft, OpenAI and I'm pretty sure Anthropic can sell you an Enterprise service that guarantees a certain level of confidentiality These companies hoovered up all of our content without notice, permission, or compensation, to train their models. I wouldn't trust them one bit. My personal opinion is that it's foolish to trust them. > I work in aerospace, one of the most paranoid industries Paranoid about what exactly?
      • simonw 1y ago
        If you're not going to trust them when they say "here is a contract that guarantees we won't train on your data" because they trained on a scrape of the web, you're never going to get the benefit from these tools. I guess that's your call. I chose to believe companies when they contractually oblige themselves to not do things.
        • 1y ago
• paulsutter 1y ago
  The best I can offer skeptics is the more you work with the tools the more productive you become. Because yes the tools are imperfect. If you've had a dog you know that "dog training" classes are actually owner training. Same with AI tools. I see big gains for people who spend time to train themselves to work within the limitations. When the next generation of tools come out they can adapt quickly. If this sounds tedious, thats becuase it is tedious. I spent many long weekends wrestling with tools silently wrecking my entire codebase, etc. And that's what I had to do to get the productivity improvements I have now.
• greybox 1y ago
  > Does an intern cost $20/month? Because that’s what Cursor.ai costs. So then where do the junior developers come from? And then where do the senior developers come from?
  • Ygg2 1y ago
    As we all know by that time AI will make all senior developers immortal, rendering junior developers obsolete.
• api 1y ago
  A big problem is that you're either hearing breathless over the top insane hype (or doomerism, which is breathless over the top hype taken to a dark place) or skepticism that considers AI/LLMs to be in the same league as NFTs. Neither of these is accurate, but I guess nuanced thinking or considering anything below surface vibes is out these days. So far after playing with them I'm using them as: 1. A junior intern that can google really really fast and has memorized a large chunk of the Internet and the library, and can do rough first-pass research and dig for things. 2. Autocomplete 2.0 that can now generate things like boilerplate or fairly pedestrian unit tests. 3. Rubber duck debugging where the rubber duck talks back. 4. A helper to explain code, at least for a first pass. I can highlight a huge piece of code and ask it to summarize and then explain and walk me through it and it does a passable job. It doesn't get everything right but as long as you know that, it's a good way to break things down and get into it. For those things it's pretty good, and it's definitely a lot of fun to play with. I expect that it will get better. I don't expect it to replace programmers for anything but the most boring mindless tasks (the ones I hate doing), but I expect it to continue to become more and more useful as super-autocomplete and all the other things I listed.
• tedious-coder 1y ago
  AI makes me sad. When I started my CS degree, I didn't even know what silicon valley was. I was unaware of what the SWE job landscape was like. I went to school in a no-name town. Computer science was an immensely fun subject to learn. I moved to one of the big cities and was bewildered with how much there was to learn, and loved every second of it. I gradually became good enough to help anyone with almost anything, and spent lots of my free time digging deeper and learning. I liked CS and programming - but I did not like products built by the companies where I was good enough to be employed. These were just unfortunate annoyances that allowed me to work close enough to what I actually enjoyed, which was just code, and the computer. Before LLMs, those like me could find a place within most companies - the person you don't go to for fast features, but for weird bugs or other things that the more product-minded people weren't interested in. There was still, however, an uncomfortable tension. And now that tension is even greater. I do not use an LLM to write all my code, because I enjoy doing things myself. If I do not have that joy, then it will be immensely difficult for me to continue the career I have already invested so much time in. If I could go back in time and choose another field I would - but since that's not possible, I don't understand why it's so hard for people to have empathy for people like me. I would never have gone down this path if I knew that one day, my hard-earned-knowledge would become so much less valuable, and I'd be forced to delegate the only part of the job I enjoyed to the computer itself. So Thomas, maybe your AI skeptic friends aren't nuts, they just have different priorities. I realize that my priorities are at odds for the companies I work for. I am just tightly gripping the last days that I can get by doing this job the way that I enjoy doing it.
  • simonw 1y ago
    I recommend reframing this. LLMs don't make your hard-earned-knowledge less valuable: they make it more valuable. You are better qualified to use them to build great software than people who don't have your level of experience and software engineering domain expertise. If you don't want to do that then I guess you can find another career - but if you switch careers because you incorrectly think that LLMs make programming experience less valuable you would be making a big mistake in my opinion.
    • 1y ago
• jleyank 1y ago
  If they’re regurgitating what’s been learned, is there a risk of copyright/IP issues from whomever had the code used for training? Last time I checked, there’s a whole lotta lawyers in the us who’d like the business.
  • simonw 1y ago
    Most of the big AI vendors have liability policies in place where their lawyers are committed to step in and help you out if someone sues you for copyright infringement based on code their LLMs wrote for you. I think the term they use is "copyright shield". OpenAI has that as point 14 in https://openai.com/policies/services-agreement/ https://openai.com/policies/services-agreement/ Anthropic mention theirs here: https://www.anthropic.com/news/expanded-legal-protections-api-improvements https://www.anthropic.com/news/expanded-legal-protections-ap... Here's the Google post: https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/ai-machine-learning/protecting-customers-with-generative-ai-indemnification https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/ai-machine-learning/p...
• greybox 1y ago
  > All this is to say: I write some Rust. I like it fine. If LLMs and Rust aren’t working for you, I feel you. But if that’s your whole thing, we’re not having the same argument. Yes we are, because the kind of work you need to do in C++ or Rust is probably entirely different from the work this person manages to get the LLM to do in Go.
• terminatornet 1y ago
  > Meanwhile, software developers spot code fragments seemingly lifted from public repositories on Github and lose their shit. What about the licensing? If you’re a lawyer, I defer. But if you’re a software developer playing this card? Cut me a little slack as I ask you to shove this concern up your ass. No profession has demonstrated more contempt for intellectual property. Loved this style of writing in 2005 from Maddox on the best site in the universe or whatever. Sorry if I don't want google and openAI stealing my or anyone else's work.
• greybox 1y ago
  > As a mid-late career coder, I’ve come to appreciate mediocrity. You should be so lucky as to have it flowing almost effortlessly from a tap. If the kind of work this person is doing requires no thought, then of course an LLM will be perfect for it.
  • metaltyphoon 1y ago
    > I’ve come to appreciate mediocrity I don’t care how long I can be in my career, I just can’t do BE like this. It feels off character for me to be mediocre.
• mrcwinn 1y ago
  >It’s getting the same kind of attention that smart phones got in 2008, and not as much as the Internet got. That seems about right. Are you kidding me? Mosaic was released in 1993. In 1998 Apple released the iMac on a theory, based on some marketing research, that people might be really interested in "getting online." Five years. And that's about a decade before we realized we might want a touch phone. More than a decade before an App Store. This is very much still the top the first. AI will make even the internet seem small. Which makes sense — the entire whole internet is merely one input into this technology.
• onepremise 1y ago
  These systems do work, quite well. Especially the latest release of Claude. Palantir is using AI to process your IRS information without your consent, https://archive.is/QAY9E https://archive.is/QAY9E. This should concern everybody. Not only can this information be used to determine specific account details. They can use this to target individuals which don't align with the current administration's agenda, as well exclude hiring base of political alignment. They could also use this data to exclude and discriminate those against Peter Theil's network state agenda aka "Freedom Cities", but it seems everybody is complacent with that.
• Wowfunhappy 1y ago
  The most salient part of the article IMO: Under the heading: "but you have no idea what the [LLM's] code is." > Are you a vibe coding Youtuber? Can you not read code? If so: astute point. Otherwise: what the fuck is wrong with you? You’ve always been responsible for what you merge to main. You were five years go. And you are tomorrow, whether or not you use an LLM. If you build something with an LLM that people will depend on, read the code. > People complain about LLM-generated code being “probabilistic”. No it isn’t. It’s code. [...] The LLM might be stochastic. But the LLM doesn’t matter. What matters is whether you can make sense of the result > Reading other people’s code is part of the job. If you can’t metabolize the boring, repetitive code an LLM generates [...] how are you handling the chaos human developers turn out on a deadline?
• krainboltgreene 1y ago
  lmao of course he wrote this.
• Mofpofjis 1y ago
  > A heartfelt provocation okay then (profanity begets profanity) > Reading other people’s code is part of the job. If you can’t metabolize the boring, repetitive code an LLM generates: skills issue! Do you /intend/ to spend /most/ of your work life reading AI puke? If so: sanity issue! You are advocating for replacing creative action that gives you Flow with reaction that gives you hemorrhoids, as the /bulk of the work/. Fuck right off. > How are you handling the chaos human developers turn out on a deadline? By correcting the deadline setting methodology for the next round of development. > Does an intern cost $20/month? Because that’s what Cursor.ai costs then rely on Cursor.ai to raise your next-gen seniors who are going to be supposed to review AI puke in the future > but the craft [...] Do it on your own time Go choke on a bag of dicks. You are the problem. This is why quality no longer exists in the world, only lowest common denominator consumerist shit. This is why cars, home appliances, and tools have been getting both worse and more user-hostile. Because nobody values the quality of their own creative output anymore. Quality should not be an exception (which makes it very expensive), but the standard. Quality should be a near-commodity, and therefore at least occasionally affordable for anyone. > I buy a fucking table A ridiculously low quality, but hey, cheap!, table, that will fail you at the most inopportune moment. IKEA does have its place, but it's probably not in your office where you receive clients. Do you want them to see the table top fly off? > They almost certainly have a bigger bag of algorithmic tricks than you do: radix tries, topological sorts, graph reductions, and LDPC codes and you'll have to review that bag of algorithmic tricks embedded in AI puke, with potential hallucinations introducing obscure, critical mathematical bugs. Good luck verifying all that as a senior, based on proofs and first principles. A human coder will either use a well-reviewed library, or cite a textbook, and implement the textbook very closely, so you can follow it, and have some trust in the intent at least. > No profession has demonstrated more contempt for intellectual property how disingenuous. you are showing contempt for copyright. You are totally missing the point of copyleft. Copyleft doesn't advocate for anarchy, it advocates for user freedom via the software copyright framework. When AI barfs GPL'd code snippets into a proprietary code base, that harms user freedom. > and watched it in seconds spot LVM metadata corruption issues you are drifting; this is not code generation. Fuzzy pattern matching has always been fair game.
• hollowturtle 1y ago
  > but the code is shitty, like that of a junior developer > Does an intern cost $20/month? > Because that’s what Cursor.ai costs. So sick of hearing comparisons between LLMs and Juniors, first of all are we really are seniors? After almost 20 years sometimes I still think I know nothing. Second, when I was a Junior just me being younger, fresher and with an eager learner attidute brought a net positive impact on the team I joined back then, that I still hang out with those people to this day and we still have fun joining new projects together. I'm so sick of these snobbish "seniors" that keep throwing rocks at younger and well prepared people
• nomilk 1y ago
  > "but you have no idea what the code is" > Are you a vibe coding Youtuber? Can you not read code? If so: astute point. Otherwise: what the fuck is wrong with you? You’ve always been responsible for what you merge to main. You were five years go. And you are tomorrow, whether or not you use an LLM. This identifies a critical lever: it doesn't matter that AI sometimes makes mistakes, hallucinates, makes poor architecture decisions. All that matters is your PR to master, because that's what you always have been and will continue to be judged on. Merging trash? That's on you! Failing to utilise new tools and taking 10x longer to make the feature? Also on you!
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• satisfice 1y ago
  You know what, I can use the word “fuck” too, just like this pro coder does: I’m fucking tired of these fucking nuts who act as if there is no problem at all having AI mess with my code. It harms my relationship with my code! It reduces my agency. It threatens my accountability. He implies that if I am talking about some other flavor of AI than he personally uses than I am just not serious— but that’s what they said six months ago and two years ago. These fucking boosters have already blown their credibility. If you want to prove that AI agents writing code for you is safe then perform a large scale test and show your results. We’re not crazy for doubting you. You are crazy for not doubting yourself.
  • seesharper 1y ago
    [dead]
• XiphiasX 1y ago
  All good. They will suffer, and you will laugh.
• aykutcan 1y ago
  > Do you like fine Japanese woodworking? All hand tools and sashimono joinery? Me too. Do it on your own time. Ughh. That "own time." Spoken like a true middle manager who thinks passion is a liability.
  • gyomu 1y ago
    The author also wrote “Steve Jobs was wrong: we do not need to carve the unseen feet in the sculpture. Nobody cares if the logic board traces are pleasingly routed.” This tells you all you need to know about the kind of work the author values. Next time you wonder why so much software is buggy, slow, half considered slop, you’ll know exactly who it was made by.
    • dbalatero 1y ago
      As I recall, fly.io was going down an awful lot last time I peeked in.
• wat10000 1y ago
  I wonder if it comes down to there being many kinds of programming and this stuff is good for some but not all. The author describes a world where most code is boring grunt work and most collaborators are mediocre. This world is not familiar to me. I can see LLMs being useful in such a world, but it’s not where I work. The comment about buying a table instead of building it really stuck with me. We’re the ones who design the table! Saying we should buy one from the store is like saying farmers should buy their food from the store instead of putting in all that work to grow it.
• threePointFive 1y ago
  Can someone comment on the cost of running agentic models? Not for a company but for an individual. I tried "vibe coding" a personal project I was struggling with and left even more frustrated because I kept running into token rate limits with Claude (used inside of Zed if it matters). Did I pick the wrong model, the wrong editor, or do I just need to not be so tight with my money?
  • tymscar 1y ago
    It’s not you. The emperor does not have any clothes
    • threePointFive 1y ago
      While i think i know what you're getting at, for the sake of discussion, could you elaborate?
    • Dylan16807 1y ago
      Someone running out of tokens is not relevant to the article or its argument.
  • mholm 1y ago
    Try Cursor.ai or Windsail. They have free trials for the good models, and are pretty cheap to use if you decide you like them.
  • haiku2077 1y ago
    I tried Zed's agent support with Copilot. I was able to get it to implement a working feature with tests, but the code quality was poor and it took longer to do it than if I had written it myself. I am wondering if maybe the average programmer is way slower and worse than I thought.
  • gr2020 1y ago
    I haven't used zed specifically, but were you using your own API key for Claude? If so, you were probably running into the Anthropic API rate limits [1]. You can either a) deposit more funds to move your way up the tier list, or instead access Claude via something like OpenRouter, which will give you much higher limits. [1] https://docs.anthropic.com/en/api/rate-limits https://docs.anthropic.com/en/api/rate-limits
• 1a527dd5 1y ago
  I'm a recent convert. I _was_ a sceptic until I wasn't (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44059847 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44059847).
  • deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
• beej71 1y ago
  > I like moving the code around and chuckling to myself while I delete all the stupid comments. I have to read the code line-by-line anyways. I'm glad I got out when I did. :) This simply isn't something I want to do for a living. I'm glad there are people who do, though.
  • alex_suzuki 1y ago
    Judging from your username, you are 10 years older than I am. What are you doing now? Early retirement? Or career change?
    • beej71 1y ago
      Went from 20 years of dev to teaching CS at a university--for as long as that lasts. Call it "semi-retirement". :) After that, who knows. Maybe the whole system collapses and I just go to work as a tutor for some rich peoples' kids in exchange for loaves of bread.
• palata 1y ago
  Without AI, software is getting worse every year. My question is: will AI resolves that problem, or will it make it worse? My feeling is that AI will keep the software industry in the same trend: produce more software of lower quality while being more profitable. People sometimes say "perfect is the enemy of good". But this implies that putting less effort is "good enough". I believe it goes the other way: why would a company put efforts into selling you something good, if it can make you pay the same for something worse? It's all about maximising profit, and AI is no exception there.
• cesarb 1y ago
  This article does not touch on the thing which worries me the most with respect to LLMs: the dependence. Unless you can run the LLM locally, on a computer you own, you are now completely dependent on a remote centralized system to do your work. Whoever controls that system can arbitrarily raise the prices, subtly manipulate the outputs, store and do anything they want with the inputs, or even suddenly cease to operate. And since, according to this article, only the latest and greatest LLM is acceptable (and I've seen that exact same argument six months ago), running locally is not viable (I've seen, in a recent discussion, someone mention a home server with something like 384G of RAM just to run one LLM locally). To those of us who like Free Software because of the freedom it gives us, this is a severe regression.
  • ImaCake 1y ago
    >the dependence. Sure, but that is not the point of the article. LLMs are useful. The fact that you are dependent on someone else is a different problem like being dependent on microsoft for your office suite.
  • aaron_m04 1y ago
    Yes, and it's even worse: if you think LLMs may possibly make the world a worse place, you should not use any LLMs you aren't self-hosting, because your usage information is being used by the creators to make LLMs better.
    • inadequatespace 1y ago
      I think that’s a bit of a leap; if you think LLMs make the world a worse place, there are many actions that you might take or not take to try to address that.
      • aaron_m04 1y ago
        It's true that there could be other more impactful actions. I'd love to hear your thoughts on what else can be done.
• stego-tech 1y ago
  Finally, a proper good take from someone (seemingly) approaching it rationally and objectively, rather than blindly sitting on either side of the hype fence. LLMs are good tools, and even I, a decidedly-not-software-engineer, have been increasingly tinkering with locally-run tools to create applications and tooling that meets my own needs. The one thing that’s held me back from publishing has been the IPR angle, but I quite like this line on that topic: > But if you’re a software developer playing this card? Cut me a little slack as I ask you to shove this concern up your ass. No profession has demonstrated more contempt for intellectual property. The OP isn’t wrong. Some of the most brilliant minds in computer science have built tools to shatter DRM, enable widespread piracy, and repeatedly lift code wholesale from public repos if it helps them move a product forward. The modern crop of technologists (myself included) have long had a hypocritical view on IPR: “rights for me, not for thee” to oversimplify things. The entirety of the modern public cloud is built by trodding on the backs of open source projects while wearing lawn-aerating spikes. We steal shit from others so our Founders and Masters can reap billions in profit; to decry plagiarism now feels incredibly dishonest and insincere, at the very least. Look, I’m an AI skeptic myself. On the whole, these tools are bad. They’re taking jobs, polluting the planet, and dumbing down a society that still can’t try rebooting something when it fails, let alone identify where their WiFi ends and the internet begins. They’re toxic walled gardens that can reauthor reality to the whims of the VCs and Billionaires funding them, locking you into subscriptions forever. But even I will admit that modern LLMs, when it comes to writing code, are actually really good for the majority of C-tier devs and below. Are they as helpful to bleeding-edge engineers on the cusp of the future? Nah, not really, but if you’re just writing a checklist app for iOS to help you stay on task, or a Packer manifest to lay out some VM templates, they’re kinda awesome.
• noobermin 1y ago
  Tbf the dismissal of the IP argument is a bit disappointing. Just because you don't respect IP doesn't mean we all do. Some of the code I'm proudest of I'm considering never open sourcing now because I simply don't trust online repositories anymore. Granted I'm in a bit of a different field than most developers but still, open source as a concept seems less attractive in the wake of tools that scrape it and copy it automatically without attribution. Count me out from ever sharing my code ever again. I used to believe in the stereotypical copyleft anti IP ethos. In the modern day of corporate LLMs and disrespectful scraping, the lay of the ground is different and people understandably should be less inclined to open source their code.
  • Anamon 1y ago
    This is also one of my predictions. LLM scrapers have made me add the "no derivatives" descriptor to the default CC license I publish all of my writing and side-projects under (for now, CC considers ND a valid legal defense against LLM scraping). I still do stuff in the hopes of it benefitting anyone - but not parasitic oligarchs who are responsible for the imminent destruction of the world and society. I don't know if a reasonable number of spare-time creators, authors, artists etc. feel similar about these things, but if they do, I'd expect a lot more content under non-free licenses in the future, that might've been published openly otherwise.
• snickerbockers 1y ago
  >People complain about LLM-generated code being “probabilistic”. No it isn’t. It’s code. It’s not Yacc output. It’s knowable okay wtf is this weird jab at yacc supposed to be? I generally prefer to write my own LR parsers because it's really not that difficult but I never felt like yacc code was difficult to read or not "probabilistic". AFAIK most serious compilers don't use yacc either because they need to be able to parse context-dependent grammars, and also reinventing wheels is often worth the effort when the wheel is 50 years old and forces you to make compromises because it also has to support use-cases you are not interested in. But again, it's not bad, it does the thing it is designed to do and it does save a lot of effort if you're fine dealing with its limitations. Only serious complaint I have about Yacc is that the basic posix form has frustrating limitations such as not being able to have two separate yacc instances because they'll declare the same symbols, and I'm fairly certain it's not thread-safe either. Bison fixes some of these while still remaining "probabilistic". Anyways I'd rather use Yacc+Lex (preferably Bison+flex) to generate my parser than have to go read everything your "agent" wrote with a fine-toothed comb to make sure it didn't introduce any crippling memory corruptions or dangerous ROPportunities.
• bigbuppo 1y ago
  Ah yes, because it was garbage six months ago, all that was thrown away and now they latched on to the "agentic" thing. At best this is pre-alpha-quality software not fit for production use. After all, it has been less than six months. Next it's going to be the post-agentic world, and then all the companies are going to go bankrupt once the bills are actually due. Any company that pivoted to video, err, AI is also going to go bankrupt, while everyone they laid off is going to build the next big thing and they'll live the heads of the AI charlatans on pikes outside of town to warn off any AI stragglers.
• 3abiton 1y ago
  > For art, music, and writing? I got nothing. I’m inclined to believe the skeptics in those fields. I just don’t believe them about mine. I am curious about this part though
• slowhadoken 1y ago
  There is no AI yet, it’s just automation and that’s why people hate it. It also allows corporations to consume open source code for profit.
• skeptrune 1y ago
  > I think this is going to get clearer over the next year. The cool kid haughtiness about “stochastic parrots” and “vibe coding” can’t survive much more contact with reality. I’m snarking about these people, but I meant what I said: they’re smarter than me. And when they get over this affectation, they’re going to make coding agents profoundly more effective than they are today. Yes, yes, and yes. SOOOO much yes. We are going to be in for a wild ride once everyone gets on board with the reality of coding agents.
• thombles 1y ago
  Hmm a bit of a tone shift from: https://fly.io/docs/about/open-source/ https://fly.io/docs/about/open-source/ > Fly.io builds on the work of a tremendous open source infrastructure community. We want open source authors to benefit from their work because we think a healthy, thriving open source ecosystem will help us build better products. To the fine article: > Meanwhile, software developers spot code fragments seemingly lifted from public repositories on Github and lose their shit. What about the licensing? If you’re a lawyer, I defer. But if you’re a software developer playing this card? Cut me a little slack as I ask you to shove this concern up your ass.
  • sho_hn 1y ago
    Imho, the fly.io people are largely performative HN attention seekers that practice writing posts to produce engagement. It's almost charming in the way it resembles the early-on blogosphere, and you should read them as token summaries of "this is a popular sentiment right now, framed to appear a bit wise and edgy". They're often wordy versions of "that one trick they don't want you to know" or "am I really the only one that [actually quite popular thing]". In the sense that the posts distill whatever HN at the time would accept as thought leadership it's a good pulse check on the community.
  • inahga 1y ago
    It's rather shocking for a company to admit to flaunting software licensing in public communications. But this is not new https://fly.io/blog/wrong-about-gpu/ https://fly.io/blog/wrong-about-gpu/ > At one point, we hex-edited the [NVIDIA] closed-source drivers to trick them into thinking our hypervisor was QEMU.
• bgwalter 1y ago
  I'd be interested in the open source repositories that the author of this article created a) before "AI" and b) after "AI". I mean significant work mostly done by him.
• agentultra 1y ago
  I just don’t like using AI tools. It’s absolutely boring. If you like that, fine. Me? I like programming.
• lucasyvas 1y ago
  I’m AI neutral but the writing style here is pretty dismissive, and - to match the tone of the article - annoying as fuck. Most completely reasonable objections to LLMs were totally dismissed.
  • 12_throw_away 1y ago
    Right? It's gripping reading about the author's insecurities, but fails to say anything useful about AI.
  • lomase 1y ago
    All this smart people is dumber than me.
  • metalrain 1y ago
    Seems like very common AI hype post style. "If you aren't using this AI feature you are left behind." I usually block people for posting like that.
  • Anamon 1y ago
    Yeah, this was one of the weakest pieces of writing on GenAI that I've ever read, and I've read a lot of it. We should flat-out dismiss the issue of licenses and copyright violations because... all developers pirate TV shows? Seriously... what a load of crap.
• ImaCake 1y ago
  >My AI skeptic friends are all nuts This is dead right; my AI skeptic friend are ideologically opposed to LLMs and GenAI. Their arguments have nothing to do with how good or bad LLMs are: - IP issues (for code in a jupyter notebook which will never face IP scrutiny) - because it exploits slaves and poor people (but so does the computer they use and the clothes they wear). I also have a few programmer friends who make more legitimate complaints about code quality but because they are friends there is also an obvious subtext of ideological opposition. My opinion is you should use LLMs anyway; you can hate "capitalism" and still take advantage of the system.
• patcon 1y ago
  I so strongly agree with this. I've never been a completionist. I'm distracted. I like novelty. I make half-form experiments, but mostly provide deeply immersive conversations for the benefit of a small group of people around me, some of whom go on to make/do things that I proudly feel my influence on. The final 10% of work often defeated me. Now, I just make it happen. The pain is gone. Something else can carry the last 10%, and my ideas get realized by me (and AI). I can't even conceive how this will change the world en masse. Knowledge domains (not just tech, but science, art, etc) have been built of the things that the type-A completionists knew how to see. The others didn't finish, and what they saw of the world has largely been marginalized. The mind of ADHD and creative types is about to get much more represented in the output products of civilisation. This is going to be a big recalibration, and I think a re-balancing toward something more healthy tbh
• OhMeadhbh 1y ago
  people do not believe AI is fad because of NFT mania. we believe LLMs are a fad because they're over-hyped and they under-deliver. just my $0.02. note that i didn't say "AI is Bullshit." but I will say some of the AI hype is bullshit. and one thing i've noticed is there are so many caveats for making accurate statements about LLMs, it's hard to make short statements that aren't wrong (unless you have all those exceptions and caveats.) come at me.
• bigmadshoe 1y ago
  I agree with the main take in this article: the combination of agents + LLMs with large context windows + a large budget of tokens to iterate on problems can probably already yield some impressive results. I take serious issue with the "but you have no idea what the code is" rebuttal, since it - to me - skims over the single largest issue with applying LLMs anywhere where important decisions will be made based on their outputs. To quote from the article: People complain about LLM-generated code being “probabilistic”. No it isn’t. It’s code. It’s not Yacc output. It’s knowable. The LLM might be stochastic. But the LLM doesn’t matter. What matters is whether you can make sense of the result, and whether your guardrails hold. Reading other people’s code is part of the job. If you can’t metabolize the boring, repetitive code an LLM generates: skills issue! How are you handling the chaos human developers turn out on a deadline? The problem here is that LLMs are optimized to make their outputs convincing. The issue is exactly "whether you can make sense of the result", as the author said, or, in other words: whether you're immune to being conned by a model output that sounds correct but is not. Sure, "reading other people’s code is part of the job", but the failure modes of junior engineers are easily detectable. The failure modes of LLMs are not. EDIT: formatting
  • proc0 1y ago
    It's also funny how it requires a lot of iterations for the average task.. and the user has to pay for the failures. No other product has this expectation, imagine a toaster that only toasts bread 20% of the time, and 50% it's half toasted.
    • deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
  • NitpickLawyer 1y ago
    > The problem here is that LLMs are optimized to make their outputs convincing. That may be true for chat aligned LLMs, but coding LLMs are trained w/ RL and rewards for correctness, nowadays. And there are efforts to apply this to the entire stack (i.e. better software glue, automatic guardrails, more extensive tool-use, access to LSP/debuggers/linters, etc). I think this is the critical point in a lot of these debates that seem to be very popular right now. A lot of people try something and get the wrong impressions about what SotA is. It turns out that often that something is not the best way to do it (i.e. chatting in a web interface for coding), but people don't go the extra mile to actually try what would be best for them (i.e. coding IDEs, terminal agents, etc).
• lolinder 1y ago
  > Meanwhile, software developers spot code fragments seemingly lifted from public repositories on Github and lose their shit. What about the licensing? If you’re a lawyer, I defer. But if you’re a software developer playing this card? Cut me a little slack as I ask you to shove this concern up your ass. No profession has demonstrated more contempt for intellectual property. This kind of guilt-by-association play might be the most common fallacy in internet discourse. None of us are allowed to express outrage at the bulk export of GitHub repos with zero regard for their copyleft status because some members of the software engineering community are large-scale pirates? How is that a reasonable argument to make? The most obvious problem with this is it's a faulty generalization. Many of us aren't building large-scale piracy sites of any sort. Many of us aren't bulk downloading media of any kind. The author has no clue whether the individual humans making the IP argument against AI are engaged in piracy, so this is an extremely weak way to reject that line of argument. The second huge problem with this argument is that it assumes that support for IP rights is a blanket yes/no question, which it's obviously not. I can believe fervently that SciHub is a public good and Elsevier is evil and at the same time believe that copyleft licenses placed by a collective of developers on their work should be respected and GitHub was evil to steal their code. Indeed, these two ideas will probably occur together more often than not because they're both founded in the idea that IP law should be used to protect individuals from corporations rather than the other way around. The author has some valid points, but dismissing this entire class of arguments so flippantly is intellectually lazy.
  • sfRattan 1y ago
    > The author has some valid points, but dismissing this entire class of arguments so flippantly is intellectually lazy. Agree 100%. And generally programmers have a poor understanding of the law, especially common law as it applies in America (the country whose legal system most software licenses have been written to integrate with, especially copyleft principles). American Common Law is an institution and continuity of practice dating back centuries. Everything written by jurists within that tradition, while highly technical, is nonetheless targeted at human readers who are expected to apply common sense and good faith in reading. Where programmers declare something in law insufficiently specified or technically a loophole, the answer is largely: this was written for humans to interpret using human reason, not for computers to compile using limited, literal algorithms. Codes of law are not computer code and do not behave like computer code. And following the latest AI boom, here is what the bust will look like: 1. Corporations and the state use AI models and tools in a collective attempt to obfuscate, diffuse, and avoid accountability. This responsibility two-step is happening now. 2. When bad things happen (e.g. a self-driving car kills someone, predictive algorithms result in discriminatory policy, vibe coding results in data leaks and/or cyberattacks), there will be litigation that follows the bad things. 3. The judges overseeing the litigation will not accept that AI has somehow magically diffused and obfuscated all liability out of existence. They will look at the parties at hand, look at relevant precedents, pick out accountable humans, and fine them or---if the bad is bad enough---throw them in cages. 4. Other companies will then look at the fines and the caged humans, and will roll back their AI tools in a panic while they re-discover the humans they need to make accountable, and in so doing fill those humans back in on all the details they pawned off on AI tools. The AI tools will survive, but in a role that is circumscribed by human accountability. This is how common law has worked for centuries. Most of the strange technicalities of our legal system are in fact immune reactions to attempts made by humans across the centuries to avoid accountability or exploit the system. The law may not be fast, but it will grow an immune response to AI tools and life will go on.
• a_bonobo 1y ago
  I find the Konwinski Prize to be very interesting in this context. 1 million dollars to whoever's open source LLM solves >90% of a set of novel Github issues. https://www.kaggle.com/competitions/konwinski-prize/ https://www.kaggle.com/competitions/konwinski-prize/ Currently, the #1 spot sits at a score of 0.09, not 0.9. A far cry from being useful. I know that open source models are not as good as closed source, but still, we're a long way from LLMs being good for code on their own. And that supports OP's point - these tools aren't AGI, they produce trash that needs evaluation, but they're still useful.
  • deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  • jachee 1y ago
    They’re tab-completion with extra cognitive-load steps.
    • a_bonobo 1y ago
      I mean, if you can solve 9% of Github issues automatically that's a fairly huge load of work you can automate. Then again you'd have to manually identify which 9% of issues.
      • blibble 1y ago
        "update dependencies" that would probably cover it, and you don't need "AI" to do that
        • dboreham 1y ago
          You do if it's a JS project because every patch release of every dependency makes breaking API changes.
  • virgildotcodes 1y ago
    Am I misunderstanding or are the models also limited to those that can be run with less than 96 gigs of VRAM? The models that are both open source and quantized so that they can fit within that much memory are going to be significantly less capable than full scale frontier closed source models, I wonder how the latter would perform.
• skywhopper 1y ago
  This is one of the most obnoxious things I’ve ever read. “I’m right and every vague straw man I can think of is stupid and naive.” Great. Why did you write this?
• starkparker 1y ago
  I'm more interested than skeptical, but I'd take 500 simonw posts over another one of these "shove this concern up your ass" ones.
• moron4hire 1y ago
  I think I figured out a big problem I have with AI, and that is that I just hate using other people's software. The vast majority of software is just garbage. It all tries to take way too much of my attention. It doesn't help that all these AI tools are new, so they are inextricably linked to some SV startup that wants to be the next unicorn, so they have some bullshit account-generation/data-retention/terms-of-service/acceptable-use-policy/remarketing-email-campaing song and dance that is all stuff I have to pay attention to. All I really want to do is sit down and think on my own. I'm constantly inundated with distractions at work, so when I get a few minutes to myself, I sure as hell don't want an AI bot messaging me about reviewing its PR. I don't even want to review the human-written PRs; just push your code already, if it breaks you get to fix it. I certainly don't want a 500th unread email in my inbox. You know what doesn't constantly nag for my attention? Dead text files on disk. They just sit there, waiting for me to grace them with my presence. That's the way it should be. Computers serve me, not the other way around.
• orsorna 1y ago
  If you are resource constrained this article will make you sad. I do not have unlimited funds to plug in some token and burn a bunch of money when writing code. I am gpu poor. I'm lucky that 8gb vram can run the smallest models. But the output is so poor that I lose out to anyone using a hosted service. If anything this article shows that building great programs is less democratized than it once was.
  • philomath_mn 1y ago
    ChatGPT is $20 / month?
    • simonw 1y ago
      And Gemini is free. https://aistudio.google.com/ https://aistudio.google.com/ gets you free access to their best models. OpenAI and Anthropic both have free plans as well.
      • orsorna 1y ago
        Neither of you read the content of the OP methinks. Many of the AI skeptics framed in the blog do not leverage agentic frameworks. In fact, they are explicitly turned off by how the chat interface cannot tackle large codebases as you can't just throw vector embeddings into the chat window. Thus, they write off AI completely. In order to do this you need to set up your IDE and connect it to an API, either local or one of the paid services. I am not aware of any paid service that has an unlimited token plan through the API.
        • simonw 1y ago
          GitHub Copilot has a free tier these days. It's not 100% free no matter how much you use it but it's generous enough that you can get a feel for if it's worth paying for.
        • Dylan16807 1y ago
          It doesn't matter if they offer unlimited tokens or not. You're not using unlimited tokens. What matters is how many tokens you need to get good results, and whether you can get that many tokens at a good price.
• aussieguy1234 1y ago
  I have a trick to improve code quality from LLMs. I only use the ones where I have control of the system prompt. I use a prompt that convinces the LLM they are a Staff Engineer at Google and care deeply about best practices and writing clean, quality code. While not perfect, it does improve the code quality.
• mlsu 1y ago
  I tried the agent thing on: - Large C codebase (new feature and bugfix) - Small rust codebase (new feature) - Brand new greenfield frontend for an in-spec and documented openAPI API - Small fixes to an existing frontend It failed _dramatically_ in all cases. Maybe I'm using this thing wrong but it is devin-level fail. Gets diffs wrong. Passes phantom arguments to tools. Screws up basic features. Pulls in hundreds of line changes on unrelated files to refactor. Refactors again and again, over itself, partially, so that the uncompleted boneyard of an old refactor sits in the codebase like a skeleton (those tokens are also sent up to the model). It genuinely makes an insane, horrible, spaghetti MESS of the codebase. Any codebase. I expected it to be good at svelte and solidJS since those are popular javascript frameworks with lots of training data. Nope, it's bad. This was a few days ago, Claude 4. Seriously, seriously people what am I missing here with this agents thing. They are such gluttonous eaters of tokens that I'm beginning to think these agent posts are paid advertising.
  • turtlebits 1y ago
    Have it make small changes. Restrict it to a single file and scope it to <50 lines or so. Enough that you can easily digest without making it a chore.
    • declan_roberts 1y ago
      A small change scoped to <50 lines is something easy to write for a normal software engineer. When do the LLMs start doing the hard part?
      • kasey_junk 1y ago
        When you wire them up to your cicd process with pull requests and the github gui as your interface, rather than sitting there passively riding along as it prompts you the changes it’s going to make. With my async agent I do not care about how easy it is for me, it’s easier to tell the agent to do the workflow and comeback to it later when I’m ready to review it. If it’s a good change I approve the pr, if not I close it.
      • 1y ago
• rednafi 1y ago
  A lot of people who are wary of LLMs aren’t against the technology itself, but rather the narrative surrounding it. You can take advantage of the tool while turning a blind eye to the discourse. This 16-minute, expletive-filled, edgy-old-man-trying-too-hard-to-be-cool article could easily be dismissed as yet another AI creed that somehow found its way to the top of the HN front page.
• raspasov 1y ago
  “I work mostly in Go.” That should have been the start of the essay. New title: LLMs make Go programming feel good
• keeda 1y ago
  A lot of the doubters are basically saying: "If it's so great, show me proof." While that is usually the right stance, I think it is short-sighted in times of revolutionary change. To be sure, you definitely should not blindly trust the people who have a stake in selling AI products. However, you probably should trust the people who have no stake in selling AI, but are using it to accelerate themselves. The problem is, these people are probably too busy building things to spare any time convincing you. And in fact, it is a competitive advantage for them if others don't figure it out. Here's my take: Everyone needs to figure out how AI works for them. The thing with AI is that it is a technology that behaves like people. It has the speed, efficiency and scale of computers but the fallibility and quirks of humans. This is why it's so confusing to discuss, and why folks have such varying experiences. The right approach to working with AI is like working with people: understand what they're good at and where they are weak, and then work with them to achieve your goals. This will require using it "in anger" on many non-trivial tasks over a significant period of time, which will take persistence and patience. Yes, the hype is so over-the-top that you might not want to invest your valuable time on it. But you owe it to yourself to ensure you can fully capitalize on the sea change that is happening. If it helps, I (like the OP) have no stake in selling AI and I posted this comment about my experiences on the other thread about the AI coding -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44163543 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44163543 -- The upshot is, AI has enabled me to produce innovative (probably cutting edge) work in domains I had little prior background in. And I've not even used agents yet!
  • Nevermark 1y ago
    > Everyone needs to figure out how AI works for them. That is the real takeaway. I use LLM’s for dozens of things. It took time to find how model strengths best connect with mine. People who only evaluate models for one purpose over short timespans are going to have a hard time. It’s like models come from a different cognitive & communication culture. Eliminating that barrier takes more experimentation and experience than logic. I think their creativity is also often a function of the prompters creativity. The harder you (creatively) push them into a creative corner, the more genuinely creative they get. Not unlike how a good teacher can get unexpected positive results from students when they are channeled and pushed.
• _moof 1y ago
  *sighs in aerospace* Let me know when I can use one of these without violating ITAR/EAR.
  • haiku2077 1y ago
    You can, if you run the models locally yourself on your own hardware, e.g. Ollama on a Mac Mini.
• SpicyLemonZest 1y ago
  > Professional software developers are in the business of solving practical problems for people with code. We are not, in our day jobs, artisans. Steve Jobs was wrong: we do not need to carve the unseen feet in the sculpture. Nobody cares if the logic board traces are pleasingly routed. If anything we build endures, it won’t be because the codebase was beautiful. I think this is my key point of disagreement. Professional software developers often don't see themselves as artisans, because Steve Jobs's unseen feet are implemented through our implicit standards of ourselves. I don't go out of my way to be a perfectionist on the job, but neither will I try to push 1000 lines of spaghetti to solve a minor problem that seems like it ought to be a simple fix. I've worked with people in the past who don't have this instinct, and it's my experience that their productivity is quite low if not negative, even though they often perceive themselves to be 10x developers who can handle all kinds of edge cases super fast. I suspect that most AI-generated code today ends up in this niche.
• paradox242 1y ago
  I like Thomas, but I find his arguments include the same fundamental mistake I see made elsewhere. He acknowledged that the tools need an expert to use properly, and as he illustrated, he refined his expertise over many years. He is of the first and last generation of experienced programmers who learned without LLM assistance. How is someone just coming out of school going to get the encouragement and space to independently develop the experience they need to break out of the "vibe coding" phase? I can almost anticipate an interjection along the lines of "well we used to build everything with our hands and now we have tools etc, it's just different" but this is an order of magnitude different. This is asking a robot to design and assemble a shed for you, and you never even see the saw, nails, and hammer being used, let alone understand enough about how the different materials interact to get much more than a "vibe" for how much weight the roof might support.
  • d_watt 1y ago
    What do you think the "mistake" is here? It seems like you're pointing out a consequence, not a counter argument.
    • efitz 1y ago
      Exactly. What I’ve been saying to my friends for the last couple of months has been, that we’re not going to see coding jobs go away, but we’re going to run into a situation where it’s harder to grow junior engineers into senior engineers because the LLMs will be doing all the work of figuring out why it isn’t working. This will IMO lead to a “COBOL problem” where there are a shortage of people with truly deep understanding of how it all fits together and who can figure out the line of code to tweak to fix that ops problem that’s causing your production outage. I’m not arguing for or against LLMs, just trying to look down the road to consequences. Agentic coding is going to become a daily part of every developer’s workflow; by next year it will be table stakes - as the article said, if you’re not already doing it, you’re standing still: if you’re a 10x developer now, you’ll be a 0.8x developer next year, and if you’re a 1x developer now, without agentic coding you’ll be a 0.1x developer. It’s not hype; it’s just recognition of the dramatic increase in productivity that is happening right now.
    • 1y ago
• bayindirh 1y ago
  I'll be a happy and ignorant nut as long as these models are trained on publicly scraped code without their creators' consent, and the models fail to cite the licenses and sources of the parts the answer is composed from. Oh, GH Copilot was adding citing capabilities which was going to be in production around this time? Any progress on that front? Thanks.
• komatineni 1y ago
  Not a programmer now but my real takeaway from working with developers, enterprises at various stages of adoption: AI / LLM are not magic. The hype still exists but basically AI/LLM are tools. How we use these tools is what makes the enterprises different. unfortunately the quantity hype is '+' by big boys from MS, Goog adding to the noise. Personally, I love to see the quality and most importantly some real examples going beyond coding assistance. Be it automating the QA/QC or even some of the infra
• are_you_sure 1y ago
  I'm not a skeptic because they can't produce code or whatever. Sure they are getting better at it. I'm a skeptic because the megacorps have decide ai slop is the future and its going to push us deeper into hypercapitalist dystopia. Programming as a career is going to end up as a ai slop janny. You aren't going to be paid more if your job is easier or whatever, you're gonna get paid less (and then end up doing more atomised work) because "an ai can do it". That's the direction that everything seems to be heading.
• deleted 1y ago
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• dvt 1y ago
  Fully agree with @tptacek here: > But AI is also incredibly — a word I use advisedly — important. It’s getting the same kind of attention that smart phones got in 2008, and not as much as the Internet got. That seems about right. However, I just don't think the AI coding part is that interesting or future-thinking. We're seeing so much more progress in semantic search, tool calling, general purpose uses, robotics, I mean, DeepMind just won a Nobel for goodness' sake. Don't get me wrong, I use ChatGPT to write all kinds of annoying boilerplate, and it's not too bad at recalling weird quirks I don't remember (yes, even for Rust). But hard problems? Real problems? Zero shot. Novel problems? No way. > But I’ve been first responder on an incident and fed 4o — not o4-mini, 4o — log transcripts, and watched it in seconds spot LVM metadata corruption issues on a host we’ve been complaining about for months. I'm going to go ahead and press (X) to doubt on this anecdote. You've had an issue for months and the logs were somehow so arcane, so dense, so unparseable, no one spotted these "metadata corruption issues?" I'm not going to accuse anyone of blatant fabrication, but this is very hard to swallow. Listen, I also think we're on the precipice of re-inventing how we talk to our machines; how we automate tasks; how we find and distribute small nuggets of data. But, imo, coding just ain't it. Donald Knuth calls computer programming an art, and to rob humanity of effecting not just coding—but any art, I'd argue—would be the most cardinal of sins.
  • Aurornis 1y ago
    > I'm going to go ahead and press (X) to doubt on this anecdote. You've had an issue for months and the logs were somehow so arcane, so dense, so unparseable, no one spotted these "metadata corruption issues?" I'm not going to accuse anyone of blatant fabrication, but this is very hard to swallow. I have this problem with a lot of LLM miracle anecdotes. There’s an implication that the LLM did something that was eluding people for months, but when you read more closely they don’t actually say they were working on the problem for months. Just that they were complaining about it for months.
    • tpmoney 1y ago
      >There’s an implication that the LLM did something that was eluding people for months, but when you read more closely they don’t actually say they were working on the problem for months. Just that they were complaining about it for months. On the other hand, we've all probably had the experience of putting out a fire and wanting time to track down an issue only to be told to not bother since "everything is working now". Sometimes you spend months complaining about something because the people you're complaining to don't have the time to dive into an issue. Even if it would have taken mere hours for a human to hunt down the issue, someone still has to be given those hours to work on it. By contrast, copying a bunch of logs into an AI is nearly free.
• Glyptodon 1y ago
  I think he's pretty much right, but it just leaves me managing an AI and hopefully having fewer offshore developers and faster turnaround. So something less than a 50% boost, and kind of variable, but still significant. I don't really think it's world shattering because most software is deeply constrained by business processes (deciding what to build, etc.) that this doesn't help.
• thoughtpeddler 1y ago
  I was recently "pair-vibe-coding" with someone who's much 'smarter' than I am, certainly when it comes to coding, especially Python. He's always been in the LLM skeptic camp, and it was fascinating to see that because of his extensive Python knowledge, his prompting was actually very minimal and weak, one might even say 'lazy'. The output he got from o3 for our given task was therefore really mediocre, and had a few hallucinations (which could've been avoided if he spent a few more seconds or minutes prompting). I, knowing far less than him, would've had a much more elaborate prompt, and o3 would've proved a lot more competent/capable. Yet with my friend, since he knows so much already, and has such a high bar, he thinks the AI should be able to do a lot more with just a few basic words in a prompt... yet, for that same reason, he (understandably) doubts the inevitable sub-par output. That's what makes all these debates about "Why are smart people doubting LLMs??" so pointless. The smarter you are, the less help you need, so the less prompting you do, the less context the model has, the less impressive the output, and the more the smart person thinks LLMs suck. With this logic, of course the smartest people are also the biggest skeptics!
  • sho_hn 1y ago
    I doubt this holds true generally. The smart coders I know who are also LLM users generally develop a decent intuition for what the models are good and bad at, and how to steer them into good performance.
    • thoughtpeddler 1y ago
      Then perhaps my friend has remained a skeptic for so long that he's atrophied in this regard (which OP's post touches on). Either way, most of his day job is as a CTO/manager at a startup, so he's not in the weeds coding as much anymore in the first place. I should've seen how he prompts LLMs for managerial tasks, then I'd know whether his 'prompt laziness' was systemic or influenced by his coding knowledge.
  • deleted 1y ago
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• Aurornis 1y ago
  I tried to take this article seriously, but it seems more like HN ragebait than an actual attempt at discussion. The engagement bait appears to be working, given all of the comments. It’s like half of the arguments are designed as engagement bait with logical consistency being a distant concern: > If hallucination matters to you, your programming language has let you down. This doesn’t even make sense. LLMs hallucinate things beyond simple programming language constructs. I commonly deal with allusions to functions or library methods that would be great if they existed, but the LLM made it up on the spot. The thing is, the author clearly must know this. Anyone who uses LLMs knows this. So why put such a bizarre claim in the article other than as engagement bait to make readers angry? There are numerous other bizarre claims throughout the article, like waving away the IP rights argument because some programmers pirate TV shows? It’s all so bizarre. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised to scroll to the bottom and see that the author is a HN comment section veteran, because this entire article feels like it started as a reasonable discussion point and then got twisted into Hacker News engagement bait for the company blog. And it’s working well, judging by the engagement counts.
  • tpmoney 1y ago
    > This doesn’t even make sense. LLMs hallucinate things beyond simple programming language constructs. I commonly deal with allusions to functions or library methods that would be great if they existed, but the LLM made it up on the spot. I think the author's point is your language (and more generally the tooling around it) should make this obvious, and almost all the AI agents these days will minimally run linting tools and clean up lints (which would include methods and library imports that don't exist) if they don't actively attempt to compile and test the code they've written. So you as the end user should (almost) never be seeing these made up functions.
  • bwfan123 1y ago
    agree - it is written like clickbait or worse like a sponsored piece. > But “hallucination” is the first thing developers bring up when someone suggests using LLMs, despite it being (more or less) a solved problem. really ? what is the author smoking to consider it a solved problem ? This statement alone invalidates the entire article in its casual irreverence for the truth. I use copilot everyday, and I know where it shines. Please dont try to sell it to me with false advertising.
• esjeon 1y ago
  It's like the problem of half-full vs half-empty. We see LLM can handle certain tasks, but counter-examples are too far from being rare. So, "LLM can do A" is always followed by "LLM fails at A". The problem is that LLM never performs consistently. It works when it works. It doesn't when It doesn't. No one knows exactly why, and no one can tell when it's gonna fail. For example, even to this day, GPT sometimes gives me wrong calculations, even when it is instructed to use calculator for that. Who knows why it ignores the instruction, nor why it can't reliably perform the addition of two integers. That really screws up with the automation. Anyways, I'm really tired of skeptic-skeptics. I hate some people believe "half-full" is genuinely better than "half-empty". I refuse that idea completely. It's more about which context you're in. If you need exactly a cup of water, it's half-empty. If you are lucky to have some water, it's half-full. If you have a clear direction you want to go, you discover a lot of deficiencies. If you're there just enjoying the moment, yeah, you can just keep enjoying the new toy.
  • deleted 1y ago
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• leecarraher 1y ago
  It depends on what level of nuts you mean. Some are AGI skeptics about LLMs, theyre probably right, there is likely more breakthroughs required before true AGI. But AGI isn't required to completely disrupt a ton of good, well-paid professions. That is the more worrying scenario. AI is already widening the wealth gap irreparably and with more progress it will only continue.
• cookiengineer 1y ago
  Seeing everything these days being about vibe coding, I feel a little old with my VIM setup and my LSP servers who I already thought were a nice productivity increase. The problems I have with the stuff relating to MCP is that the tech around it is developing so fast that it's hard for outsiders to catch up with what the best working setup is, for example. What would you do, for example, if you want to selfhost this? - which models (qwen ai coder?) - which api (with ollama? Bolt? Aider? Etc) - how to integrate PRs with a local gitlab/gogs/forgejo instance? Do you need another MCP agent for git that does that? - which hardware dependencies to run it? I am currently trying to figure out how to implement a practical workflow for this. So far I'm using still a synchronous MCP agent setup where it basically runs on another machine in the network because I have a too unperformant laptop to work with. But how would I get to the point of async MCP agents that can work on multiple things in my Go codebases in parallel? With the mentioned PR workflows so that I can modify/edit/rework before the merges? The author makes a lot of claims and talks always about that their opponents in the argument are not talking about the same thing. But what exactly is the same thing, which is reproducible locally for everyone?
  • ethagnawl 1y ago
    I haven't even gotten around the integrating LSPs into my vim workflow -- I feel positively ancient.
    • cookiengineer 1y ago
      I can recommend govim, it's using LSP behind the scenes. I'd also recommend tagbar because it uses the newer ctags fork which supports much more languages. [1] https://github.com/govim/govim https://github.com/govim/govim [2] https://github.com/preservim/tagbar https://github.com/preservim/tagbar
      • ethagnawl 1y ago
        Thanks. I'll have a more thorough look tomorrow. I'm glad to see that neither seem to depend on NeoVim, which is also something I haven't bothered to take up.
• Verdex 1y ago
  Hundreds of comments. Some say LLMs are the future. Others say they don't work today and they won't work tomorrow. Videogame speed running has this problem solved. Livestream your 10x engineer LLM usage, a git commit annotated with it's prompt per change. Then everyone will see the result. This doesn't seem like an area of debate. No complicated diagrams required. Just run the experiment and show the result.
  • dbalatero 1y ago
    I'd honestly love to see this. People always say "you just need to learn to prompt better" without providing any context as to what "better" looks like. (And, presumes that my prompt isn't good enough, which maybe it is maybe it isn't.) The easy way out of that is "well every scenario is different" - great, show me a bunch of scenarios on a speed run video across many problems, so I can learn by watching.
    • theshrike79 1y ago
      It's because you get to the No True Scotsman -thing pretty fast. If I use LLMs to code, say a Telegram bot that summarise the family calendars and current weather to a channel - someone will come in saying "but LLMs are shit because they can't handle this very esoteric hardware assembler I use EVERY DAY!!1"
      • lomase 1y ago
        But... do you know anybody who will give me 50k a year to write telegram bots for them?
        • theshrike79 1y ago
          It's not like every single problem you face at work is breaking new ground and exploring unknown reaches of computer science. If so, please hire me. You will be writing CRUD operations and slapping together web apps on every level of experience. Even in (mobile) gaming there you're repeating the same structures as every game before. Not a 100% of the time, but way more than 50%.
• gerdesj 1y ago
  Try getting your fav LLM to do something useful with PowerCLI. That's the VMware PowerShell thing. It is quite popular but not enough, so that most prompts will end up with bollocks, masquerading as code. When a LLM has been tamed to the point that I can define and request a PowerCLI programme, I can be fairly sure that AI is a solved thing.
• apwell23 1y ago
  > “hallucination” is the first thing developers bring up when someone suggests using LLMs, despite it being (more or less) a solved problem. i don't get it. It keeps making stuff up or gives me wrong stuff that merely compiles when i tell it signature doesn't exist.
• eqmvii 1y ago
  Coming around to this conclusion myself after experimenting with the tools for a few weeks. Things have changed.
• system2 1y ago
  I am still using ChatGPT like a caveman and am happy with it.
• meander_water 1y ago
  I suspect a large proportion of claims made for productivity increases are skewed by the fact that the speed at which code is produced by AI makes you _feel_ productive, but these gains are largely replaced by the effort to understand, refactor, review and clean up the code. The high that you get when something "works" tends to stick more in your memory than the time when you had to spend a day cleaning up dead code, refactoring 2k line modules into a more readable project structure etc. I'm not saying that AI can't make you productive, it's just that these claims are really hard to verify. Even the recently posted Cloudflare OAuth worker codebase took ~3 months to release (8 Mar - 20 May), producing a single file with >2k lines. Is that going to be harder to maintain than a codebase with a proper project structure that's easily parseable by a human?
  • tptacek 1y ago
    This is cope. I know my own experience, and I know the backgrounds and problem domains of the friends I'm talking to that do this stuff better than I do. The productivity gains are real. They're also intuitive: if you can't look at a work week and spot huge fractions of work that you're doing that isn't fundamentally discerning or creative, but rather muscle-memory rote repetition of best practices you've honed over your career, you're not trying (or you haven't built that muscle memory yet). What's happening is skeptics can't believe that an LLM plus a couple hundred lines of Python agent code can capture and replicate most of the rote work, freeing all that time back up. Another thing I think people are missing is that serious LLM-using coders aren't expecting 100% success on prompts, or anything close to it. One of the skills you (rapidly) develop is the intuition for when to stop a runaway agent. If an intern spun off hopelessly on a task, it'd be somewhat problematic, because there are finite intern hours and they're expensive. But failed agent prompts are nickel-denominated. We had a post on the front page last week about someone doing vulnerability research with an LLM. They isolated some target code and wrote a prompt. Then they ran it one hundred times (preemptively!) and sifted the output. That approach finds new kernel vulnerabilities! Ordinary developers won't do anything like that, but they will get used to the idea of only 2/3 of prompts ending up with something they merge. Another problem I think a lot of skeptics are running into: stop sitting there staring at the chain of thought logs.
• kmeisthax 1y ago
  in re: "but the plagiarism" As someone who thinks modern copyright law is unfit for purpose, and more specifically that software shouldn't be copyrightable at all, my main complaint about LLMs is the same as Chinese spying and IP theft: I only care because they don't share. I'm perfectly fine using open-weights LLMs[0] to do things LLMs are good at. But I would never trust using OpenAI or Perplexity's SaaSS models as a replacement for my own skills. Half the reason they put things behind a server is so they can spy on you[1], the other half is so they can promise a revenue stream to the people they plan to sell the company to so they can enshittify it. The only enshittification-resistant software is software people can't charge you for. All the other things this blog post is complaining about are real reactions to real harms, even in the FOSS community. People use LLMs as skilled labor substitute and get burned, while creating a spam problem for everyone else. In fact, that's the real replacement threat for artists: diffusion models don't so much outperform human artists as much as they convince people not to pay for art. [0] I don't give two flying fucks about the license terms. [1] The judge in the NYT lawsuit is even ordering spying for evidentiary reasons
• aabajian 1y ago
  I've observed that AI excels at creative work, but not exacting sciences. For example, If I say, "Write the code to put the button in the upper right corner," I'll almost certainly get a button in the upper right. Conversely, if I say, "Put the button in the upper right corner exactly like the existing button in the upper left," I'll get a button in the upper right, but not exactly like the upper left button.
• ReflectedImage 1y ago
  Whilst generative AI is great for writing business letters and essays and all that, going straight for coding, one of, if not the hardest problem is a bit much. This is a come back in 5 years when it works sort of thing.
• ww520 1y ago
  I use LLM as a super Stackoverflow. So far it has been helpful. For code gen, 8 out of 10 cases, the code won't compile and need fixing. LLM did help a lot in learning new topics. Gemini did help tremendously recently in pointing out a new approach to a problem I was stumped on. Though the code it generated was garbage, the code did provide insight on a new approach which I adopted to make it work eventually.
• Animats 1y ago
  Here are two routine problems I have to solve at the moment. Can any of the current LLM systems do either? 1. Input is an 256x256 pixel elevation map stored as a greyscale .png file, and a minimum and maximum elevation. A pixel value of 0 corresponds to the minimum elevation, and a pixel value of 255 corresponds to the maximum elevation. Read in the .png file and the elevation limits. Then construct a 256x256 floating point array of heights. From that array, construct a triangle mesh with X and Y dimensions 0..255. Perform a mesh reduction operation on the triangle mesh to reduce the number of triangles. Mesh reduction must not generate holes in the mesh. From the reduced mesh, generate a glTF file where the UV parameters run from 0.0 to 1.0 along the X and Y axes. 2. Given four glTF files constructed as above, corresponding to four quadrants of a larger square, construct a single 511x511 mesh which combines all four input meshes to cover a larger area. Because the input meshes are 0..255, not 0..256, there will be gaps where the four quadrants meet. Fill those gaps with reasonable triangles. Perform a mesh reduction as above. From the reduced mesh, generate a glTF file where the UV parameters run from 0.0 to 1.0 along the X and Y axes. Rust code is preferred; Python code is acceptable. So, what service should I sign up for?
  • perfmode 1y ago
    try claude code, in python
  • JKCalhoun 1y ago
    Why don't you paste that into Claude, ChatGPT — report back what you find?
    • Animats 1y ago
      I tried Github Copilot, free mode, on #1. The Python code outsourced all the hard work to numpy and pymeshlab, which is fine. Copilot wrote code to generate triangles. It's a reasonable job. Copilot's knowledge of what to call is better than mine. I have to try it now, but it did OK. On #2, it set up the problem, but bailed on the gap filling part with # (This is a complex step; see note at bottom.) That's not surprising, since I didn't tell it how to solve the problem. Can any of the premium systems do #2?
• Aziell 1y ago
  I was a bit skeptical at first too, but once I let AI dive into my code, run tests, refactor functions, and even catch its own bugs, it felt like I suddenly had a really competent teammate. AI has been genuinely helpful for me , it saves time and lets me focus on the things that actually matter.
  • yahoozoo 1y ago
    > lets me focus on the things that actually matter. This reads right out of the PR release for these AI companies and their agentic coding solutions.
• yahoozoo 1y ago
  Will LLMs ever break the “you have to treat it like an intern/junior” ceiling?
• tkgally 1y ago
  Both off and on topic: I got access to Claude’s voice mode today, and for my second test I asked it for its thoughts about both the linked blog post and the HN discussion here. The full transcript is at [1]. Some parts that stood out (slightly edited): Me: So what is your assessment of the discussion at Hacker News? Claude: The Hacker News discussion strikes me as much more grounded than the blog post itself. What I find compelling is that many commenters are sharing specific technical experiences rather than making broad ideological arguments. When someone describes spending hours fighting with Claude agents that keep refactoring code into spaghetti, that's concrete data about the current state of these tools. ... Me: Well, what about you, Claude? You are made by a company whose president has recently made some public statements saying that, you know, 50% of white collar jobs will be replaced soon. And the company, Anthropic, also is very aggressively developing and selling tools to help with AI coding. What are your thoughts about that? Claude: That's a really fair question to ask me directly. I think there's an obvious tension in my position here since I'm built by a company that has clear financial incentives around AI adoption, including coding tools. When I look at my own capabilities honestly, I can see both sides of this. I'm genuinely useful for certain coding tasks like explaining unfamiliar code, generating boilerplate, or helping debug specific problems. I've helped people learn new programming languages faster than they might have otherwise. But I'm also clearly not at the level where I could replace an experienced software engineer working on complex system design or novel problem solving. ... [1] https://claude.ai/share/c934e67c-f132-43e8-8c31-ab238b5be25a https://claude.ai/share/c934e67c-f132-43e8-8c31-ab238b5be25a
  • collinvandyck76 1y ago
    Thank you for sharing. I'm looking forward to getting voice mode, but after doing some searching I saw that it still needed the user to hit the "send" button after they are done talking. Did I misread, or was your experience that it would reply to you after you finished talking without the need to press anything?
    • tkgally 1y ago
      When you’re done talking, you tap anywhere on the screen to indicate that you’re finished talking, and Claude replies a second or two later. If you are silent for several seconds, it goes ahead and replies without waiting for you to tap. When Claude is talking you can tap on the screen to interrupt; that is actually quite useful, as it can be a bit long-winded. It’s not quite as natural a back-and-forth as with ChatGPT’s or Gemini’s voice mode on mobile, but maybe that’s for the best. I tried a test later in which I gave it a research paper—Sakana AI’s latest—and asked it to explain it to me. When it used a term I didn’t understand, I just tapped on the screen and asked for an explanation. That worked quite well.
• bccdee 1y ago
  To quote an excellent article from last week: > The AI has suggested a solution, but the added code is arguably useless or wrong. There is a huge decision space to consider, but the AI tool has picked one set of decisions, without any rationale for this decision. > [...] > Programming is about lots of decisions, large and small. Architecture decisions. Data validation decisions. Button color decisions. > Some decisions are inconsequential and can be safely outsourced. There is indeed a ton of boilerplate involved in software development, and writing boilerplate-heavy code involves near zero decisions. > But other decisions do matter. (from https://lukasatkinson.de/2025/net-negative-cursor/ https://lukasatkinson.de/2025/net-negative-cursor/) Proponents of AI coding often talk about boilerplate as if that's what we spend most of our time on, but boilerplate is a cinch. You copy/paste, change a few fields, and maybe run a macro on it. Or you abstract it away entirely. As for the "agent" thing, typing git fetch, git commit, git rebase takes up even less of my time than boilerplate. Most of what we write is not highly creative, but it is load-bearing, and it's full of choices. Most of our time is spent making those choices, not typing out the words. The problem isn't hallucination, it's the plain bad code that I'm going to have to rewrite. Why not just write it right myself the first time? People say "it's like a junior developer," but do they have any idea how much time I've spent trying to coax junior developers into doing things the right way rather than just doing them myself? I don't want to waste time mentoring my tools.
  • tptacek 1y ago
    No, what's happening here is that you're using a different definition of "boilerplate" than the adopters are using. To you, "boilerplate" is literally a chunk of code you copy and paste to repeatedly solve a problem (btw: I flip my shit when people do this on codebases I work on). To them, "boilerplate" represents a common set of rote solutions to isomorphic problems. The actual lines of code might be quite different, but the approach is the same. That's not necessarily something you can copy-paste. Coming at this from a computer-science or PLT perspective, this idea of an "abstract, repeatable meta-boilerplate" is exactly the payoff we expect from language features like strong type systems. Part of the point of rigorous languages is to create these kinds of patterns. You had total expressiveness back in assembly language! Repeatable rigor is most of the point of modern languages.
• TheAlchemist 1y ago
  His arguments are mostly right I would say. I tend to use a bit of LLMs for coding - just Copilot though - and I do like how it quite often saves me time with autocomplete spanning entire lines. ChatGPT is also pretty usefull - especially for naming things. However, on a global scale, I would compare the shift towards 'vibe coding' and massive LLMs use to the one we got when people doing the coding don't even know what Assembly even is. Current state of software is that it's incredibly bloated and slow (and I do love python). Doesn't matter that much since we've got massive improvements in hardware, but still. In 5 years, instead of not really realizing that we're writing slow and bloated code, we will not really realize we're writing incorrect code. I don't know anything about web developement, but in the environements I've seen during my career - where most code is quite critical and a stupid mistake, one that an LLM could easily hallucinate, can cost a lot - I don't see it replacing humans anytime soon. It's a pretty good and usefull tool though.
• kazinator 1y ago
  > You’ve always been responsible for what you merge to main. I've never merged anything with an unclear copyright to main, let alone if I positively suspected that it had been plagiarized. > Cut me a little slack as I ask you to shove this concern up your ass. No profession has demonstrated more contempt for intellectual property. Every place I've been employed was nearly paranoid about copyright, with rules in place about never copying and pasting anything copyrighted into the company code base. All the major open source distros and projects, likewise. There are some bad apples out there, like, oh, Sam Altman, who wants massive plagiarism to be fair use. So, au contraire, you can shove your contemptuous blog up your ass, buddy.
• K0balt 1y ago
  I’d love to know your tool stack?
• sincerecook 1y ago
  [dead]
• jatins 1y ago
  Everything about that is true but, and that's a big BUT, the code I write with LLM I can only iterate on it with an LLM. My mind doesn't develop a mental model of that code, I don't know where the relevant parts are, I can't quickly navigate through it and I have to reach the LLM for every small change. Which is why I like Copilot style editing more than agents as a working model but agents are just so much more powerful and smarter thanks to everything available to them.
  • swalsh 1y ago
    You can ask the llm to write code the way you think about it. I usually write a little spec document as my first prompt, and in there i'll add some rules on how I want code structured, seperated etc. If you use cursor, cursorrules can be a good way of doing this.
    • smartties 1y ago
      This still doesn't work for me. I have to actively think about the problem, find a solution, and write the code myself. Outsourcing these efforts makes my learning ineffective. I will keep using LLMs for 1 week greenfield hobby projects that I don't plan to revisit. But no matter how good LLMs get, I will never use them in my dailyjob, otherwise, I risk losing touch with the codebase.
  • 59nadir 1y ago
    This is in line with "Programming As Theory Building"[0] (Peter Naur, 1985) that puts forward the idea that when one is building a system one builds a "theory" (in a sense a mapping of what, where and why) of that system that is essential for continued work on it. Once I internalized this idea it helped me make sense of why rewrites are not "never a good idea" and simultaneously why they are so fraught with peril, as well as what kind of onboarding actually makes sense for work on a system. It's also why I can never get on board with the passive "review code an LLM spits out" type of development; it just does not build theory as reliably, effectively and efficiently. It's a good, very digestible paper, in my opinion; well worth the read. [0] - https://gwern.net/doc/cs/algorithm/1985-naur.pdf https://gwern.net/doc/cs/algorithm/1985-naur.pdf
• quasimodo_code 1y ago
  I think for most people that do not get value out of AI assisted coding, its a skill or learning issue. I don't care how good of a developer you consider yourself to be. If in 2025, these tools do not provide you significant (to almost absurd) value, you just do not know how to use them, or are to stubborn to push past the initial learning curve. Alternatively, maybe... programming is changing so much with AI, that you just might not see what's happening right infront of your eyes because its so foreign to all the other paradigms in the past. In 2025 I am about 800-900 hours deep into using Cursor, blowing through 500 credits each 2 days (500 credits = 20$). I also organize a local "vibe code" workshop and meetup, with people from all sorts of experience levels, from no coding experience, to twice my senior. And what I am seeing is that what separates those from those who are good at using AI and those who are not, generally is a level of rigid stubbornness. I can't wait for time to do its course here and those people who now are "all nuts" to slowly see programming of the past become an old relic.
• zmmmmm 1y ago
  I think in a lot of cases the skeptics haven't really witnessed how good LLMs can be for a subset of software engineering tasks. I find for mid-complexity code they are far, far better than I am at coding. Even though I often tweak their solutions, they outweigh that by often identifying APIs and even whole libraries to call where I fully would have set about implementing it myself - either out of ignorance or an assumption that it would be too hard to implement it myself. They also put in much more error checking than I would normally do. Even if I do implement something myself, it's insane not to at least see what the LLM would do to get ideas. The thing is, once I do that, I nearly always come away with the conclusion that I might as well just use the code it made.
  • ivape 1y ago
    The primary skill a developer hones is the ability to know when something is already solved for you. This is where innate laziness is a gift. Why should I write a fetch function if api.fetch exists? This is a natural game time automatic decision, like a baseball player running for first base soon as the ball hits the bat. The natural thing that should be happening to every developer is the natural realization that the LLM is the ultimate api. I have literally sat here going “well why build anything, this damn thing does this and that for free”. For example, why build a todo app? Any of the LLMs can mostly do this. This is not self awareness, but game conditioning and fitness. You should automatically be feeling the sensation just like someone playing a sport for the millionth time. Developers thinking AI is a fad is like a left fielder thinking about if they should stick their hand out to catch the ball or not. You can’t think about this. Anyway, I find myself in stasis trying to actually see what to build given the reality of the power of this api. The South Park episode of “The Simpsons did it” is an apt episode. We are very much at the point where the continuous question will be “Well the LLM can do it”.
• stavros 1y ago
  This isn't about the post itself, but can you please put the author's name at the top? It's written in first person and we have no idea who's talking until the end of the post.
  • deleted 1y ago
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  • mwcampbell 1y ago
    To anyone else who was going to protest that the name _is_ at the top, apparently it depends on one's browser window width and zoom level. I was a bit surprised to find that increasing the zoom level even affects the order when reading with a screen reader.
• PeterHolzwarth 1y ago
  Wow, I'm surprised this post hasn't gotten hit by the HN flame-war detector: We have threads downvoted into forced-collapsed that are headed by completely innocuous comments. It really is strange how people here are not able to accept different viewpoints in a discussion: I've three times now returned to the comments to just blanket-upvote everything that's starting to turn grey.
• deleted 1y ago
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• theusus 1y ago
  Numerous words to make a very small point. Also, a lot of colloquial words used that made it difficult to comprehend the sentences.
• mudkipdev 1y ago
  Which AI agent is actually good nowadays? I've tried cursor but i didn't want a fork replacing vscode just to be able to call an LLM. And I'd preferably want pay as you go, not a subscription model
• mrbluecoat 1y ago
  https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/02/opinion/ai-coders-jobs.html https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/02/opinion/ai-coders-jobs.ht...
• stavros 1y ago
  I love LLMs, and I really like programming with Cursor, but I never managed to get the "agents with tons of stuff in their context" mode to work for me. I use Cursor like a glorified code completer, 4-5 lines at a time, because otherwise the LLM just makes too many mistakes that compound. If you let it run in the "write my code for me" mode, and ask it to fix some mistake it made, it will always add more code, never remove any. In my experience, in the end the code just ends up so brittle that the LLM will soon get stuck at a point that it never manages to overcome some mistake, no matter how many times it tries. Has anyone managed to solve this?
  • __grob 1y ago
    I would love to know as well. I also have problems with the LLM coding agents when it comes to lesser-known languages like Julia. Has anybody solved this yet?
  • mikeshi42 1y ago
    imo cursor's small context window on the $20 plan is what kills their agent mode. Try claude code or anything that lets you use larger context windows (I think cursor has a tier you can pay for now?). claude code regularly deletes and corrects code and LLMs are very much capable of that today.
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  • csomar 1y ago
    No. And I don't think they are doing anything magical. Performance drop sharply after 50k tokens. Your LLM does best when you have a short 2-5K context.
  • sv0t 1y ago
    in the last two weeks I've started using Cursor in the 'you do everything, I'm just your boss mode', to see how far I can push it. Right at this minute, I'm working on something thats become pretty big but I'm constantly on the verge of just going back to writing code like normal LOL. That said, I'm super impressed by how quickly I've been able to get this far with something pretty niche and complex in places. Here's what I've learned. There are million AI Bros on youtube who have the ultimate solution but they all boil down to a few basic things. Make rules: make them before you get started and continue updating them as you go. Lots of tiny modules: Push things into small bite sized bits of code with lots of interface documentation. This feels a bit unnatural when the code is prototype quality. Documentation is key: the youtubers will often create detailed planning and specification documents in advance. I done this and it's hit and miss, what I've found works is explain what you want to build to an llm and have it create extremely concise documentation, then a rough checklist for implementation and then evolving these documents in cursor as I go. This leads to a kind of plan --> document, implement --> document, run tests --> document workflow on each reasonable chunk of the design being the most smooth. Don't let cursor ever see inside big datasets or huge folder trees. In fact keep cursor in a few folders writing source code and nothing else. To do this, early on build tools that can go and get information or make safe edits for cursor from those datasets without it attempting direct access. The current project has a tools for working with the primary datasets, a job manager, a process manager, a log manager, a workflow manager, these all have functions for querying. Cursor is instructed to use these. It naturally doesn't want to but if you tell it 7 times out 10 it will :) No mess: Cursor will like to make lots of random tests and processes along the way. instruct it to use a /debug/tests/ folder and wipe it clean often. force it to make 'production' code by having it be registered with the workflow manager and made allowable by process manager. This lets it play around for a while and get something up and running with it's weird little scripts and then implement it for real elsewhere and using the proper framework. The workflow manager needs to have documentation on how the script is used and the process manager needs to the source to be in a particular place with a particular set of standard interfaces. you might say this is a lot of plumbing, but what isn't these days and it's not like I'm maintaining it - right ;) Cursor is always about to go insane any minute, or can't remember what's going on. So most of it is about keeping things simple enough for it to focus on the bit it's working on and nothing else. Regularly for work we have massive code bases written in our company style and built using our business processes. This kind of thing is absolutely not the place for Cursor. I can imagine a company setup from scratch to use Cursor but our current products and practices woud just make it impossibly time-consuming.
• agnishom 1y ago
  I think the key premise here is that one can effectively and efficiently audit code that the LLM is producing. I doubt that. First, human attention and speed is very limited. Second, when I see something, I am already predisposed to assume that it is right (or at the very least, my subsequent inquiries are extremely narrow and anchored around the solution I have seen presented to me.)
  • klabb3 1y ago
    Yeah. Reviewing code thoroughly is extremely time consuming. When you review code from a human, you can look for choices they made fairly quickly - say they used framework X and language feature Y. Most importantly, you assume that they’ve checked certain things to work. This way, code review can be fast but it still isn’t thorough on its own. Most of it is trust and bureaucracy (big companies do this also to prevent malicious employees from smuggling in backdoors etc). Code from LLMs that looks right, clean and even clever poses as competence but are prone to hallucinations and business logic errors. In the short term, these changes will pass through due to their appearance but contain more issues than a human would have with the same code. In the medium term, we just lose that signal - the assumptions we can make about the authors state of mind and comprehension. It’s already incredibly hard to distinguish solid points from nonsense, when the nonsense is laundered by an LLM.
  • nprateem 1y ago
    Yeah the problem is the fatigue of repeatedly reviewing code. You do a few iterations until code runs, review carefully but notice a bug. So you do another iteration and 40% of code changes. Now you need to review again but you need to understand how the changes fit in. Repeat this a few times and it becomes very tiring. Ultimately you can't trust them not to do stupid shit. Your tests fail and you tell it to stop that? Sure, we can just catch those exceptions and the tests pass, etc. You get pissed off an tell it to FIX the CODE so the tests pass and the cycle continues. It's like working with a potentially gifted moron.
  • einrealist 1y ago
    Exactly. And even if LLMs become more accurate and qualitative better, it just raises the costs for validation. Errors and bad design decisions become harder to spot.
• kortilla 1y ago
  The premise of “lol, I’m just a dumb developer and just wait until the smart developers catch on” falls extremely flat coming from Thomas. It kinda invalidates the entire premise because it builds on this false foundation of “look how useful it is to a mere plebeian” and the skills actually required to sift through LLM garbage are what puts you in the top 5% of programmers. Most senior developers cannot conduct useful code review and spot errors. In every company I’ve been at, there were only 1 in 20 people that would give the useful in-depth reviews required to pick up LLM bullshit. This style of engagement bait is brutal and it severely overshadows other nuggets of wisdom of how LLMs can be useful.
• jhancock 1y ago
  I'm not a skeptic, but I keep LLMs on a short leash. This is a thoughtful article. Thanks `tptacek My LLM use is: 1 - tedious stuff; web pages interacting with domain back end. 2 - domain discovery. In a recent adventure, I used Claude 4 to tease out parameters in a large graph schema. This is a combination of tedium and domain discovery (it's not my graph and I'm not a domain expert). In the first day, Claude uncovered attributes and relations no other LLM or Google search uncovered. And it worked!! The next day, I allowed it to continue. After a bit, results didn't pass the sniff test. I checked into details of Claude's thinking: it decided to start making up schema attributes and inventing fallback queries on error with more made up attributes. It was "conscious" of its decision to do so. By the time I caught this, Claude had polluted quite a bit of code. Sure, plenty of well placed git commits helped in rolling back code...but it's not quite that simple..over the many git commits were sprinkled plenty of learnings I don't want to toss. It took another two days of carefully going through the code to pull out the good stuff and then roll things back. So now I'm at day five of this adventure with cleaned up code and notes on what we learned. I suspect continual improvements on tooling will help. Until then, it's a short leash.
  • wraptile 1y ago
    Domain discovery is so underrated. LLMs remove so much friction that makes everything so incredibly accessible. If LLMs couldn't do anything else then that alone would still warrant an invention of a century sticker.
    • jhancock 1y ago
      No doubt. The tedious stuff is just a time saver. The domain discovery is often the difference between making progress and giving up.
    • epiccoleman 1y ago
      Couldn't agree more. The first time I used Claude Code was for something very much like this. We had a PDF rendering issue with Unicode characters in one of our libraries. We ultimately needed to implement a sort of bespoke font fallback system. With the help of the agent, I was able to iterate through several potential approaches and find the gaps and limitations within the space of an afternoon. By the time we got to the end of that process the LLM wrote up a nice doc of notes on the experiments, and *I* knew what I wanted to do next. Knowing that, I was able to give a more detailed and specific prompt to Claude which then scaffolded out a solution. I spent probably another day tweaking, testing, and cleaning up. Overall I think it's completely fair to say that Claude saved me a week of dev time on this particular task. The amount of reading and learning and iterating I'd have had to do to get the same result would have just taken 3-4 days of work. (not to mention the number of hours I might have wasted when I got stuck and scrolled HN for an hour or whatever). So it still needed my discernment and guidance - but there's no question that I moved through the process much quicker than I would have unassisted. That's worth the $8 in API credit ten times over and no amount of parroting the "stochastic parrot" phrase (see what I did there?) would change my mind.
• grafmax 1y ago
  > Our jobs are just as much in tech’s line of fire as everybody else’s have been for the last 3 decades. We’re not East Coast dockworkers; we won’t stop progress on our own. If you really believe in the power of LLMs then it’s time to wake up. The writing is on the wall. Automation the workforce further into precarious jobs. The idea that tech workers can’t stop so-called “progress” is at best a dumb self-fulfilling prophecy. Our workplaces depend on us. We have the power to put the brakes on whatever our employers are up to by organizing and striking. Tech workers should be organizing to prepare for the profit-taking moves management has in store for us as the tech gets better and better. If LLMs really live up to their potential, It’s just going to get worse from here. They keep bragging about how many people are going to lose their jobs and they mean us. They’re bragging about firing us! It’s foolish for us to sit idly by while we are the ones who make them their profits.
  • Aeolun 1y ago
    > We have the power to put the brakes on whatever our employers are up to by organizing and striking. You have the power to do that in your own isolated environment, but it's a delaying tactic at best. This whole thing is as inevitable as TV, smartphones, airplanes, tanks or guns. Everyone will use them, because they're so much better than anything that came before that there's no competition for the same use cases.
    • grafmax 1y ago
      The point isn’t to delay the tech from arriving but to have better negotiating power when it fully arrives.
  • dyauspitr 1y ago
    If the tech is there dragging your feet is not going to buy you too much time.
  • swalsh 1y ago
    > Tech workers should be organizing to prepare for the profit-taking moves management has in store for us I think you think this is going to help tech workers, but raising the cost of employing humans is only going to incentivize companies to adopt AI faster. You should do the opposite, and tax AI use. Though that's probably rife with potential issues too. I think as umemployment increases we're going to have to make a bad decision somewhere... and I'm guessing taxing AI is the lesser evil.
• kyle-rb 1y ago
  >> but you have no idea what the code is > Are you a vibe coding Youtuber? Can you not read code? If so: astute point. Otherwise: what the fuck is wrong with you? > You’ve always been responsible for what you merge to main. You were five years go. And you are tomorrow, whether or not you use an LLM. Loved this bit. In a professional setting, any code — AI-written or not — should be read by at least two people, the submitter and the reviewer.
• drodgers 1y ago
  > "LLMs can’t write Rust" This really doesn't accord with my own experience. Using claude-code (esp. with opus 4) and codex (with o3) I've written lots of good Rust code. I've actually found Rust helps the AI-pair-programming experience because the agent gets such good, detailed feedback from the compiler that it can iterate very quickly and effectively. Can it set up great architecture for a large, complex project from scratch? No, not yet. It can't do that in Ruby or Typescript either (though it might trick you by quickly getting something that kinda works in those languages). It think that will be a higher bar because of how Rust front-loads a lot of hard work, but I expect continuing improvement.
  • wdroz 1y ago
    I agree, the latest models are not bad at Rust. Most issues I have when writing LLM-assisted Rust code are related to dependencies. There are a lot of v0.x.x crates in Rust with frequent updates and breaking changes. As LLMs "learn" from code in the wild, they are exposed to different way to use the same crate and thus fail to produce working code "from memory". But as soon as you explain how to use it with the latest syntax, they are able to fix the code.
• peepeepoopoo131 1y ago
  [flagged]
  • dyauspitr 1y ago
    tptacek has been on HN forever.
• isatty 1y ago
  I don’t use AI and I don’t really care for it, but the language in this article is really bad. I expected better from Thomas.
• deleted 1y ago
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• notnullorvoid 1y ago
  I like LLMs, it's legitimately impressive to see people vibe code solutions (some times even to novel ideas). Agents are a much better use of LLMs than auto complete (which is terrible). However I've tried coding agents, and well they suck... for me. Nearly all of the code I write these days is performance sensitive, as well as design sensitive (making abstractions for others to use), and not close to what could be considered boilerplate. The boilerplate I do write usually takes a trivial amount of time to write by hand. I'll keep trying whatever is new in AI every few months, I certainly don't want to be left behind, but so far that strategy hasn't left me optimistic. > but the code is shitty, like that of a junior developer It's worse than a junior. Juniors learn and grow, if they're a good junior it's often fairly rapid and self directed. Juniors can also ask for guidance or help, this is something maybe agents will be capable of in the future, but I could see it going pretty poorly for reasons tied to the first point about not learning. While LLMs contain a ton of information, more than a junior could, the junior is a better reasoning machine; I don't consider LLM "reasoning" to be anything close to the meatbag version. > but the craft Craft matters, it's important to enjoy and take pride in your work. If you enjoy managing AI agents that's fine, lots of programmers end up on the manager career path, but it's not for everyone.
  • deleted 1y ago
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• jandrewrogers 1y ago
  The reaction to this article is interesting. I have found AI to be useful in software contexts that most people never exercise or expect based on their intuitions of what an LLM can do. For me, a highly productive but boring use of LLMs for code is that they excel at providing midwit “best practice” solutions to common problems. They are better documentation than the documentation and can do a lot of leg work e.g. Linux syscall implementation details. My application domains tend to require more sophisticated solutions than an LLM can provide but they still save a lot of rote effort. A lot of software development exists almost entirely in the midwit zone. Much more interesting, they are decent at reducing concepts in literature to code practice for which there are no code examples. Google and StackOverflow turn up nothing. For example, I’ve found them useful for generating specialized implementations of non-Euclidean computational geometry algorithms that don’t really exist in the wild that I’ve ever seen. This is a big win, it literally turns months of effort into hours of effort. On the other hand, I do a lot of work with algorithms that don’t exist in literature, never mind public code, with extremely performance-engineered implementations. There is an important take away from this too: LLMs are hilariously bad at helping with this but so are human software developers if required to do the same thing with no context. Knowledge for which there is little or no training data is currently a formidable moat, both for LLMs and humans.
  • joshvm 1y ago
    I agree on the distillation step. They're very good at identifying what problem you're trying to solve, especially if you don't have much experience in the domain. I've found ChatGPT great for figuring out problems involving combinatorics. And then you can be canny and ask the LLM to write the next prompt to get some boilerplate code. I like to do this with ChatGPT 4.5 (heavily rate limited) targeting 4o. Getting good code is still a pain with chat, but you can go a fair way by reducing the context as much as possible and only asking for core functions (no point wasting hundreds of tokens on an arg parser). I'd like to play with Cursor or Zed a bit more. Debugging sometimes works. 4.5 often figures out errors in one, 4o often struggles and spits out suggestions like it's a customer support agent (it also falls into repetition fairly often if you tell it "no, so what else could it be?"). You really have to work to convince it up front that you're not an idiot.
  • 1y ago
• evantbyrne 1y ago
  > Does an intern cost $20/month? Because that’s what Cursor.ai costs. The cost is a pretty obvious indication that it's nowhere near the capability of an engineer. A robotic worker that can produce code 24/7 without tiring would be worth even more than a person of equivalent skill. I don't know what kinds of goofy hiring ya'll are doing, but all of the juniors I've been involved in hiring actually worked out great.
• mkfs 1y ago
  > Meanwhile, software developers spot code fragments seemingly lifted from public repositories on Github and lose their shit. What about the licensing? If you’re a lawyer, I defer. But if you’re a software developer playing this card? Cut me a little slack as I ask you to shove this concern up your ass. No profession has demonstrated more contempt for intellectual property. > The median dev thinks Star Wars and Daft Punk are a public commons. The great cultural project of developers has been opposing any protection that might inconvenience a monetizable media-sharing site. When they fail at policy, they route around it with coercion. They stand up global-scale piracy networks and sneer at anybody who so much as tries to preserve a new-release window for a TV show. This is pretty disingenuous and mean-spirited. He's using SV startup types to smear all developers, including the typical, humble, un- or undercompensated FOSS dev who absolutely respects intellectual property, and quite reasonably, expects their own IP to be respected as well. But because Sam Altman types follow the "It's Better to Beg for Forgiveness than to Ask for Permission" rule, altruistic, non-sociopathic developers have no right to complain?
  • tomnipotent 1y ago
    > non-sociopathic developers have no right to complain The very same developers that advocate pirating from Netflix or Disney? He's pointing out the hypocrisy in a class of people (generally, tech-savvy programmers) that have no problem advocating for piracy and gleefully thwarting the concrete IP rights of businesses on one hand, while defending and bemoaning the abstract IP rights of other content creators on the other hand. My take away is that he's saying IP rights is a weak argument to use to defend a personal position for not adopting LLM's in your workflow, especially given the context of modern piracy.
    • mkfs 1y ago
      > The very same developers that advocate pirating from Netflix or Disney? Even the ones advocating or engaging in personal piracy aren't creating unauthorized derivative works and monetizing them, which is arguably what these AI systems and their customers are doing. And Thomas wasn't talking about personal piracy, but instead trying to use the IP-hostile conduct of Google and certain startups (like Scribd or GrooveShark) to smear all developers and de-legitimize their IP-based objections, even of those releasing code under permissive licenses (like the GPL) in exchange for expected adherence to certain terms and conditions that these systems and their users ignore.
• jszymborski 1y ago
  The argument that I've heard against LLMs for code is that they create bugs that, by design, are very difficult to spot. The LLM has one job, to make code that looks plausible. That's it. There's no logic gone into writing that bit of code. So the bugs often won't be like those a programmer makes. Instead, they can introduce a whole new class of bug that's way harder to debug.
  • intrasight 1y ago
    My philosophy is to let the LLM either write the logic or write the tests - but not both. If you write the tests and it writes the logic and it passes all of your tests, then the LLM did its job. If there are bugs, there were bugs in your tests.
    • dfedbeef 1y ago
      This is pretty nifty, going to try this out!
    • underdeserver 1y ago
      That rather depends on the type of bug and what kinds of tests you would write. LLMs are way faster than me at writing tests. Just prompt for the kind of test you want.
      • catlifeonmars 1y ago
        Idk about you but I spend much more time thinking about what ways the code is likely to break and deciding what to test. Actually writing tests is usually straightforward and fast with any sane architecture with good separation of concerns. I can and do use AI to help with test coverage but coverage is pointless if you don’t catch the interesting edge cases.
    • therealmarv 1y ago
      I don't agree. What I do agree on is to do it not only with one LLM. Quality increases if I double check code with a second LLM (especially o4 mini is great for that) Or double check tests the same way. Maybe even write tests and code with different LLMs if that is your worry.
• habosa 1y ago
  I’m an AI skeptic. I’m probably wrong. This article makes me feel kinda wrong. But I desperately want to be right. Why? Because if I’m not right then I am convinced that AI is going to be a force for evil. It will power scams on an unimaginable scale. It will destabilize labor at a speed that will make the Industrial Revolution seem like a gentle breeze. It will concentrate immense power and wealth in the hands of people who I don’t trust. And it will do all of this while consuming truly shocking amounts of energy. Not only do I think these things will happen, I think the Altmans of the world would eagerly agree that they will happen. They just think it will be interesting / profitable for them. It won’t be for us. And we, the engineers, are in a unique position. Unlike people in any other industry, we can affect the trajectory of AI. My skepticism (and unwillingness to aid in the advancement of AI) might slow things down a billionth of a percent. Maybe if there are more of me, things will slow down enough that we can find some sort of effective safeguards on this stuff before it’s out of hand. So I’ll keep being skeptical, until it’s over.
  • mindwok 1y ago
    I share your concern, but being skeptical doesn't help us here. If anything it makes people take it less seriously.
  • throwawaye3735 1y ago
    You are right, it will certainly be used for evil, but the reason is not because AI is evil but because the people who use it are evil - will AI allow worse atrocities that we have seen in the past? Probably, new technology always enables new capability for good or for bad but we should strive to combat the evil in this world and not put our heads down and hope the world isn't changing. AI can also be used for good and let's focus on more of that.
  • simonw 1y ago
    "And we, the engineers, are in a unique position. Unlike people in any other industry, we can affect the trajectory of AI." I firmly believe that too. That's why I've been investing a great deal of effort in helping people understand what this stuff can and can't do and how best to make use of it. I don't think we can stop it, but I do think (hope) we can show people how to use it in a way where the good applications outweigh the bad.
• grumple 1y ago
  Where are the results? I keep hearing about how great these coding agents are. What have you built beyond the complexity of a disposable toy app? Where are the swarms of new apps built by these agents that are solving new problems and taking over markets? I’m just not seeing results. I guess I need to spend some time using cursor as an agent to see it for myself. I am a believer that these tools will be (if they aren’t already) extremely useful. Game changing in many ways, and I worry about the future of knowledge fields. Definitely not a skeptic in the trajectory. I do wonder if that makes those of us who are on the cutting edge more valuable as AI can quickly reproduce things that are well understood.
• ttiurani 1y ago
  "You don’t believe in IPR. Then shut the fuck up about IPR." As a software engineer, I need to call out this rhetoric. We are not all morally bankrupt. Many of the people with the most ethical backbone I know are also software engineers. I don't use "AI" for the same reason I don't use amphetamine. I'm sure I could get stuff more stuff done faster if I used it, but I don't, because the manufacturing and the distribution of it is completely unethical. The blatant stealing of intellectual property is only the tip of the shitberg. As bad are the giant ecological footprint[1], the colonialism of the grossly underpaid RLHF, and the conceding of even more of our digital lives to trillion dollar corporations. We can and must ethically evaluate our work, and that includes our tools. Nobody's perfect, but doing one immoral thing does not mean you get a free pass to skip morality altogether. 1. https://www.greenpeace.de/publikationen/environmental-impacts-of-artificial-intelligence https://www.greenpeace.de/publikationen/environmental-impact...
• mindwok 1y ago
  I am pretty exhausted with reading the cynical takes on AI lately. Like, I get it, but ugh. Yes, the tech isn't perfect yet. Yes, it means existing industries will be displaced. Yes, it threatens to undermine the identities we have built as useful artists, programmers, data analysts, whatever. It is a scary, uncertain future, and on some days I am overcome with dread about what it means for me. But ffs, we will figure it out. This technology, if it continues to improve at the pace it has, will open the door to us solving previously intractable problems - problems like curing cancer, endless energy and nuclear fusion, making us 100x more productive at building great housing and infrastructure. Let's get on board and make this thing a success, not fight it every step of the way because we want to preserve some basically arbitrary state of society.
• fourthark 1y ago
  LLM, please find all occurrences of "shut the fuck up" and suggest actual arguments for the author to use. Otherwise, well written and persuasive.
• femiagbabiaka 1y ago
  I agree wholeheartedly with this piece, but I think it might've been taken better if it wasn't written in the style of an HN comment. That being said, definitely doesn't deserve so much flaming in the comments, sorry to see that, because it's basically correct, with some small things I disagree with here and there. Feels exciting to be on the precipice of having a Star Trek style spaceship computer at my fingertips.
• AstroAd 1y ago
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• xvilka 1y ago
  The problem is not about quality of the code, it simply almost never works. Just tried some models still in beta on the code of one of the C projects and, while some pieces were okay and could be used as is, some are complete garbage and wouldn't even compile. Maybe few years later it will not become a problem but right now they are useless. For the AI-assisted research and internet search, that's a different thing and works pretty well already.
  • digianarchist 1y ago
    I’m happy to see evidence to the contrary. Does anyone have a video of someone interacting with a LLM and it producing half decent code? I’ve yet to witness this myself but that’s with my interactions. Which are limited to free offerings.
• deleted 1y ago
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• peterjliu 1y ago
  interesting are LLMs a lot better at Go than Rust?
• calebm 1y ago
  This article is very well-written. Obviously not written by AI.
• bitwize 1y ago
  Eric S. Raymond is now doing 100% of his coding with AI assistance, and claims he is much faster and more productive. I think we've passed the threshold beyond which not using AI is just doing things the hard way for no appreciable gain.
• ken47 1y ago
  Let’s not conflate LLM’s with AI. LLM’s are a kind of AI that can be a software engineer’s assistant, at best. But the degree of hype is undermining belief in AI among many professionals who the hypesters claim are going to be replaced. No, this iteration is not going to replace doctors or engineers. But the degree to which the hype train wants to do so is alarming.
  • cheevly 1y ago
    I'm curious what walls you've hit? I literally can't find the boundaries of what is possible to achieve.
    • ken47 1y ago
      Search engineering forums online. If you haven’t found the walls, you haven’t been trying.
    • jcims 1y ago
      The only question for me is whether or not the walls are moving in the direction of greater actualized capability. I can't prove it but I *think* the answer there is yes.
    • xigency 1y ago
      Have you tried creating your own programming language? How about solving unsolved frontier problems in mathematics? Ever written a book that won a Pulitzer prize? How many languages do you know? As someone who was born ambitious I find this technology tepid at best.
• energy123 1y ago
  > but it’s bad at rust Is it really? I scraped all HN comments with the words "Rust" and "LLM" from the last 6 months, put it into Gemini and asked it to surface quotes of people saying they had a good time, versus quotes of the opposite. It was about 60% positive and 40% negative. Does anyone have recent personal experience with this they can talk about?
• devmor 1y ago
  For some reason, every hardcore AI proponent I hear from resorts to gaslighting and namecalling to convince everyone it's so useful for everything. When that doesn't work, they start inventing hyper-specific scenarios and graphs with grounding that exists only in their imagination to push the topic further. If the AI can't solve a problem in a domain for you, well, it's that domain that's the problem, not AI. You simply need to re-invent the paradigm around your entire problem - easy stuff. Finally, when they've failed to convince anyone with a modicum of rationality, they resort to some version of "well, fuck you, it's the future and I'll just be leaving you behind!" Interestingly, this article has all three.
• layoric 1y ago
  > Some of the smartest people I know share a bone-deep belief that AI is a fad — the next iteration of NFT mania. > Meanwhile, software developers spot code fragments seemingly lifted from public repositories on Github and lose their shit. What about the licensing? If you’re a lawyer, I defer. But if you’re a software developer playing this card? Cut me a little slack as I ask you to shove this concern up your ass. No profession has demonstrated more contempt for intellectual property. > The median dev thinks Star Wars and Daft Punk are a public commons. The great cultural project of developers has been opposing any protection that might inconvenience a monetizable media-sharing site. When they fail at policy, they route around it with coercion. They stand up global-scale piracy networks and sneer at anybody who so much as tries to preserve a new-release window for a TV show. So it starts with a humble strawman, and then the author illustrates how dumb they think their fellow developers really are if they have the make different decisions based on different values. Most developers I interact with who are what you might call 'AI skeptic', are most concerned with how this tech will be used, especially since its creation is rooted in mass scale disregard for ownership of anything. > "The great cultural project of developers has been opposing any protection that might inconvenience a monetizable media-sharing site.... They stand up global-scale piracy networks", IMO the author is here projecting or something, cause I literally never met someone with this opinion, and I've also been in tech/developer circles for over 20 years. Personal use of pirated content is very different from commercial distribution or making money of share sites. Not everyone's values are so rooted in making money with complete disregard to the impact of their actions in doing so. I get it, the author wants to keep using LLMs are for people to stop trying to make them feel bad but trying to make a case for how their arguments are just dumb. But the author completely missed the 'why' behind the arguments. In the end, LLMs are a tool. Use them or not is up to the individual. But that doesn't give a blanket social license to use them in any way people, or more importantly, companies want.
• tstrimple 1y ago
  This is the same as every other transformative tool which has come to market. You've got a certain segment of the population who will embrace it and push the boundaries of what is possible with the current tools and those in the future. And you've got the curmudgeons who won't let go of the one tool and one non-cloud hosting solution they so desperately cling to and deny the utility of anything else.
• FilosofumRex 1y ago
  Don't be pennywise and pound foolish... The LLM coding agents might help you fire some swe to save a penny or two, but soon enough, it will also help your customers or suppliers to replace your business model.
• chairmansteve 1y ago
  I find it interesting that TFA claims that Go is the most LLM legible language. I suspect C# Asp.Net Core not so much. Any thoughts?
• r0s 1y ago
  Weird to claim the llm does all the boring learning and boilerplate for you as a selling point, but then also insist we still need to responsibly read all the output, and if you can't understand it's a "skill issue". Also the emphasis on greenfield projects? Starting is by FAR the easiest part. That's not impressive to me. When do we get to code greenfield for important systems? Reminds me of the equally absurd example of language choice. You think you get to choose? What? Imagine all the code these agents are going to pump out that can never be reviewed in a reasonable time frame. The noise generated at the whim of bike-shedding vibe coders is going to drown all the senior reviewers soon enough. I'll call that Cowboy Coders on Steroids. Anyone with skills will be buried in reviews, won't have time for anything else, and I predict stricter code gen policies to compensate.
  • otabdeveloper4 1y ago
    Yeah, I remember five years ago (before being sold this latest VC crock of bull) when reviewing shitty thoughtless code was the tedious and soul-sucking part of programming.
  • layla5alive 1y ago
    And (rigorously) reviewing code is easily 10x harder than writing it. But this won't stop it from happening.
    • tptacek 1y ago
      This is just obviously not true. I had a full-time job of reviewing code for roughly 15 years and it was never true, but it's also just intuitively not true that engineers spend 10 hours reviewing their peers code to every 1 they spend writing it. What you mean to claim here is that verification is 10x harder than authorship. That's true, but unhelpful to skeptics, because LLMs are extremely useful for verification.
      • JohnKemeny 1y ago
        I once graded over 100 exams in an introductory programming course (Python). The main exercise was to implement a simple game (without using a runtime). Some answers were trivial to grade—either obviously correct or clearly wrong. The rest were painful and exhausting to evaluate. Checking whether the code was correct and tracing it step by step in my head was so draining that I swore never to grade programming again.
• kkylin 1y ago
  I found this comment especially interesting: "The code in an agent that actually “does stuff” with code is not, itself, AI. This should reassure you. It’s surprisingly simple systems code, wired to ground truth about programming in the same way a Makefile is. You could write an effective coding agent in a weekend. Its strengths would have more to do with how you think about and structure builds and linting and test harnesses than with how advanced o3 or Sonnet have become." I haven't used coding agents. Can someone who has (or knows about these things) elaborate, or point me to a good resource? Thanks!
  • danielbln 1y ago
    It's a while loop. You collect a ton of context (file paths, function signatures, etc.), provide a bunch of functions to the LLM that it can ask to be called and an objective ("Implement X", "figure out X"). Then you send this to the LLM, perform the function calls it requests ("open file", "edit file", "call service X") and append their output to the payload and send it back to the LLM. Rinse and repeat until objective is complete (in which case the LLM may request to call a work_complete function/tool). That's really it. Stuff the context, loop over the LLM until work is done.
    • kkylin 1y ago
      Thank you!
• pier25 1y ago
  I'm mostly skeptical about AI capabilities but I also think it will never be a profitable business. Let's not forget AI companies need to recoup a trillion dollars (so far) just to break even [1]. VCs are already doubting if the billions invested into data centers are going to generate a profit [1 and 2]. AI companies will need to generate profits at some point. Would people still be optimistic about Claude etc if they had to pay say $500 per month to use it given its current capabilities? Probably not. So far the only company generating real profits out of AI is Nvidia. [1] https://www.goldmansachs.com/insights/articles/will-the-1-trillion-of-generative-ai-investment-pay-off https://www.goldmansachs.com/insights/articles/will-the-1-tr... [2] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/02/business/ai-data-centers-private-equity.html https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/02/business/ai-data-centers-...
  • geraneum 1y ago
    Hence the flurry of articles, controversial interviews and aggressive marketing and the pitch to replace all white color jobs.
  • jillesvangurp 1y ago
    Some of the revenues are very real. A few million subscriptions at tens-hundreds of dollar per month add up to non trivial revenue pretty quickly. I think most software engineers will have such subscriptions fairly soon. We're talking about a market where companies drop 5-20K/month on software engineers and hire whole teams of those. Of course they are going to spend on this. Maybe not 500$. But 20-100$ is a lot less controversial. And this is quickly spreading beyond software engineering. Software engineers are just being guinea pigs for agentic AIs eventually popping up in all sectors. Basically, while security and quality issues are being sorted out, it helps having users that are a bit more clued in about what they are doing. That's why AI investments are so hot right now. Of course there are a lot of AI companies that will fall short. There always are. And companies like Nvidia that will make a lot of money selling GPUs. But there is some non trivial amount of revenue potential there. Anybody still in denial about that is probably penny pinching.
    • consp 1y ago
• deleted 1y ago
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• justlikereddit 1y ago
  >Important caveat: I’m discussing only the implications of LLMs for software development. For art, music, and writing? I got nothing. I’m inclined to believe the skeptics in those fields. What a strange disclaimer. Image generation was a (career)killer feature long before vibe coding was halfway useful.
• aprilthird2021 1y ago
  He forgot "but the 15 year old behemoth codebase that doesn't fit in any context window and isn't well documented and changing of which requires changing tons of ancillary files not easily connected to each other logically". That's what a lot of the highest paid programmers work on. I work in such a firm and the agent they have for us is incapable. And it's the latest and greatest from whoever coders love to rave about online. I love that AI written tests and other generally greenfield things work well and can be vetted quicker than writing and getting the code oneself. But for most more complex tasks it's not there. I'm ready when it is though
• barrell 1y ago
  This blog post makes me actively want to use something besides fly. Putting aside the massive condescension in the article… … most of the code you write is tedious boilerplate? What do you do all day? I can honestly say the most tedious code I write is migrations, because I have to edit three files. I do this like once a week. It would take way longer to explain to an ai what to do than just do it myself. … you run the ai on your procrastination and as a result do heads down work? Seriously? 1, programming with AI is like playing a slot machine. It keeps you hooked just on the verge of winning the jackpot for far longer than the tedious task would have distracted you. And let’s say a good agentic case - it runs for 30 minutes before it’s done. That’s not even enough time to “boot up” a serious problem, and your already having to put it aside to go check the work you yourself are saying is mediocre? And you’re advocating to run multiple of these? Even the most ardent vibe covers I know talk about babysitting the agents. How is this unlocking deep work time in any way shape or form? … craft is relagated to hobbies? I guarantee you, this person loves Linear. It was probably written on a MacBook. This whole “we solve real problems” BS is just a cop out because being great is hard. … mediocre code is good code? All code is a liability. If you generate 10 times the code, and are admitting it’s the lowest bar of quality possible, it is at a minimum 10x the liability on your shoulders. … letting LLMs refactor your tests? Serious question, who actually does this? Because I would LOVE to have LLMs write tests for me. I have tried every. single. time. I need to write something that needs a lot of tests to ask LLMs for tests for TWO YEARS, and not once have I ever used a single test it generates. It generates worse tests than it does code, and the last thing I want is 42 asserts in 8 tests across 600 LoC that nobody understands that poorly tests what should have been 2 asserts in 2 tests in 12 lines of code.
• msteffen 1y ago
  This article is ridiculous Q: but the code that AI generates is incoherent gibberish Guess what, life’s tough. Fixing incoherent gibberish is part of the job you wuss. Honestly, I bet you write incoherent gibberish. Would you rather be fixing incoherent gibberish that an AI wrote or incoherent gibberish that you wrote? Q: but I have to re-do everything it touches. Everything takes me ten times as long! What are you, some kind of vibe-coding YouTuber? Everything taking ten times as long is part of the job, cupcakes. What’s important is that now it takes ten times as long automatically. I like the way Zed does it, where it tells you to leave while it’s changing stuff.
• bowsamic 1y ago
  This article doesn’t address literally THE argument I have against LLM usage: that it will degrade major human skills like reading, writing, and yes, coding But I’m at least grateful for LLMs making me more aware of how important it is for me to focus on my own skills building. I will never use it because I value having those skills sharp
• keepamovin 1y ago
  This is very well written article. I love the style: aggressive, youthful, humorous, informed, experienced. I think it could do with a little bit more friendly, but… it’s got its own charm. It also convinced me I should be using agents rather than raw dogging Gemini 2.5 pro
• deleted 1y ago
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• techpression 1y ago
  This post feels quite dishonest. Every concern is countered with some variation of ”you’re wrong and I am right”, zero nuance. I use Claude for specific questions, it works great (but apparently I’m doing it wrong according to the author), code generation doesn’t, I don’t want my boilerplate code to have subtle differences in every file, that’s the worst kind of boilerplate and that’s what I get if I automate it. There are real world implications of all the infrastructure being built for this too, not to mention the extremely short e-waste cycles during the boom we’re in right now. To me it also seems like LLMs are the wrong thing to solve for, it’s like a gasoline car, make the engine larger and more fuel consuming to go faster and no matter how much you perfect it, it will still be fossil fuel being burnt at a high rate. What’s the alternative, I don’t think we know yet, but if we were a smarter species we would see that this is not it.
• baxtr 1y ago
  There’s a fine line between being an AGI skeptic and an AI skeptic. While I don’t believe the “AI will take all jobs” VC tales, I also think not using LLMs in software development workflows is similar to not wanting to use Excel as an accountant in the 1990s. AI won’t replace all jobs, but companies that cleverly integrate it into their processes will be faster and more efficient compared to those that don’t.
• tom_m 1y ago
  I think people fail to realize that to value software to $0 is to destroy the point of most of it. If it becomes so easy to write apps, then everyone can build their own. They won't need your app. The entire point of most SaaS business revolves around the simple concept/question: build vs. buy. So if there's no point in buying since building is so easy, then AI isn't helping you like your software product/SaaS. I think programmers may just become the "IT person" or "webmaster" or "AI guy" at a company that needs software. Not at a separate company building it for others. This may greatly reduce the need for programmers. This will in turn reduce the need for fancy computers like that expensive MacBook Pro. It will reduce the need for web hosting. Don't get me wrong, these things will still exist...but the demand will decrease. Essentially it will become the biggest bubble since the dot com bust. It'll be much larger. The dust will eventually settle and we'll all adapt to a new world with AI...but I think the years and years of over specialization could come to a screeching halt. The industry will likely implode and suck in all of the orbiting industries along with it. I hope I'm wrong, but I don't think people quite understand here. I greatly suspect there will be far fewer sales of high end computers. Compute power will continue to move to data centers. Think about it this way. Code aside, because it's not just a coding thing. If everyone can create amazing videos and full on films with AI, then they don't need all those high end machines. They don't need tons of hard drive space that takes all the raw footage and different cuts to make a video. You prompt and the get the exact result you need. Assuming AI gets that good. So the more we push into AI the greater than "gravity" here so to speak and the stronger the implosion. I just see an entire industry collapsing in on itself personally. If I'm believing all the FOMO logic out there. If "we'll see our first one person billion dollar company." Whoever said that is a moron. You understand what that means, right? If anyone can do all that, then how could that even exist? Are we all going to become billionaires now? No, to say something as stupid as that is to say software is trivial and worthless. So how could anyone start a software business worth so much?
  • nprateem 1y ago
    No. The issue is maintenance and focus. Sure, smash out an AI accounting app, payroll app, CRM, etc but now you're not in the business of selling hamburgers or whatever, you've become a conglomerate.
• groestl 1y ago
  I find it curious that nobody in this whole thread does once mention AI communism. I think after much pain and sorrow, and many deaths, this is the most likely outcome. Probably in a dystopian fashion.
• ookblah 1y ago
  basically nails every point i've wanted to say but couldn't lol. also in the end the endless posturing gets tired and we go back to getting shit done. either it helps you are it doesn't.
• weitzj 1y ago
  I was quite happy and entlohntes when I dropped an HTML table Formates with Emojies into my prompt and told to turn it into a terraform module. But how do you quality check this part? I am proofreading all these transformations and I am not sure if this is really faster than actually recording a VIM macro, which will do the steps I need.
• bergen 1y ago
  One point is missing for me - you get lazy. People are less and less equiped to think about complex problems the more they RELY on this for coding. Also this article is just about coding.
  • rzodkiew 1y ago
    Not sure why more people aren't mentioning this. But that's the exact reason I've stopped using any LLM stuff. Your thinking just gets lazier and lazier the more you use it. You stop thinking the problems deeply and thoroughly when the "answer" is just around the corner. Then one day you snap out of that mirage, and see what a boatload of junk you've just created with this stuff. I also dread what's going to happen to the younger generations which have this to replace their real education, but that's a bit offtopic here.
• mdavid626 1y ago
  Please stop this. It’s clear to me that you’re not a software engineer. You weren’t one before AI, and you are not one after. You can do whatever you want, but please don’t push this AI narrative down everyones throat. I’ve had enough of this.
• wiseowise 1y ago
  You’re the goat, Ptacek. Seriously, this is the most based defense of LLM that I’ve read over the years. All the yapping in the thread only proves your points.
• captainbland 1y ago
  A couple of thoughts: On 'just read the code' - all well and good. Of course this implies insisting on team members who can read the code, will read the code and are empowered to read the code. Otherwise orgs will try to hire pure vibe coders who aren't interested in that and only allow time for literally just instructing agents to generate code because it sounds cheaper and execs don't understand the nuance so long as it looks like product is shipping - until it all blows up and the one standing senior developer on hand is supposed to fix a prod issue buried in millions of lines of vibe reviewed code ASAP. On 'but it's cheaper than a junior': cloud hosted LLM systems are currently massively subsidised to an absurd degree. The cost side of things is all smoke and mirrors geared towards accelerated market adoption at all costs. It's not a profitable enterprise at the model development level. At some point that AI economy is going to expect to make that money back, and future (especially near-future) hardware advancements don't explain where all of that is going to come from.
• rienbdj 1y ago
  I tried Copilot many times and found it lacking. I like discussing concepts (maybe with pseudocode) with Gemini. I find this useful but not game changing. So genuine question for AI Boosters, what should I be using? I would like the 10x productivity gains we were promised :)
• deleted 1y ago
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• bhupesh 1y ago
  I am in the middle, neither a dogmatic skeptic nor a full-blown prompt engineer, but I lost it when the author compared a junior developer (a human) to a SaaS subscription. Tells you what you need to know about the AI culture.
  • speedgoose 1y ago
    I don’t think it’s an uncommon comparison. If you don’t consider the human aspect, a LLM coding agent has a similar use than a junior developer. Of course, humans have advantages and those advantages have value. But the coding agent costs $20 dollars a month. Replacing humans my machines that are much cheaper isn’t really something new.
• supermatt 1y ago
  i am no clearer on what setup the author is using? are you hand coding all these non-code agents you mention? You talk about zed, then about cursor - don't they both do the same thing, or are you using 2 IDEs to write your code? What tooling is used for these async agents that are doing things while i eat my breakfast? I really want to like AI assisted coding, but I guess i am just stuck as to what to do. I have tried co-pilot, both 2 years ago, and recently. I have tried some other AI plugin on VScode (i thought that was cursor, but I don't see it in the extensions when i now search, so it was probably something else). If anything, I have found with these solutions that they are great for the first few tasks - generate these models, scaffold this, add oauth, etc - but after that they lack all consistency with the code they themselves generated (like if i add a new model, the output is wildly different to what it already created) and it takes more time to rewrite that output than to copy-paste and change whats already there. @op - could you explain exactly what tooling you are using, maybe give an example of these async agents, etc? Would be most appreciated for us luddites who would love to be more productive.
• sahil_sharma0 1y ago
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• kotaKat 1y ago
  Nah, I’m not nuts, you’re just terminally brain damaged by the amount of ketamine you’ve huffed thinking AI was such a great tool.
• pokercheat 1y ago
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• SKILNER 1y ago
  Let's just imagine we're critiquing cars or planes in about 1910. They're so flawed. No one can say with certainty whether or how they will improve. Side note of interest, from Wikipedia: "Flying Machines Which Do Not Fly" is an editorial published in the New York Times on October 9, 1903. The article incorrectly predicted it would take one to ten million years for humanity to develop an operating flying machine.
  • suddenlybananas 1y ago
    Conversely, imagine we're someone talking about colonising the moon in 1969.
    • SKILNER 1y ago
      It's a good idea to think of a converse situation, but this is a bad example. The constraint was not about technology but about budget, perceived benefits and political will.
      • zahlman 1y ago
        What technologies existing in 1969 might have been used to create an environment with a breathable atmosphere and a self-sustaining ecosystem on the Moon? What technologies existing today might be used for this purpose, assuming no financial or political limitations?
    • Dylan16807 1y ago
      If we had funded that as much as we're currently funding AI I think it would have been a plausible goal. Keep in mind we cut more than half of NASA's budget after we first landed.
      • suddenlybananas 1y ago
        I disagree.
        • 1y ago
• pianopatrick 1y ago
  Seems to me that AI itself will take some jobs but the cheap workable software the AI creates will take even more jobs, especially if the AI can create workable software for automation robots.
• kokaybro 1y ago
  I will create an account just to point out that the response to > But it is an inherently plagiarist technology Was > Developers frequently engage in copyright infringement, and so will I, so unless if you're a lawyer, shove it up your ass "I am a bad person so I get to continue being bad" is not the gotcha you think it is, Patrick.
• matthewsinclair 1y ago
  I think this article is pretty spot on — it articulates something I’ve come to appreciate about LLM-assisted coding over the past few months. I started out very sceptical. When Claude Code landed, I got completely seduced — borderline addicted, slot machine-style — by what initially felt like a superpower. Then I actually read the code. It was shockingly bad. I swung back hard to my earlier scepticism, probably even more entrenched than before. Then something shifted. I started experimenting. I stopped giving it orders and began using it more like a virtual rubber duck. That made a huge difference. It’s still absolute rubbish if you just let it run wild, which is why I think “vibe coding” is basically just “vibe debt” — because it just doesn’t do what most (possibly uninformed) people think it does. But if you treat it as a collaborator — more like an idiot savant with a massive brain but no instinct or nous — or better yet, as a mech suit [0] that needs firm control — then something interesting happens. I’m now at a point where working with Claude Code is not just productive, it actually produces pretty good code, with the right guidance. I’ve got tests, lots of them. I’ve also developed a way of getting Claude to document intent as we go, which helps me, any future human reader, and, crucially, the model itself when revisiting old code. What fascinates me is how negative these comments are — how many people seem closed off to the possibility that this could be a net positive for software engineers rather than some kind of doomsday. Did Photoshop kill graphic artists? Did film kill theatre? Not really. Things changed, sure. Was it “better”? There’s no counterfactual, so who knows? But change was inevitable. What’s clear is this tech is here now, and complaining about it feels a bit like mourning the loss of punch cards when terminals showed up. [0]: https://matthewsinclair.com/blog/0178-why-llm-powered-programming-is-more-mech-suit-than-artificial-human https://matthewsinclair.com/blog/0178-why-llm-powered-progra...
  • nipah 1y ago
    > What’s clear is this tech is here now, and complaining about it feels a bit like mourning the loss of punch cards when terminals showed up. Just stop with this, it's bulshitty. There's nothing related between LLMs and the migration from punch cards to terminals, nor to photoshop compared to film theatre, literally [nothing]. This is a pretty underwelming way of trying to say people that are critiques of this are akin to nostalgic people that "miss the old good days", when there are more than enough pertinent reasons to disagree with this tech in this case. Basically calling opposing people irrational. I'm not talking about doom or software dev dying or any bullshit like that, I'm just saying this kind of point you make in the end is not reasonable.
• moomin 1y ago
  Who are these friends? Are they in the room with us right now? Look, maybe my experience is atypical but I’m an AI skeptic and I know plenty of others. I’ve never heard people claim that LLMs are a fad or going to go away. I’ve seen lots of people: * think that conflating LLMs and “AI” produces a lot of poorly reasoned arguments * doubt the economic narratives being built around LLM technology * think the current rate of progress in the technology is basically flat * think most “AI companies” resemble most crypto companies An addendum to the last point: very few crypto skeptics deny that BitCoin is a thing or think it’s going away, either. It’s just strawmanning.
  • eleveriven 1y ago
    Like you said, nobody reasonable is denying that something real is happening - the question is more about how useful, how soon, and for whom
  • tptacek 1y ago
    These are 4 arguments that have literally nothing to do with what I wrote. * I don't care what "AI" is. There's a section in the post about this. Nobody needs to update their religious beliefs because of LLMs. * I don't care about the economic futures of Nvidia or the frontier model companies. I'm not recommending you invest in their stock. * The article opens with "all progress in LLMs could halt and this would still apply". * The article doesn't care about "AI companies". I'm a crypto skeptic and I do deny Bitcoin is a long-term thing, for what it's worth. I'm a hard skeptic of cryptofinance.
    • GenshoTikamura 1y ago
      [flagged]
    • moomin 1y ago
      As I say, those are the arguments that I actually hear people make. And most of the arguments I'm hearing people make are from people who are using LLM tech on a daily basis (not the agent stuff so much, although it sounds promising). I remain surprised you're encountering so many people quite so skeptical. The only real dispute about the usefulness of the current technology I hear is the concern that this will leave us without devs who understand the code at a deep level.
• globnomulous 1y ago
  I've only just realized how bad AI is for me, in a manner I didn't at all expect. I don't use it. I don't want to use it. I hate it. As another commenter here nicely put it, I want to do, not tell. I like writing code. I like solving problems. I like doing the work myself. I like struggling and then, the next day, finding that my capabilities have grown. And yet I'm overwhelmingly demoralized and depressed about AI's encroachment on software engineering, so much so that I am finding it difficult to marshal cognitive resources. I'm finding it harder and harder to engage with coding problems, even though I love programming. The last thing I expected was that AI, even kept at a distance, would rob me of the joy I find in one of the things I love most. It so devalues what I do and my basic capabilities as a human being that I kind of want to die. I'll stick around for my daughter, my partner, and any future children, but I'm not optimistic at all about the future.
  • GenshoTikamura 1y ago
    Stay strong. Someday we'll all meet at the opposite riverside, as in Fahrenheit 451.
  • xantronix 1y ago
    It's enough that I consider peacing out. Not out of life, mind, but out to the woods on a permanent basis. I want zero proximity to the cynicism that runs rampant through the industry because it's so much more difficult to discern useful hype from slop than I could have ever imagined. The bastards are winning.
• zephyrfalcon 1y ago
  This is satire, right? ...Right?
• atakan_gurkan 1y ago
  "If you’re making requests on a ChatGPT page and then pasting the resulting (broken) code into your editor, you’re not doing what the AI boosters are doing. No wonder you’re talking past each other." This is in fact what I am doing (though I am not trying to convince anyone not to use LLMs). How can I get into this other mode? Any pointers? Do I need to pay up for a service? I do not want to carry out vibe coding, I want to use LLMs to solve physics, math and logic problems/puzzles. I'd appreciate any recommendations.
  • baduiux 1y ago
    Just have a look at Cursor.ai or zed.dev. Cursor is based on VS Code and integrates different models right into your codebase. It has access to your codebase, knows your code (after indexing) and is able to directly apply changes to your code or run commands on your integrated terminal. You can directly accept/decline changes. You can reference existing code / files. You can link documentation, you can write a default prompt and default settings (previously .cursorrules). It's faster than opening chatgpt in browser, writing your promt, waiting for the reply, scanning and scrolling through the reply, copying it, inserting it manually, going back to say something doesn't work.
• 20k 1y ago
  >All progress on LLMs could halt today, and LLMs would remain the 2nd most important thing to happen over the course of my career. During my time as a programmer (gaming + astrophysics), the following things have happened: 1. The rise of GPGPU programming, which has enabled 1000x increases in performance 2. A revolution in CPU architecture, from single core, to massively multicore 3. C++98 - C++26 4. Transformational increases in CPU memory 5. (In the graphics space): dedicated raytracing hardware, the fully general purpose GPU + OpenCL/CUDA, deferred rendering, FSR/DLSS 6. Mobile phones were invented 7. 64-bit 8. The internet went from being for MSN and facebook to what it is today 9. The rise of Valve/Steam and the incredible transformational existence of the indie games market, which enables individuals to self publish their code and products for virtually nothing 10. Clang was born, and GCC came back to life. MSVC became standards compliant, finally 11. Rust was invented, and is taking off. People actually take security seriously now (!) 12. Unified CPU/GPU memory spaces, GPU architectures becoming scalar etc All of these have had vastly more impact on my programming than LLM's ever had. I've always a bit wondered who people are who find it transformational, because I can vaguely gesture at any part of my programming tooling and find that its vastly different to 10 years ago >interact with Git, run existing tooling, like linters, formatters, and model checkers, and make essentially arbitrary tool calls (that you set up) through MCP. I mean.. you can just do all these things anyway. Its literally more work for me to use an LLM to run a linter than to run a linter (its built into my IDE). So's git. And formatters as well. You can also make arbitrary tool calls.. through your ide/scripts/precommit/postcommit/etc. I have no idea why you'd even want an LLM to do this! >People complain about LLM-generated code being “probabilistic”. No it isn’t >The LLM might be stochastic ????????? That's literally the entire point. I want deterministic answers, like clang based autocomplete instead of the nightmare that is prob- i mean stochastic autocomplete >If hallucination matters to you, your programming language has let you down. They matter beacuse they waste your time with bullshit that you then have to fix. No programming language can truly enforce correct logic constraints which are one of the primary difficulties with writing code. I literally have no idea what the OP is even doing, actually writing code has always been a vastly minimal amount of time - the main bottleneck is the train of thought to make sure that everything's correct. The literal typing is an afterthought. No programming language can bypass that step, they can (at best) handhold you through certain kinds of problems >Does an intern cost $20/month? Because that’s what Cursor.ai costs. For the moment. They'll jack up the prices while enshittifying, and then good luck. I do not want to subscribe to a service to be able to code. I use free IDEs and free tools for exactly this reason. If you rely on a paid-for 3rd party you are doing it wrong and will regret it. This is one of the silliest things in the whole article >But people select languages in part based on how well LLMs work with them, so Rust people should get on that They really don't. People select languages based on: 1. What they're taught at school/university 2. What language meets their domain requirements 3. What language their job requires >Meanwhile, software developers spot code fragments seemingly lifted from public repositories on Github and lose their shit. What about the licensing? If you’re a lawyer, I defer. But if you’re a software developer playing this card? Cut me a little slack as I ask you to shove this concern up your ass. No profession has demonstrated more contempt for intellectual property. Are you joking. Is this article a troll? Programmers give a lot of a crap about copyright law. GPL/MIT/etc are hugely important, and people respect the ever loving crap about it in general - even most major companies won't just blatantly pirate GPL works There's a tonne more in this article, but it smells like someone who has literally no idea what they're talking about talking out of their arse, and it shows profoundly
• fifticon 1y ago
  By the reply count it appears this post was excellent at trolling HN's core audience :-). The author may be right, but his preface "look I'm one of you" was in a very different tone to the rest of his "now shut up and get to work" rant. I do use the AI tools to some extent, if for no other reason than that they are currently the path of least resistance, and google+friends have lately played themselves out of the game. He is probably right we should get acquainted with using agents before dismissing it :-).
  • thedevilslawyer 1y ago
    The article is chefs_kiss.jpg. the author is core-hn, in spirit and in karma. imo that tone is exactly what's needed to set right the entitlement that we SWEs have developed over the last decade. The key line in the article gets to the heart of the actual concern developers have imo. > LLMs really might displace many software developers. That’s not a high horse we get to ride. Our jobs are just as much in tech’s line of fire as everybody else’s have been for the last 3 decades.
• voidUpdate 1y ago
  but I like writing code, rather than reviewing code somebody/thing else wrote
• ivolimmen 1y ago
  Call me old but I am not using AI for coding. It's not what I expect or want an AI to do for me. I would love for it to do stuff I don't like to do. It's like the meme that was floating around: that a woman says it would have loved the AI to do the dishes so she can to art; not the other way around. Yes I am also a skeptic but that is not weird as I have seen to many movies about AI taking over the world. I hope I never have to say: "I told you so". I really do see positive points to AI but just not in coding. I would not even trust them to write tests. Might make them write documentation at some point. I would like to point out: LLM's look really intelligent until you converse with them in a less popular language, it will make weird mistakes and interpret your questions all wrong. I am Dutch and they really suck at that.
• millipede 1y ago
  "AI is Amazing" - People who barely write any code.
• runeks 1y ago
  > LLMs can write a large fraction of all the tedious code you’ll ever need to write. And most code on most projects is tedious. You still need to read this tedious code to verify that it actually does what you want it to do. Given this, I'd much rather prefer to write the tedious code myself than having to make sense of someone else's tedious code.
  • officehero 1y ago
    I've reproduced this type of sentiment over several of my hobby projects and it usually hits hard toward the latter half of the project and its usually related to bugs. In the beginning it's all great and fast with LLMs, but then there's a kind of steep drop in motivation as one realizes one has to dig as deep anyway into the tedious stuff, because there are always bugs.
• fjfaase 1y ago
  When I ask chatGTP to generate the code for a M4F MCU that implements the VirtIO code for accessing the GPIO through RPMSG using FreeRTOS it produces two answers that are both incomplete and incorrect.
  • ivanjermakov 1y ago
    I wonder if "lack of data" problem is solvable within LLM. Humans can apply general programming language knowledge when using a new language, but LLMs have to have lots of concrete source code to work well. Today these models fall apart very quickly once you step out of js/python/c land to rust/zig/ocaml. With today LLM tech, feeding it language documentation does not work great.
  • cdrini 1y ago
    This is very outside my domain :P I asked ChatGPT to explain the acronyms in your comment and still do not understand it. But I think a reason LLMs might struggle is that there are too many up front complex requirements. Giving it only 1 or 2 complex requirements at a time, and then having it iterate, I've found to be more effective. Most LLMs don't "think", so when asking an LLM something, I generally try to think "would I be able to do this without thinking, if I had all the knowledge, but just had to start typing and go?". You could break down your prompt into separate prompts like this maybe: https://chatgpt.com/share/683eb7d7-e7ec-8012-8b3b-e34d523dc965 https://chatgpt.com/share/683eb7d7-e7ec-8012-8b3b-e34d523dc9... I think it broke things down in a weird way, but I definitely can't analyse the correctness of anything it outputs in this domain :P Coding specific agents like Copilot might be better able to handle a complex initial prompt, since they take the initial prompt, and use LLMs to break it down into smaller steps, which ChatGPT doesn't do. They can sort of "think". Deep research AIs also have a sort of thinking too, so might do better.
    • fjfaase 1y ago
      I was just giving it as an example of how there are domains where AI assistance have little or no benefit. Even if you used them for searching for resources or instructions how to achieve something, they come up with nothing useful, or lead you in the direction you do not want to go. It is just like searching with Google: If you search for the thing that 90% of the people are searching for, your answer will be in the first page. If you search for something outside that, you have to skip many pages, or even not being able to find it at all. One could also conclude that a large portion of software engineering is rather is mostly implementation of things that have been implemented many times before and that only a small portion consist of real software engineering where you have to develop code for a problem that nobody ever wrote before or that require a deep understanding of the problem domain.
• JodieBenitez 1y ago
  I don't get the focus on the coding. In all the projects I worked on for 25 years, coding has never been the bottleneck in projects. Maybe the projects I work on are simple, maybe I was lucky, but still: once the requirements are clear, coding is easy. And it's literally what takes the least time. I don't want to spend less time on coding thanks to AI. Because coding is what I like, not the rest of the job. Bring me AI that will do the meetings for me please.
• dominicrose 1y ago
  > but it’s bad at rust I gave chatgpt (the free desktop web version) my Ruby solution to one of my favorite adventofcode challenges and asked it to write in in Rust. I've no experience in Rust except reading the few first chapters of the book but with the help of the compiler I managed to fix it and it gave the right responses 100x faster than Ruby did. So chatgpt did a great job keeping the logic intact. I would have done the same thing if LLMs didn't exist, write it in Ruby first and then in Rust. The flexibility and expressiveness of Ruby allows to actually find a working solution. Experienced Rustaceans would do it directly in Rust, but writing in Ruby should be easier and an LLM can transform it.
• PokerFacowaty 1y ago
  This is a great article and I think I agree with most of it, not being an agent user myself. One point the author might be missing is: > If you were trying and failing to use an LLM for code 6 months ago †, you’re not doing what most serious LLM-assisted coders are doing The tech giants and AI bros alike have been bombarding us with "but look what it can do NOW", "the new shiny model is revolutionary, now buy tokens", "look what's around the corner" and whatever else for over 2 years now. Can you really blame a typical "skeptic" for not being interested in putting their time to veryfing these claims themselves after seeing mediocre results so many times? You start to develop a filter for these things.
• einpoklum 1y ago
  > LLMs can write a large fraction of all the tedious code you’ll ever need to write. For most software projections, they cannot even remotely do that - at least not today and as far as I can tell. And that is to say, it's not that they can write a not-so-large fraction. They cannot write any significant fraction of it. They can often write you a draft that helps you get there faster, though. They can also facilitate web search result consolidation etc. which can also help. But - they can also lead you down wrong paths and dead-ends, on occasion.
• GenshoTikamura 1y ago
  [flagged]
  • v3xro 1y ago
    Yes pretty much spot on. And if he thinks that > they’re smarter than me. And when they get over this affectation, they’re going to make coding agents profoundly more effective than they are today. Then I really hope he's in for a surprise.
  • Ragnarork 1y ago
    It's interesting also how these takes consistently ignore spectacularly the environmental cost of these as well. I'm a bit on the fence myself, as I think it's very harmful, but I can also see ways it can be useful. But it's absolutely mindblowing how this is nearly always completely out of the discussion even though our current way of living and powering things is on a timer and we still haven't addressed it as a whole.
    • GardenLetter27 1y ago
      What environmental cost? The uranium is going to decay on its own anyway, we might as well use that energy for useful things. Maybe LLMs will help lead to a breakthrough in nuclear fusion or battery research. Degrowth is the philosophy of poverty, and a poverty of philosophy.
      • rel_ic 1y ago
        This mindset is cancerous
      • timdiggerm 1y ago
        Degrowth and "Maybe this uses too much electricity" are not the same thing, particularly when a nontrivial portion of US generation is fossil-fuel based. As for the breakthroughs, maybe they will, maybe they won't; it's not much of an argument.
      • GuinansEyebrows 1y ago
• Leo-thorne 1y ago
  At first I didn’t think LLMs were that impressive, but ever since I started using them, I’ve pretty much stopped writing for loops by hand. It’s not that I forgot how. I just don’t feel like doing it anymore. The time it saves me on boilerplate lets me focus on other things. Sometimes the code isn’t perfect and I need to fix it, but it’s still way easier than starting from scratch.
  • lomase 1y ago
    99% of the code I write today does not use for loops. I don't need an IA for that, just C# or any map function.
• nmeofthestate 1y ago
  This sounds very cool - almost science-fiction in parts. I want to know more details about the specific technology, whether it could handle a 30k C++ codebase, how much work you would need to do to make it learn how to run your tests, analyse their output, interface with all your internal software development services etc.
• v3xro 1y ago
  Another one, here we go :) I think I'm going to keep it short because I am not here to convince people they're wrong, just to voice my dissent from uh almost every viewpoint this article comes from. > Professional software developers are in the business of solving practical problems for people with code. We are not, in our day jobs, artisans. Well that's just wrong - we have failed to capture tremendous value through knowledge of our craft and to reduce it down to min-maxing effort/profit is not a pursuit that I can get behind. Nobody is talking about building Ivory towers, but we can do a lot better than most of the common denominator technologies in use today. We're failing our users most of the time (and of course people like the author say it doesn't matter because it doesn't show up in the quarterly results). > Nobody cares if the logic board traces are pleasingly routed. Speak for yourself.
• cerpins 1y ago
  What worries me about this is that the benefit of well practiced developers using AI to boost their productivity is there, but what happens to the new developers that piggyback off of LLM tooling too much and end up with worse understanding as a whole?
  • cdrini 1y ago
    I think this has always been a problem; eg the students who do all their assignments in groups and coast through with a cursory understanding of their degree. Or those who cheat. If someone doesn't want to learn, there have always been ways to avoid it. Now it's easier with LLMs, that's true. But for people who do want to learn, I think it's also easier now with LLMs. I'm not sure where the equilibrium will land, in terms of whether we'll end up with more people with a deep understanding, or more people with a shallow understanding. Or maybe the ratio will end up being the same, but there will just be more people in both groups! Ie the ease of learning will pull some of the previously shallow learners into developing a deep understanding, and the ease of coasting will pull up people who were never into development before into being shallow learners.
• karel-3d 1y ago
  What is the agent setup that I should try? What I tried is indeed "set up Cursor" or "copy-paste ChatGPT", and it was all bad, I have no idea what is this "agent" and "MCP" stupp.
• manoji 1y ago
  > Think of anything you wanted to build but didn’t. You tried to home in on some > first steps. If you’d been in the limerent phase of a new programming > language, you’d have started writing. But you weren’t, so you put it off, for a > day, a year, or your whole career. > I can feel my blood pressure rising thinking of all the bookkeeping and Googling and dependency drama > of a new project. An LLM can be instructed to just figure all that shit out. > Often, it will drop you precisely at that golden moment where shit almost works, and development means > tweaking code and immediately seeing things work better. That dopamine hit is why I code. This is me . Just yesterday I finished something I have been putting off for 2 years. I maintain 2 mobile phones one because of work and i needed a way to see sms messages from the other phone. I wanted to write a simple andoird app that reads incoming messages and saves them somewhere for me to use for OTP's and other stuff. For the longest time I wanted to build something like this for myself but I have been putting it off just because of all the weird issues i had been getting with mobile development. A couple of days ago since I had some time and I fired up gemini and asked it to write me a simple flutter app for and to save the messages to supabase and voila it was amazing . With some help and some tweaking I have a fully functioning mobile app on andoird , a small tauri application on desktop to read the messages nicely formatted in a data table without much coding on my part at all. Truly remarkable.
• rk06 1y ago
  Can someone guide me which AI tools are good? And their docs and tutorial I want to see the hype but without paying up front. My focus area is c#, .net, js.
• djaychela 1y ago
  "If hallucination matters to you, your programming language has let you down." But every time I try this,this happens. I've tried the same thing on multiple agents and they all make up some magic api that doesn't exist, even when I've used the right thing elsewhere in the code to do the same job with that function commented as such. Asking them to use that always fails. This seems a massive flaw to me that is just hand waved away here.
• skor 1y ago
  well, I'm going to reference [1] a comment on the "Who Cares Era" that really stood out and maybe should get pinned somewhere. What about that "superpower" we had to make something out of _nothing_ but our own brains? Sure, you may have looked up some code (do some research and learn), but that mental exercise.. just knowing your code inside-out, can never be compared to the "oh look at that, it actually works" with LLM stuff. Well guess what, now, you traded that superpower for a subscription! (yes, you are now a middle man of software peddling - paying some company that stole other peoples code and ideas and did not pay _them anything_ in return), and eventually you will get to a point when the internet is down, you won't write any software that day cause you cant get the N model to work. Did we go to the next step in software evolution? If it has a cost per month (and you pay thieves) (yes that what they are), its going to be a hard "no" for me, you just became a cow. Sure, now this is whats expected of you? OK. This has some strong neoliberalism drift, I assume I can be wrong so please comments welcome I am quite interested in this part. yes, augmentations seem like amputations, is it McLuhan? I'm not sure, Will we retain our power to produce software? No! Humans dumb down very quickly, a generation is all it took to reduce reading to kids below expected educational levels [2]. There will be less professionals and lots of peddlers that have no skills, and software will be so junk it will be seriously scary to catch a plane in 10 years time. Interesting times. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44116724 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44116724 [2] https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2025/jun/02/gen-z-parents-reading-kids https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2025/jun/02/gen-z-p...
• shalmanese 1y ago
  I mean, the root cause of this is quite mundane. People like to think that intelligence is some intrinsic force but it's far better thought of as situational. We are contextually smarter or dumber based on the emotions we're trying to process from a situation and how our motivation reasoning allows us to avoid certain negative emotions. The subset of people the OP is trying to argue against are people who are otherwise normally intelligent but have an emotional need for AI to be unimportant that they're unable to process so they build a social community of terrible arguments. The nature of the internet is that visibility is terribly correlated (and often anti-correlated) with popularity so OP thinks this is some large contingent of people when it's instead algorithmically served conflict generators. Writing against that is also an algorithmic conflict generator, as evidenced by the number of upvotes here. The correct response is to realize that people putting up terrible arguments about AI don't actually care about AI, they're using this issue to process unresolved trauma from other, unrelated areas of their life and taking their ideas literally instead of seriously is a waste and diversion. There are plenty of smart people with far more nuanced views that still disagree with you where they're interested in the content of the argument.
• sebstefan 1y ago
  >Professional software developers are in the business of solving practical problems for people with code. We are not, in our day jobs, artisans. Steve Jobs was wrong: we do not need to carve the unseen feet in the sculpture. Nobody cares if the logic board traces are pleasingly routed. If anything we build endures, it won’t be because the codebase was beautiful. Maybe you are, but I didn't get a Master's degree to produce quick shit for shareholders
• ang_cire 1y ago
  One thing that really bothered me that the author glossed over (perhaps they don't care, given the tone of the article) is where they said: > Does an intern cost $20/month? Because that’s what Cursor.ai costs. > Part of being a senior developer is making less-able coders productive, be they fleshly or algebraic. But do you know what another part of being a senior developer is? Not just making them more productive, but also guiding the junior developers into becoming better, independent, self-tasking, senior coders. And that feedback loop doesn't exist here. We're robbing ourselves of good future developers, because we aren't even thinking about the fact that the junior devs are actively learning from the small tasks we give them. Will AI completely replace devs before we all retire? Maybe. Maybe not. But long before that, the future coders who aren't being hired and trained because a senior dev doesn't understand that the junior devs become senior devs (and that's an important pipeline) and would rather pay $20/month for an LLM, are going to become a major loss/ brain drain domestically.
  • paffdragon 1y ago
    I imagine it like this. Juniors will be taught by LLMs on some things, but seniors will still be there, they will still assist, pair program, code review, etc. but they will have another party, the LLM, like a smarter calculator.
  • esskay 1y ago
    It's a bit misleading to compare $20/month with an actual human person. The junior dev wont get half way through the day and tell you they've used up all their coding time for the month and will now respond with jibberish. Cursor is a heck of a lot more than $20/month if you actually want it working for a full work day, every day.
    • Closi 1y ago
      Maybe - but it will still probably be less than a junior dev. You could probably hammer the most expensive cursor API all-day every-day and it would still be a fraction of the cost of a junior dev.
    • falcor84 1y ago
• Swiffy0 1y ago
  My 5 cents would be that LLMs have replaced all those random (e.g. CSS, regex etc) generators, emmet-like IDE code completion/generator tools, as well as having to google for arbitrary code snippets which you'd just copy and paste in. In no way can AI be used for anything larger than generating singular functions or anything that would require writing to or modifying multiple files. Technically you might be able to pull off having AI change multiple files for you in one go, but you'll quickly run into sort of "Adobe Dreamviewer" type of issue where your codebase is dominated by generated code which only the AI that generated it is able to properly extend and modify. I remember when Dreamviewer was a thing, but you essentialyl had to make a choice between sticking with it forever for the project or not using it at all, because it would basically convert your source code into it's own proprietary format due to it becoming so horribly messy and unreadable. Regardless, AI is absolutely incredible and speeds up development by a great deal, (even) if you only use it to generate small snippets at the time. AI is also an absolute godsend for formatting and converting stuff from anything and to anything - you could e.g. dump your whole database structure to Gemini and ask it to generate an API against it; big task, but since it is basically just a conversion task, it will work very well.
• dev_l1x_be 1y ago
  So the reaso we should not use Rust (a memory safe language that gets rid of categories of bugs) is because some new AI tools are not read? Using AI for over a year now on a daily basis, most AI tools do not struggle with Rust, they struggle to provide value. If I do not instruct them to keep the output to the bare minimum, I usually end up with 10x the output what would be a simple solution to my problem.
• Voltage 1y ago
  I'm on the side of AI is a huge productivity booster (by my guess... 10x) But I don't want to make the claim lightly, so I did an experiment. I signed up for copilot pro, and have been using their 'edit' feature. This is more than just their auto complete. I set myself a goal to create a playable web game of classic frogger. It took 4 hours with copilot "edit" and my full attention. I didn't write a single line of code, but I did ask it to refactor and gave it a project description. I suspect this would have taken me 4 days full time to get to this level. Try it out: https://dev.zebrar.com/jd/frogger/ https://dev.zebrar.com/jd/frogger/
  • Voltage 1y ago
    * It's not mobile friendly, and you use arrow keys to move around
  • GenshoTikamura 1y ago
    > a playable web game of classic frogger You could create a Tetris in even less time. Try to create something more novel and less hot on the heatmap of paths walked in gamedev.
    • Voltage 1y ago
      I will. I'm just trying to evaluate the tools on a medium size task. I'm trying copilot's agent mode with the goal of creating a warcraft 1 clone. Or something resembling it.
  • guax 1y ago
    So less than 10x already. Question, how familiar are you with the used technologies? My experience on where Ai have been useful so far is things I don't have a good understanding on but, when I do, its a different ball game, mostly because coding it directly seems faster since I know exactly the behaviour I am looking for and I am not having to deal with unintended consequences. I see it as the Alice cat thing, when you don't know where you going, any road will take you there. So its been great for exploratory work and prototyping.
• Ygg2 1y ago
  > but it’s bad at rust It's not just Rust. It's everything that has been created post the last vacuum. You need a large corpus for LLM to get decent-ish.
• lawn 1y ago
  Not a very bright move from fly to publish this kind of condescending post on the company blog. Making fun of people who care about copyright (implying that fly abuses GPL for instance) is just icing on the cake.
• lomase 1y ago
  I never used AI, microservices, blockchain, Mongo, and used only 2 js frameworks in my carrer.
• HenriTEL 1y ago
  I'm working with python and it does not work very well, LLMs usually generates at least an order of magnitude more code than what I would write. That code often uses outdated practices, does poor design choices and does not understand hints like writing code in a way that reduce cognitive load, even when we explain that it means, i.e. keep the number of classes and functions small. It's the complete opposite of OP's main language GO, as he says: > Go has just enough type safety, an extensive standard library, and a culture that prizes (often repetitive) idiom. LLMs kick ass generating it. Python is an interpreted dynamically typed language and the static type checkers are not there yet (most popular 3rd parties libraries have no type hints for example). Also it allows for many different programming styles that the LLMs struggle to choose from. 1. Every extra line of code is much more risky. 2. It's much harder to verify the LLM's code. On the other hand I think rust will be in a good place in regards to LLMs in the next few years thanks to the robustness of the language and the quality of its diagnostic messages. Those 2 attributes should compound very well.
  • lubujackson 1y ago
    I use Cursor with Python and it works great. Things you should try: * use type hints everywhere. * use dataclasses everywhere. * add the dataclass files to your prompt. * if the produced code is too complex, ask the LLM "Is this the simplest and cleanest way to solve this?"
• epolanski 1y ago
  LLMs are a tool, a very precious one if you know how to use it. I've seen Antirez use it for hard to find bugs in the Redis codebase (videos are on YouTube, albeit Italian), I've seen Cursor refactor in a matter of minutes code that would've taken hours, correctly, I've seen security researchers leverage it to find complex edge cases, etc My 2 cents is that developers that won't learn to use the tools will be left behind (albeit not for long imho), but also, that sales people promoting the idea that devs can be replaced equally dangerous.
• exfalso 1y ago
  I was skeptical at first, but after trying to use it several times for work (Cursor/Claude) I concluded that it's worse than I thought. Lot more time wasted for little to no results. Maybe for boilerplate frontend code or TODO app generation it's good or something? Anyway in a couple of months I'll try again. Until that time, I guess the search result summaries are nice?
• YuukiRey 1y ago
  Adding fuel to the fire. I'm extremely disappointed to see such an inflammatory article on fly.io. I wouldn't want this on my personal blog, let alone on my employers, but I guess they're fine with it. I've been using Zed and Claude Sonnet 4 (and sometimes trying Opus) heavily over the past weeks. For small edits where I have lots of unit tests, the results were great. So great that they worry me with regards to job security. For exploring a new programming domain it was also somewhat useful. I work a lot with the Typescript compiler API right now, and it has almost no documentation. Since the AI can see into every GitHub repository out there, it's much better, and more efficient, at learning APIs based on code from other folks. On the other hand it means I don't do that job, and I am forced to rely 100% on how the AI presents the Typescript compiler API to me. Are there better methods I could use? Who knows. Where it's abysmal is code architecture. Sometimes it's almost comical: it adds an if statement to handle one highly specific edge case in a program that only makes sense if it solves the general case. This didn't happen often thought. The hardest part was to force it to reuse existing code from the same file. My use case is transforming a Typescript AST into a GraphQL AST. The code is one big switch statement with lots of recursive calls. The AI would often add 300 lines of code that duplicate some logic which already exists somewhere else. In the end I rewrote the whole thing from scratch. At around 900 lines of code the AI was starting to really struggle. When I wanted to take over, I realized that I didn't have the in-depth knowledge to do so. And trying to understand the code the AI had written proved futile. Ultimately that's on me, I should have been more diligent reviewing the dozens of 300 line of code changes the AI throws at me over the course of a day. But I wasn't, because reviewing is really, really hard. For many reasons. And AI makes it even harder. Am I therefore nuts? I find this whole article extremely one sided. Surely, based on the sheer amount of both positive and negative press, the answer is somewhere in the middle.
  • neochief 1y ago
    Having the same exact experience as you.
• mcv 1y ago
  I wasn't familiar with these agents yet. Does anyone know what the best ones are? Is there a good comparison of the options and their strengths and weaknesses?
• thunderbong 1y ago
  > We are not, in our day jobs, artisans. Steve Jobs was wrong: we do not need to carve the unseen feet in the sculpture. Nobody cares if the logic board traces are pleasingly routed. If anything we build endures, it won’t be because the codebase was beautiful. Very true and humbling.
  • draw_down 1y ago
    [dead]
• thesz 1y ago
  I thought so about strong static typing looong time ago.
• fhkatari 1y ago
  This: "Important caveat: I’m discussing only the implications of LLMs for software development. For art, music, and writing? I got nothing. I’m inclined to believe the skeptics in those fields. I just don’t believe them about mine". I want to emphasize this. AI seems like a great 'first draft', but not a 'finished product'. In the hands of a programmer, a first draft is a great start. But pushing AI to frontline workers or customer support fails, as Klarna learned, because a first draft is not good enough.
• zombot 1y ago
  > Does an intern cost $20/month? Because that’s what Cursor.ai costs. And who the fuck will train those interns, now they've been replaced by machines?
• rotis 1y ago
  The author defends mediocore code, yet wrote this piece: https://fly.io/blog/vscode-ssh-wtf/ https://fly.io/blog/vscode-ssh-wtf/ Where he dunks on how SSH access works in VSCode. I don't know. The code and architecture behind this feature may well be bananas, but gets the work done. Sounds like a clear case of mediocority. I wonder how does he reconcile those two articles together. For me this is more of a clickbait. Both of the articles. With that in mind, if I am nuts for being sceptical of LLMs, I think it is fair to call the author a clickbaiter.
  • AnimalMuppet 1y ago
    Hmm. The author is a cryptography expert. So, honest question: Would he trust crypto code written by an AI? (I suspect I know the answer, but I am not certain of it.)
    • svachalek 1y ago
      The whole point of crypto is you don't trust code written by anyone, even yourself.
    • ikrenji 1y ago
      the AI is going to use crypto libraries just like you would?
  • okdood64 1y ago
    How a feature works, and how a feature is coded (how "nice" & canonical the code is) are two very different things. He's dunking on the design of it.
• thomasfl 1y ago
  Sometimes AI model generates technical debt. It happens for instance if AI generates code with dependancies that to old to be automatically be updated to the latest version.
• Fredkin 1y ago
  My main concern is not even mentioned in this article and there are hardly any comments here addressing it: Privacy / allowing 3rd parties to read and potentially train on your proprietary source code. I've used LLMs to crank out code for tedious things (like generating C-APIs and calling into poorly documented libraries) but I'm not letting them touch my code until I can run it 100% locally offline. Would love to use the agentic stuff but from what I've heard it's still too slow to run on a high end workstation with a single 4080. Or have things got better lately, and crucially is there good VisualStudio integration for running local agents / LLMs?
  • oblio 1y ago
    The problem is, it's like ads. Even if it's a paid subscription, the incentive to hoover up your code, metadata about your code or everything they can get away with is just too strong. I think it will just happen at some point, unless you run them 100% locally or hosted somewhere but self managed.
    • Fredkin 1y ago
      Yes and even if they were squeaky clean and didn't do anything bad with your code, there's also the possibility that they've been hacked and code is getting siphoned off somewhere.
  • julvo 1y ago
    Do you store code on GitHub? If so, how is GH's guarantee to not use your code different from Cursor's (with privacy mode enabled)?
    • Fredkin 1y ago
      No I definitely don't use GitHub. Everything is entirely in-house. But even if I did, there's a much more solid foundation of trust there, whereas these AI companies have been very shady with their 'better to ask for forgiveness, than permission' attitudes of late.
• shaky-carrousel 1y ago
  It is going to be so much fun when all AI companies suddenly double prices, because what are you going to do, hire juniors?
• pera 1y ago
  It's fascinating how over the past year we have had almost daily posts like this one, yet from the outside everything looks exactly the same, isn't that very weird? Why haven't we seen an explosion of new start-ups, products or features? Why do we still see hundreds of bug tickets on every issue tracking page? Have you noticed anything different on any changelog? I invite tptacek, or any other chatbot enthusiast around, to publish project metrics and show some actual numbers.
  • tschellenbach 1y ago
    One of our AI enabled internal projects is moving ~135 faster than before. Of course you can't perfectly compare. New framework, better insights, updated libraries etc.
    • mrkeen 1y ago
      Bless your metric. If you end up finishing it in 6 months, are you going to revise that estimate, or celebrate the fact that you don't need to wait until 2092 to use the project?
      • DirkH 1y ago
        Lol, I appreciate your reality check
      • 0x500x79 1y ago
        Yeah, these 100x numbers being thrown out are pretty wild. It dawned on me during the Shopify CEO post awhile back. 100x is unfathomable! You did a years worth of work in 3 days? That is what 100x means.
  • kubb 1y ago
    Most likely there’s a slight productivity increase. The enthusiasts have a cognitive dissonance because they are pretty sure this is huge and we’re living in the future, so they go through various denial strategies when the execs ask them where the money is. In this case it’s blame. These darned skeptics are ruining it for everyone.
• lowsong 1y ago
  Does no-one think ahead, for more than a moment? > Professional software developers are in the business of solving practical problems for people with code. Are we? Is that our job? You might think it is, and it might even feel like it. But it is not. Our job, in 99% of cases, is to make stock price go up. That means making software that people will buy, making people want to keep buying it, and doing whatever makes your investors happy. So what happens as you use these tools? Your job changes from coder to "LLM manager", but let's assume you're happy with that. You're more "productive", which is an artificial metric and nothing to do with your real job as described above. That's fine for now, but what happens down the road? Now your company is paying more and more money to these LLM services, and paying you less and less. > "but they take-rr jerbs" So does open source. This is a gross misunderstanding of open source. Most open source developers are paid to be, full time, by companies. Why? Warm fuzzy feeling? Goodness of their heart? No. It's because it's good for business. These open source techs are a baseline, there' not worth being competitive on. Build the open base in the direction you want, and build the "business value" ontop for profit. > We used to pay good money for databases. We still do. Have you looked at managed PostgreSQL prices lately? Also if you haven't noticed, Oracle hasn't gone anywhere. > LLMs really might displace many software developers. That’s not a high horse we get to ride. Our jobs are just as much in tech’s line of fire as everybody else’s have been for the last 3 decades. This isn't the same thing as replacing punch cards, or moving away from Java 6, or replacing artisans with factory machines. This is centralisation and rent-seeking. As companies become more and more dependant on a handful of companies with the upfront capital to build massive server farms... what do you think is going to happen? Once they've convinced enough people that LLMs are essential to their work it's going to cost a lot more than $20/month. Once these companies are entrenched they will wring every last dollar out of every company that's grown to depend on them, many will simply fold. Maybe we are in a seismic shift in our industry. But the beneficiaries are not going to be whole-hearted LLM adopters, no amount of saying "you need to change how you work" is going to save any of us. The only people that will benefit are going to be the people that own the data centres.
• nilirl 1y ago
  The one main claim the article makes: Senior developers should not ignore the productivity gains from LLMs. Best use of evidence is deductive: Lots of code is tedious and uninteresting -> LLMs are fast at generating lots of tedious code -> LLMs help productivity. Weakest part of the argument: The list of rebuttals doesn't have an obvious organization to it. What exactly is the main argument they're arguing against? It's not stated outright but because the post is bookended by references to 'those smarter than me', I think this is an argument against the shaming of developers using (and loving) LLM tools. Which I think is fair. Overall, the post did not add anything to the general discussion. But the popularity of the author (and fly.io posts) may make it a beacon for some.
• aswerty 1y ago
  [flagged]
• hlpn 1y ago
  Very weak arguments and intentionally provocative.
• outlore 1y ago
  The author mentions that smart programmers kick off agents, then go for a coffee and wait to be notified. But agents like Claude Code and Cursor run on a user’s machine right? So how can they work in the background like that? are there agents that can work async?
• Bluescreenbuddy 1y ago
  >but the code is shitty, like that of a junior developer >Does an intern cost $20/month? Because that’s what Cursor.ai costs. RIP Junior devs
• homeonthemtn 1y ago
  AI is a tool, akin to a seamstress' sewing machine. Use it well, and with intention, and it'll help speed up your work. That's it.
• dspillett 1y ago
  > but the craft - Do you like fine Japanese woodworking? All hand tools and sashimono joinery? Me too. Do it on your own time. That is not my objection, though some seem to think it is. I got into coding because I found it interesting and fun. I've avoided managing others because I hate that sort of thing. Working with an LLM, prompting it to do work then assessing that work and adjusting the prompts or cleaning/completing the output myself, is far too much like outsourcing work to a 3rd party junior, and I don't want to do that whether said junior is a human in a far off land (or just down the street, for all I know!) or some LLM run by MegaCorp-ᴙ-Us. I was already seriously disliking much of the modern programming industry (remote teams, the shit-show that client-side web work continues to devolve into, and much else) anyway. If it gets to the point where I can't do my job (or can't do it competitively enough) without using LLMs on top of dealing with the other things I don't care for, I'll be retraining for something else entirely. Heck, I've got the mortgage paid, I don't have or plan to have a family beyond the cats, I could just about survive on shelf-stacking… I know it isn't a passing fad, though I'm convinced the current and near-future iterations aren't going to be quite as significant in the longer term as many believe. I don't object to others using it (aside from the matter of “MegaCorp-ᴙ-Us”s of the world suddenly deciding that piracy is just fine because they stand to benefit from it, in fact are already benefitting from it, in this case). But I don't plan to be nagged into using it myself. > Do it on your own time. If/when that career shift happens, or I survive as I am long enough to retire, I will probably do exactly that. As it stands I spend more than enough of my life on tech in DayJob, my own time is increasingly filled with unrelated hobbies and people.
• James_K 1y ago
  Use of LLMs to program really doesn't make much sense. The very nature of computer software is that it's a small effort from a small number of people that is multiplied out to massive productivity gains for a large number of people. Unless the LLM is producing better output than the people would, you are saving time for a small number of people in exchange for degrading the experience of a much larger number of people. If your AI-coded app goes down for a day and you have to vibe-debug it, that is probably gonna put you in the red from a time perspective. With the amount of supervision you need to give this stuff, I can't see it being useful for much more than auto-completing the next few lines of code as you type. You've got to read and go over the whole output carefully anyway, so you might as well have finer grained control over it.
• Ensorceled 1y ago
  I've been using LLM's pretty regularly for just over a year (my PyCharm AI license just renewed). My experience before that was pretty mixed and fell into the "sort of worth it" category. It's improved to the point where the summary that I would email a junior developer is a pretty good prompt that produces code pretty close to want I want. I had a weird project recently where I needed a stand alone event handler that would send an email receipt to the customer, another email to customer service, log the event in an accounting system via an API. I wrote up a proposal for the rest of the management team and, once accepted, pasted the proposal into ChatGPT (and a few others, but ChatGPT gave the best results). I basically got a full recipe for setting up AWS API Gateway, Lambda, and SES, the Python Lambda function with api calls to SES, suggestions on using AWS SAM, etc. etc. Tweaked the prompt a couple of times and then took over from there. I had this into the hands of the testing team in less than a day. I'm pretty sure this would reduce my team size in ANY role I've had in my career. Maybe not halve the teams, but it would eliminate a lot of the junior or journeymen developers.
• jurgenaut23 1y ago
  Something that I feel is missed in every such post or debate is that, maybe, this isn’t a yes/no question. Fast forward 10 years, the skeptics will be right on a few things, and the fanboys will be right on other things. I for one know this isn’t just a “fad” like NFTs were, but I cannot help but feel skeptical about the sweeping claims of software engineering’s doomsday.
• m0llusk 1y ago
  > If you were trying and failing to use an LLM for code 6 months ago †, you’re not doing what most serious LLM-assisted coders are doing. Translation: Drop your work and current tools every few months to pick up the shiny new thing or you aren't cool or even sane. Reality: Your favorite cool new tool will be integrated into development work as it is proven, documented, and time allows. This idea that development must leap onto the latest shiny new thing every few months is extremely corrosive to reasonable business practice. The needs of the many outweigh the preferences of the lead developer.
• benregenspan 1y ago
  One other thing that might feed into skepticism is that, for the average person who does not actively choose to use LLMs, the most regular LLM interaction is likely to be with AI Overviews in Google search, which are generally a pretty unfortunate experience. For example my last search with an AI Overview, for interpretation of blood pressure reading, resulted in the output: "Systolic pressure (top number): 123 mmHg, which is within the normal range of less than 120 mmHg". The fact that LLMs can generate this kind of output is not incompatible with the OP's argument about how useful they can be when combined with agents and code review. But search is the lowest-friction way for anyone to interact with LLMs currently, and right now it's a pretty poor advertisement.
• adammarples 1y ago
  What is the current meta on a fully agentic workflow as he describes it? Wake up, write a vague prompt, go for coffee, and get a PR to review on your phone? I'm genuinely interested to see what going all in on this looks like.
• cratermoon 1y ago
  "If you build something with an LLM that people will depend on, read the code. In fact, you’ll probably do more than that." Thus sucking up all the time you "saved" by having the LLM write the code you saved. The machine made the easy parts of coding easier while making the hard parts harder. "You’ll spend 5-10 minutes knocking it back into your own style." As if style is the only thing that matters? "LLMs are showing signs of adapting to local idiom, but we’re not there yet." First step fallacy. Ladders are showing signs of being tall enough to reach the moon, but we're not there yet.
• Existenceblinks 1y ago
  Ironically all nuts friends seem to be talking less, less defensive than other nuts friends who keep talking about other people not buying what they believe nuts.
• lerp-io 1y ago
  ai would be great if only the problems I was trying to solve were the right ones
• kurko 1y ago
  What's the likelihood that this was 90%+ written by an LLM? It'd be ironic, especially now that there are 2000+ engineers commenting on it.
• cwoolfe 1y ago
  "Reading other people’s code is part of the job. If you can’t metabolize the boring, repetitive code an LLM generates: skills issue! How are you handling the chaos human developers turn out on a deadline?" Good point! Treat AI generated code as if somebody else had written it. It will need the same review, testing and refactoring as that.
• jacobsenscott 1y ago
  I've yet to see an LLM produce anything but disastrous bugs. Remember they don't know they're writing code that can destroy companies and livelihoods. They are just spitting out plausible but always wrong text.
• dweinus 1y ago
  > You’ll spend 5-10 minutes knocking it back into your own style You lost me here. I have often found it to be far more than a 10-minute style issue, but fundamental misunderstanding of the code purposes that I need to fix.
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• ta_20250603 1y ago
  My AI enamored friends are all nuts. I get it. You're being so productive. (Or so you claim. I don't believe you.) But if I don't affirm your work choices, or embrace them myself, you lose your mind like a little caffeinated squirrel. > If you can’t metabolize the boring, repetitive code an LLM generates: skills issue! Case in point. Touch grass.
  • Joel_Mckay 1y ago
    Slop adding implicit arbitrary higher order tensors to linear problems. Sounds cool, but not useful... lol Reminds one of a classic fictional conversation... =3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X6WHBO_Qc-Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X6WHBO_Qc-Q
• trostaft 1y ago
  Thanks for the article. I've been unwilling to try agentic editing for a while, and this is the kick I need to give it a shot.
• dismalaf 1y ago
  Fun article, although I'd say I'm maybe slightly more on the skeptical side. I've found LLMs can't really write a whole program there isn't already a template for. They're good enough at writing individual functions, and as the author mentioned, their breadth of knowledge is better than any individual. Honestly, I see them as a supercharged version of googling, without all the out of context answers you get from Google since they also place ads and whatnot. I find an LLM can get me an answer far quicker than a regular internet search, even if it's imperfect and I'm probably not going to put it straight into my code.
• metalrain 1y ago
  I think LLMs are great and patient teachers. But code is something I like to write myself, it's not about speed of producing code. It's keeping it such you still fully understand it.
• throwawaybob420 1y ago
  Another day another post about AI by people whose job will be made redundant. Something fascinating about this HN crowd in particular is its lack of foresight. Companies producing medicine have to take into account longterm effects, yet people working in these “tech” companies push out AI after AI with not a single care in how it’s going to impact people.
  • simonw 1y ago
    The more time I spend using AI-assisted programming tools the less worried I am that they're going to take my job. Not because they aren't effective - they are - but because using them helps me appreciate how important my own skills and experience are for using them to effectively solve problems.
• apercu 1y ago
  > My AI skeptic friends are all nuts My CEO friends that overstate the efficacy of LLMs are all nuts. (I say this as someone who has been working in "AI" as part of Digital transformation roadmaps for SEVEN years and as someone who has used LLM's daily in my workflow for 3 years).
  • simonw 1y ago
    I think both of those statements are true at the same time.
• roncar 1y ago
  When I made a mid career change to Cobol programming in 1981 my first manager (a suit as programmers referred to them then) pointed to a book on his desk; the title,as I can best recall was Programming Without Programmers. He "You got in too late," he said. I retired from programming in 2010. The hype has a long history. I hope I'm around long enough to see how this plays out.
• strogonoff 1y ago
  If yesterday we were sued for singing the happy birthday song in public, and today we see corporations with market caps the size of countries pretending that IP ownership is not much of a thing, the alarm bells should be deafening. Control over intellectual property has given us fantastic things—Linux, Blender, etc.—and you can’t have GPL without an ability to defend copyleft. IP laws provide that ability. One does not need to be a skeptic about machine learning and its potential as technology to refuse to engage with its practical applications when they are clearly ethically corrupt. The ends do not justify the means. Just like refusing to buy products of forced labour or disproportionate environmental impact, or to invest in war and bloodshed, everyone makes this decision for themselves.
• hakanderyal 1y ago
  Spot on. Current gen LLMs also has the ability to mimic your code style. I always point it to existing code, and the result is the same as what I would have written. Yesterday I “wrote” 18k lines of code with Claude & Cursor. Mostly UI, some backend. This would have taken me a week without LLMs. I’m sold.
• dilDDoS 1y ago
  [flagged]
  • asadm 1y ago
    I think you missed the part that's not exciting. When you write your 50th webapp and start integrating auth flows once again that just work slightly differently in this new app than your older one. That's what boils the blood, not writing new business logic.
    • dilDDoS 1y ago
      Right, I guess that's what I mean I've side-stepped so far. I don't generally work on anything web related and haven't had to repeatedly work on similar projects over and over again. I've maybe just misunderstood what most other developers actually work on in the industry.
  • pests 1y ago
    To your first point, I think it’s just a distinction our industry hasn’t figured out yet. There are some stages in projects that some people just don’t like. Similar to how you have rough carpentry vs finish. Some like building the structure, others like the details and polish.
  • apercu 1y ago
    > Interestingly, I've noticed that a lot of the people I meet that both find coding tedious and are extremely excited by AI coding, are generally over 40. I don't think it's the coding that they find tedious.
  • KerrAvon 1y ago
    Anecdatum, but I'm over 40 and do not find coding tedious and am not excited by AI coding per se.
    • cassianoleal 1y ago
      Likewise. I love coding. I’m not excited by AI coding but I am curious. I find it useful in quite limited ways. I have recently started an Ansible project where Aider helped me get off the ground and expand a little bit. Then it made a mess out of it so some other day I’ll have to find the time to start over. It was useful though, and I’ll use some of the bits created by the LLM to kickstart it in anger next time around.
• deleted 1y ago
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• gspencley 1y ago
  The reason that I personally don't use LLMs was not addressed by the article: I haven't found a way to use it that makes me develop faster. The articles talks about "tedious code." If you need to generate a large static value table or something, then OK an LLM might give you a really fast result and cut through the tedium. Most of us were already writing short scripts to do that. I'm open to the possibility that an LLM can do it faster. But it's such a rare requirement that the productivity gains are truly negligible here even if they can. And in those cases, it's obvious what the repetitive task needs to be. I often find myself writing the code by hand to be quicker than coming up with a prompt to get it to write the code that I then need to review for correctness. The article then mentions scaffolding. Things like "bookkeeping" when it comes to creating and setting up a new repo (whatever he means by that). This is why I have, historically, been a big fan of frameworks and generators. Point being, this is already a solved problem and I haven't found a way to further improve the state of this world with LLMs. LLMs might be an alternate tool that work just as well. But they haven't made my existing daily workflow any faster. Setting up new repos is also something that is done so rarely that even if an LLM netted a 100% increase in efficiency, it wouldn't really impact much. I am an AI "skeptic" but I'm not a naysayer. I do use LLMs regularly. I just don't use them for developing code because I have yet to find a problem that they solve for me. Don't get me wrong, there are problems that they can solve... I just haven't come across any solutions to previously-unsolved problems. Meaning I can swap an existing solution for an LLM-based one... and it is a valid solution... but I don't observe any increase in productivity from doing so. The existing solution was already working fine. I am genuinely looking forward to the day when this changes. When I identify a single existing problem without an existing solution that LLMs solve for me when developing software. I just have yet to come across one.
  • incomingpain 1y ago
    >I haven't found a way to use it that makes me develop faster. I have pycharm pro with the ai. I can right click a function and there's 12 things AI can just do for you. "find problems" where the linter has no concerns and it finds problems that dont show up from linter are shockingly good. This is like "Hey, you need to make sure this function is only running once at a time or it can easily overwhelm the cpu." "write documentation" and it just fills in the documentation. I havent a clue what it writes and I wont be doing it. "generate unit tests" is interesting? I have literally never written a unit test before and the code it produces is lengthy. Unit tests are a waste of time; but others disagree and so AI can produce it. "explain code" look I wrote the code years ago half drunk, half high. No comments. It explains it all in depth and perfectly. Comments sometimes go stale after bug fixes and then make things confusing. Comments arent important when you have this beautifulness. Lets go back to that cpu DOS attack example. I then can prompt what is claude 3.5 sonnet to give me to solution to fix it. It gives me this beautiful cache option. I could just hit apply and it'd be done. But then i said it's too complicated give me something simpler. It then gives me a solution that is simpler. >nd in those cases, it's obvious what the repetitive task needs to be. I often find myself writing the code by hand to be quicker than coming up with a prompt to get it to write the code that I then need to review for correctness. Its all about the boring busy work crap that doesnt need to be done that now gets done.
• bhaktatejas922 1y ago
  I find the claims of 2-5x more productivity insane. I'm at least 10x more productive.
• Kennel9007 1y ago
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• norir 1y ago
  This has become an impoverished conversation. I have seen this pattern where llm capabilities improve and people who had previously dismissed the technology based on its present capabilities realize they were wrong in their pessimistic assessment of the potential of the tech switch over to the other side and project their own previous bias onto those who continue to object. The basic structure is this: six months ago, I tried llms and they were trash, but holy cow they have improved so much, now I can use them to avoid tedious that I don't like! Don't be an idiot like my skeptical past self. Then they accuse everyone who now disagrees with their take on the tech as being an incurious luddite who is blinded by their anti-progress bias. Personally, as a non-user but close observer of the tech, I never doubted that the tech would improve but there are obvious problems with the tech beyond hallucinations that have to do with human meaning, understanding and power relations that cannot be solved by making the tech better. My challenge to all of the booster is this: try to articulate your own personal vision of both ai utopia and ai dystopia. I personally find it borderline impossible to even imagine a utopia emerging from genai, but it is extremely easy for me to imagine dystopia, especially given the entities that are controlling the tech and competing to "win" the ai arms race. For me, the representation of the Chinese state as filtered through western media is already a dystopia. Of course, having not been to China myself and being unable to speak any of their languages, I cannot personally verify the representation. But by competing with the Chinese on ai (and I mean Chinese in the way we define them in the west, which I recognize may be very different from both the actual lived experience in China and their self-conception), we become more like our own negative stereotypes of them. It is essentially a race to disempower ordinary people, remove agency from their lives, hand it over to agents who most certainly do not have the best interest of living humans in mind and call this victory. To "win" the ai war as presently defined would likely be disaster for us all. There are these ridiculous handwaving things about solving climate change or even human mortality with this tech even though there is no evidence whatsoever that it will do this. Just because the people building it say it will do these things doesn't mean we should trust them. Imagine if a primatologist tried to tell us that because they have trained chimpanzees to recognize colors and some words better than a three year old, we should now stop investing in education and direct all of out resources into training chimps to do all of our repetitive tasks for us to liberate us from the drudgery of doing anything for ourselves. With enough resources, you would see an explosion in chimp capabilities and this would come directly at the expense of humans, who now have no work to do and just sit on top of a pyramid built by chimp labor. Not only would the things we made be worse than what we could have if we focused on developing our own human capacities instead of chimp capacities, but we would live in fear that the chimps (who also are much stronger than us) will wake up to their plight and rise up against their rulers. Humans would also rapidly lose our own capabilities and become much more like chimps than the humans of today. Sound familiar? I tend to believe that as it is currently being developed, this tech is far more likely to lead us in a direction like the chimp apocalypse than some post labor utopia. That doesn't mean that the tech isn't getting better or can't do impressive things. I can hold both things in my head at once. But I am much more concerned with human flourishing and well being than some bored engineers who don't actually like programming (or at least don't like it under the current industrial conditions) feeling like they are being liberated from the tedium of their work. And instead of solving the real the underlying problems that make the work so tedious, we instead compound the problem by having ai generate even more of the exact kind of code that caused the problem i the first place.
• zahlman 1y ago
  > Level Setting > First, we need to get on the same page. If you're [6 months out of date with the technology you think of as overhyped after having observed it for the last 4 years or so], you're [not fairly evaluating it]. Perhaps, but this is an extremely unconvincing approach to the argument right out of the gate - it's basically on the same level as "communism has never been tried". Especially if you're going to start out by describing your interlocutors as "crazy", rather than positing that an effectively completely new thing now exists that ought to be evaluated differently from Copilot et. al.
• lucaspauker 1y ago
  > Also: let’s stop kidding ourselves about how good our human first cuts really are.
• flkiwi 1y ago
  I tend to agree with the gist of this, namely that the change is here and "AI" presents some huge potential to save me from having to do the tedious stuff. But we do need a bit of a sanity check. I'm in the middle of trying to convince any of the AIs that I have access to to write me some simple Lua. Specifically, I'm trying to write a query that returns a certain subset of pages from the Silverbullet V2 note tool. This isn't particularly difficult, but it's become this hilarious journey to try to get the AI to figure this problem out. Silverbullet is a niche use case, v2 even more so, but a reasonably skilled developer could peruse the API documentation and come up with a pretty good starting point. AI tools? Absolutely insane wrong answers. I finally specifically asked one or two of them not to guess with their answers and they just straight up said "nah, we don't know how to do this." Point being: there's some real power in these tools, but if the ground is not already well-trodden, they risk creating a huge time sink that could be better served just learning to do the thing yourself.
  • deboredguy 1y ago
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  • squidbeak 1y ago
    Don't you think the AI might too, if you passed it the API docs?
    • flkiwi 1y ago
      Not the ones I’ve tried. They make a go of it but their results have been generally inferior, often wildly so. Because they can’t make intuitive connections as easily, I assume they need both the rules and examples of implementations to produce workable output.
• tshaddox 1y ago
  I don't doubt that LLMs will have a large impact on software and programming. But I do wonder whether it will be a positive impact. I think one of the biggest problems the software industry has is that it's far too rare for the people building software to have deep explanatory knowledge about what they have built. LLMs threaten to make this problem vastly worse than it already is.
  • bdangubic 1y ago
    the reason this is rare is that no one stays on any one project long enough for this to be a reality anywhere. you know anyone working 15-20 years on the same project? I’ve been on many projects where deep explanatory knowledge existed through and through until the project was initial-code-complete and then people left to do other amazing things leaving project with people with limited knowledge of it. I suspect this is the case for vast majority of software
• nancyminusone 1y ago
  Title nitpick: The amount is people who care about AI for coding assistance is a relative minority. For everyone else, there's 'AI', which has a huge branding problem. 'AI' is filling all search results with trash, and creating trash websites full of trash to fill up the rest of the search results. It's generating trash images to put at the top of every blog post. It's eating up all the server load with scraping. It's what's been fooling my dad every day on Facebook. When people are sick of AI, this is what they are talking about. AI hype people ignore this perspective each and every time. It doesn't matter how great your paper Mill's paper is, if you're dumping PCBs in the river, people are going to quite rightly get pissed off.
  • deleted 1y ago
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  • mierz00 1y ago
    AI has a huge branding problem on HN but I haven’t found that to be true outside of tech. Many people are very eager to see how AI can improve their lives. I’m building a product for accountants that uses AI, initially I avoided using AI as a part of marketing copy. Turns out, people are much more interested when I tell them it uses AI behind the scenes.
    • xk_id 1y ago
      It actually varies by segment. The least technical people are enthusiastic about AI. The moderately technical (e.g tech hobbyists, artists and power users) are repulsed. The segment of tech professionals are themselves divided, but I think based on how much they like/hate their career as programmers. Either way, what’s very different about this AI bubble is that the early adopters are predominantly the least technical users. This is a notable inversion of the typical adoption curve.
• nsagent 1y ago
  > Meanwhile, software developers spot code fragments seemingly lifted from public repositories on Github and lose their shit. What about the licensing? If you’re a lawyer, I defer. But if you’re a software developer playing this card? Cut me a little slack as I ask you to shove this concern up your ass. No profession has demonstrated more contempt for intellectual property. I was willing to read until I got to this part. He can shove this drivel up his own ass for all I care if that's how he thinks. What a waste of time.
• deleted 1y ago
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• wan23 1y ago
  Someone at work said something to the effect of "Oh, this would be great for an intern but we don't have one this year" to which I responded "sure you do, its name is Copilot".
• debrisapron 1y ago
  I want to skip all the debate and just have someone tell me what setup I need to get to here: > Kids today don’t just use agents; they use asynchronous agents. They wake up, free-associate 13 different things for their LLMs to work on, make coffee, fill out a TPS report, drive to the Mars Cheese Castle, and then check their notifications. They’ve got 13 PRs to review. Three get tossed and re-prompted. Five of them get the same feedback a junior dev gets. And five get merged.
• averageRoyalty 1y ago
  I feel silly asking, but is this reality or hyperbole?: > An agent can occupy itself for hours putzing with your tests in a VM and come back later with a PR. > Kids today don’t just use agents; they use asynchronous agents. They wake up, free-associate 13 different things for their LLMs to work on, make coffee, fill out a TPS report, drive to the Mars Cheese Castle, and then check their notifications. They’ve got 13 PRs to review. Three get tossed and re-prompted. Five of them get the same feedback a junior dev gets. And five get merged. I'm working better and harder with Roocode in Code mode (and somtimes Architect). I've only been doing it for a few weeks, and it reads to me like I'm already using an 'old approach'.
• kiitos 1y ago
  I read this article completely thru, twice, and I still have no idea what the author is trying to say. All I can read here is a bunch of sarcastic dismissals of stuff that I don't believe and have no way to evaluate.
• Cloudef 1y ago
  LLM fanatics throw me nuts, instead of learned helplessness, at least try to understand what the token predictor outputs and be honest when you used LLM to generate your code dump when asking for help. Otherwise you are just wasting time and being simply a middle man for a machine and person who expects an interaction with actual human being with their valuable time.
• jasonm23 1y ago
  Here's an idea... imagine you are just starting, you know nothing... an AI can and will help you. Tell me you won't use it and explain properly, without appeal to "legacy" or "human values" or other abstracts which don't self validate. Now note that this is POV for every child on earth. The new discipline is provider of LLM/AI guard rails, and absolutely requires knowing what is/not correct.
• bananamerica 1y ago
  I know this is a website for programmers and I am not one. I like LLMs for quick answers and simple tasks like proofreading (just to fix errors, not to add or change anything) and simple text formating. I absolutely hate for everything else. I am a writer and LLMs prose may be correct and sometimes whimsical but it has soulless quality to it that makes me forget about what I just read after five seconds. My friends use Meta AI on our chat groups on WhatsAppp and I hate it so much, I delete every single AI message as soon as I see it.
• BlazeNova 1y ago
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• dawnbreez 1y ago
  Throwing my two cents in here...I think there's a disconnect between what AI advocates want, and what everyone else wants. The arguments against genAI tend to point out things like: 1. Its output is unreliable at best 2. That output often looks correct to an untrained eye and requires expert intervention to catch serious mistakes 3. The process automates away a task that many people rely on for income And the response from genAI advocates tends to be dismissive...and I suspect it is, in part, because that last point is a positive for many advocates of genAI. Nobody wants to say it out loud, but when someone on Reddit or similar claims that even a 10% success rate outweighs the 90% failure rate, what they mean is most likely "A machine that works 10% of the time is better than a programmer who works 60-80% of the time because the machine is more than 6-to-8-times cheaper than the programmer". There's also the classic line about how automation tends to create more jobs in the future than it destroys now, which itself is a source of big disconnects between pro-genAI and anti-genAI crowds--because it ignores a glaring issue: Just because there's gonna be more jobs in the future, doesn't mean I can pay rent with no job tomorrow! "You can write an effective coding agent in a week" doesn't reassure people because it doesn't address their concerns. You can't persuade someone that genAI isn't a problem by arguing that you can easily deploy it, because part of the concern is that you can easily deploy it. Also, "you’re not doing what the AI boosters are doing" is flat-out incorrect, at least if you're looking at the same AI boosters I am--most of the people I've seen who claim to be using generated code say they're doing it with Claude, which--to my knowledge--is just an LLM, albeit a particularly advanced one. I won't pretend this is anything but anecdata, but I do engage with people who aren't in the "genAI is evil" camp, and...they use Claude for their programming assistance. "LLMs can write a large fraction of all the tedious code you’ll ever need to write" further reinforces this disconnect. This is exactly why people think this tech is a problem. The entire section on "But you have no idea what the code is!" falls apart the moment you consider real-world cases, such as [CVE-2025-4143](https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/cve-2025-4143 https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/cve-2025-4143), where a programmer who is a self-described expert working with Claude--who emphasizes that he checked over the results with a fine-toothed comb, and that he did this to validate his own skepticism about genAI!--missed a fundamental mistake in implementing OAuth that has been common knowledge for a long while. The author is correct in that reading other people's code is part of the job...but this is difficult enough when the thing that wrote the code can be asked about its methods, and despite advances in giving LLMs a sort of train of thought, the fact remains that LLMs are designed to output things that "look truth-y", not things that are logically consistent. (Ah, but we're not talking about LLMs, even though kentonv tells us that he just used an LLM. We're talking about agentic systems. No true AI booster would "just" use an LLM...) I actually agree with the point about how the language can catch and point out some of the errors caused by hallucination, but...I can generate bad function signatures just fine on my own, thank you! :P In all seriousness, this addresses basically nothing about the actual point. The problem with hallucination in a setting like this isn't "the AI comes up with a function that doesn't exist", that's what I'm doing when I write code. The problem with hallucination is that sometimes that function which doesn't exist is my RSA implementation, and the AI 'helpfully' writes an RSA implementation for me, a thing that you should never fucking do because cryptography is an incredibly complex thing that's easy to fuck up and hard to audit, and you really ought to just use a library...a thing you [also shouldn't leave up to your AI.](https://www.theregister.com/2025/04/12/ai_code_suggestions_sabotage_supply_chain/ https://www.theregister.com/2025/04/12/ai_code_suggestions_s...) You can't fix that with a language feature, aside from having a really good cryptography library built into the language itself, and as much as I'd love to have a library for literally everything I might want to do in a language...that's not really feasible. "Does an intern cost $20/month? Because that’s what Cursor.ai costs," says the blog author, as if that's supposed to reassure me. I'm an intern. My primary job responsibility is getting better at programming so I can help with the more advanced things my employer is working on (for the record, these thoughts are my own and not those of my employer). It does not make me happy to know that Cursor.ai can replace me. This also doesn't address the problem that, frankly, large corporations aren't going to replace junior developers with these tools; they're going to replace senior developers, because senior developers cost more. Does a senior engineer cost 20 dollars a month? Because that's what Cursor.ai costs! ...and the claim that open source is just as responsible for taking jobs is baffling. "We used to pay good money for databases" is not an epic own, it is a whole other fucking problem. The people working on FOSS software are in fact very frustrated with the way large corporations use their tools without donating so much as a single red cent! This is a serious problem! You know that XKCD about the whole internet being held up by a project maintained by a single person in his free time? That's what you're complaining about! And that guy would love to be paid to write code that someone can actually fucking audit, but nobody will pay him for it, and instead of recognizing that the guy ought to be supported, you argue that this is proof that nobody else deserves to be supported. I'm trying to steelman this blogpost, I really am, but dude, you fundamentally have this point backwards. I hope this helps others understand why this blogpost doesn't actually address any of my concerns, or the concerns of other people I know. That's kind of the best I can hope for here.
• timkofu 1y ago
  I’m gaining more confidence AI is unable to take any of our jobs if this level of marketing is needed to try to convince us it will.
• QuantumGood 1y ago
  For writing, I do a back-and-forth about what I'm trying to do with Claude before asking it to write anything. Produces much less "that's not exactly what I was looking for..."
• johannesrexx 1y ago
  OP opened with an ad hominem argument that his skeptic friends are all nuts. OP therefore loses the argument.
• palata 1y ago
  What an arrogant jerk. It sounds like someone taking a condescending tone to say that "Fast fashion is great! The clothes are really fine, and being able to wear a t-shirt once and then throwing it away instead of washing it is more convenient. This is most definitely progress. Sustainability? Hmm I can't say, that's not my field of expertise, therefore it's probably not important".
• gar1t 1y ago
  I code to understand. That's it. That's all. My code is a reflection of a problem definition and a solution. The problem may be under- or poorly defined and the solution may be lousy but by God it's there as a clear reference to be further reasoned about. Programmers who don't work to deepen their understanding? Nah, sorry, not programmers I want anywhere near the code I'm working on. To the extent that an LLM can help deepen understanding, good! Use it! Use its code. But you use it according to your intentional, systematic understanding of what the you're doing and why. And that understanding is not a function of code generation or, worse, code churn for the sake of feeling like you're going fast and paying less. > LLMs can write a large fraction of all the tedious code you’ll ever need to write. And most code on most projects is tedious. I've been writing code for over 30 years and I can't recall ever writing "tedious code". I don't know what this even means. Code, by definition, should not be tedious. At any layer of the stack, code should solve non-tedious problems. The whole point of code is to avoid tedium. Most code, most projects? I haven't seen this and doubt it's even close to true - if it is God help us. If you write tedious code, find another place to work or another career. > Sometimes, gnarly stuff needs doing. But you don’t wanna do it. So you refactor unit tests, soothing yourself with the lie that you’re doing real work. Seriously who kills time by refactoring unit tests? Is this projection by the author? > But an LLM can be told to go refactor all your unit tests. Wtaf?? The unit tests are what stands between the blind ambitions of a statistical model and correct code. Handing over tests to an LLM? One staggers. Tests represent part of that problem definition and solution. They're integral to the code. They foster and deepen understanding - not to be subject to the musings of statistical process, unless those musings serve as a dialectic. > If you can’t metabolize the boring, repetitive code an LLM generates: skills issue! How are you handling the chaos human developers turn out on a deadline? Answer: Slow the F down! Chaos and programming don't belong. Managers who drive their teams like this are bad managers. > If hallucination matters to you, your programming language has let you down. The author seems to think that programming is about producing code. Producing code that compiles is not a problem. Producing correct and coherent solutions to problems that need to be solved is a problem. Hallucinations aside, how will you know that generated code is something to keep or reject unless you have some understanding of what the code should do before you see it? > Does an intern cost $20/month? Because that’s what Cursor.ai costs. Squee! Code for all my friends! > but it’s bad at rust No, it's bad at understanding. And so are humans, initially. But it's our job to build and deepen understanding and we use code to facilitate that. > Professional software developers are in the business of solving practical problems for people with code. Correct. > [LLMs] devour schlep, and clear a path to the important stuff, where your judgement and values really matter. This begs the question, who defines what's important? It sounds like the author agrees that it's us, not the model. I agree this is a useful method. It's like any code review - it sharpens the reader no matter the code quality. > As a mid-late career coder, I’ve come to appreciate mediocrity. How cool and nonchalant what a rebel he says the opposite of everyone what a baddie! I think the author means "appreciate naivety", meaning, a first pass that's good enough is good enough - there's no need to go further. I'll concede this, but it's a concession and not something to boast about. Odds are decent you'll come back to this naive implementation and revise it. Yes, at a certain point there's diminishing returns but good programmers know when to invest in revision and when to move on. > LLMs really might displace many software developers. We've seen this cycle. Technology and globalization puts pressure on programmers. There are legions of programmers in parts of the world that will generate code for $20 an hour. You can pay $20 and hour - or $20 a month - and generate mountains of code that blows chunks - not because it's ugly but because it's incoherent or because it solves the wrong problem. We. have. seen. this. It's why Silicon Valley still pays massive salaries to good programmers. > The cool kid haughtiness about “stochastic parrots” and “vibe coding” can’t survive much more contact with reality. Time will tell. In the meantime I'll keep investing in understanding, not code, and see how things shake out.
• tantricked 1y ago
  As a junior, I feel most complexity in software is manufactured. LLMs simplify that mess for me, making it easier to get things done. But I’m constantly hit with imposter syndrome, like I’m less skilled because I rely on AI to handle the tricky stuff. And Gemini is better than me!