6 ms·

I agree, the whole 'developers don't code' AI defense was pretty ridiculous. I also concur that development is going to get a lot harder. Anyone that has succes

I agree, the whole 'developers don't code' AI defense was pretty ridiculous. I also concur that development is going to get a lot harder. Anyone that has successfully used AI coding tools knows that you can get massive productivity increases but now I have to figure out how to get a bunch of hyper active child like coding entities with memory deficiencies to build stuff without going off the rail and introducing massive security problems or building something completely mismatched to the requirements. If you can do it, yeah you can get 10x results. But now I am engineering harnesses, architecture specifications, agent structures, statistically sampling, and formal verification systems to guide the code instead of writing the code.

maxrev17 1mo ago
No one seems to mind the quality drop though. The buyers of this stuff could never discern.
- inigyou 1mo ago
  The Linux desktop just exceeded 10% because Microsoft is such shit.
- lomase 1mo ago
  [dead]
- jvanderbot 1mo ago
  You forgot "as long as" ... as long as the buyers could never discern
  - ryandrake 1mo ago
    The sad reality is that the vast majority of customers (whoever you are writing software for: clients, management, or end users) simply don't care as much about quality. If you give them the "time, cost, and quality" pick-two choice, 99.9% of customers are going to ask for fast+cheap. It's not the world I wish we were living in.
    - necovek 1mo ago
      This is why I believe true engineering art comes in actually marrying all three: build great quality quickly at reasonable (small) cost! If you need it to work for at least a month or two (instead of one and done, which some demoware is like). Following a few rules early on will ensure you can keep evolving it — even if it's MVP/demoware/whatever — as long as you know you need to evolve it soon after you build it!
    - torginus 1mo ago
      This isn't true. I don't think you or me would want a car/TV/smartphone that's cheap and flashy but breaks every two weeks. Sometimes people are strapped for cash that's why they cheap out on stuff, or really are enthusiastic about it, so they tolerate it breaking all the time, but for everything else, reliability is king.
      - Nextgrid 1mo ago
        Nobody _wants_ it, but in practice if all cars/TVs/smartphones break every two weeks, what choice do people have? In tech, the era of competing based on quality is long gone. The winning strategy is to get a monopoly/oligopoly and then you can let the quality decay to zero and people will have no choice but to keep paying you money (or to your handful of equally-mediocre competitors).
        torginus 1mo ago
        > Nobody _wants_ it, but in practice if all cars/TVs/smartphones break every two week. Certainly not true for me. One example is Linux. I've been sticking with Ubuntu LTS, and delaying upgrades for as long as I can get away with for any system that's connected with earning or at least not losing money. For the packages whose versions I care about, I compile them from source/use a PPA, and accept the consequences, but I really don't care for shiny features, if the price is random stuff breaking and having to be troubleshooted in the latest version.
      - satvikpendem 1mo ago
        There is a minimum but beyond that people don't care. Asian brands like Toyotas are the most reliable yet the Ford F150 is the best selling vehicle in the world.
- sensanaty 1mo ago
  I'm definitely noticing, I imagine the populace at large will soon too. I'm not even talking about random software either, the company I work for has more and more fired that need to be put out because people are spamming out ai-generated code that was at best rubber stamped. Not even just the customer-facing stuff either, the internal tooling is on fire more and more often. It's not sustainable in the slightest
  - pydry 1mo ago
    It took a while before the MBA hivemind woke up to this happening because of outsourcing two decades ago.
    - inigyou 1mo ago
      In the meantime their slowness should be our opportunity. Indie gaming displaced AAA when AAA started making the same franchiseslop games every year.
  - satvikpendem 1mo ago
    Are you the buyer of the stuff?
- tombert 1mo ago
  I suspect the massive shitshow of Windows 11 and all of its failings is a result of large quantities of vibe code being merged into the OS. People are noticing.
  - IshKebab 1mo ago
    Windows 11 was released before vibe coding was viable. And the shit show seems to be that they push ads and bloatware on people, not that it doesn't work reliably. Windows 11 IoT LTSC has been absolutely rock solid for me on both machines I have it on. Waaay more stable and reliable than Linux, and even a bit better than Mac (which is also way better than Linux). If they are vibe coding anything, it hasn't had any bad consequences yet. The ads and bloat are human decisions!
    - JackMorgan 1mo ago
      In the last two years Windows 11 has shipped with increasingly serious bugs. Many of my co-workers report needing to reboot a few times a day because issues just compound. I regularly have major issues with Teams and Outlook. Crashes, not showing messages until hours later, calls dropping every few minutes, and the app just never opening. Just Friday afternoon I could not close Teams from the Task Manager
    - tombert 1mo ago
      It's not just "ads" and "bloatware". Recent updates have broken notepad and calculator.
  - satvikpendem 1mo ago
    And when exactly did Windows 11 release?
    - tombert 1mo ago
      Just because some of Windows 11 was released before Claude Code doesn’t mean that the really shitty stuff from the last year wasn’t vibe-coded garbage.
- torginus 1mo ago
  They do. Most economically viable software already exists today, most people's job is to make .1% improvements, and features on top. For this work it's obviously pivotal that any change should not worsen the existing software, as that instantly nullifies the value of improvements. Another kind of highly valuable software is a new design which digitizes some process, like the ticket management of a rail company. If you don't follow the internal processes and workings of the firm exactly, or you do not interface with existing systems 100% accurately, your software very soon becomes worthless. Figuring out how to create a piece of code that solves the exact problem the customer has, while not breaking anything, and fitting into existing operations seems to be a big head scratcher still, and something humans still need to do, at least that was my experience so far with LLMs.
logicchains 1mo ago
>get a bunch of hyper active child like coding entities with memory deficiencies to build stuff without going off the rail and introducing massive security problems or building something completely mismatched to the requirements Development is essentially becoming management.
- cautiouscat 1mo ago
  I see this comparison a lot, but I’m not sure I agree. At least not semantically. The list of what an engineer using agents is responsible for, largely hasn’t changed. Engineering managers haven’t changed responsibilities either. Even with wrangling agents, you’re really just making them right the “correct code”. Something EMs don’t do, or at least the good ones don’t do with their ICs.
  - pjmlp 1mo ago
    It is quite similar to architecture work when others in the team do the actual coding, and lead devs / architects only have time to try out prototypes. Only now instead of local or offshore devs, it is agents.
    - pydry 1mo ago
      I was mainly doing architectural work as a coder long before LLMs came along. So was everyone else who wasnt slopping out boilerplate.
croes 1mo ago
Code is the written representation of your idea how to solve a problem. Now you tell someone else your idea and have to hope they get it. Otherwise you have to argue, rephrase, start all over again. We are back to the tree-swing project management, but we added another layer
a2ff6eeb0 1mo ago
This is all the stuff that the frontier labs are going to ship by default next year. Except for the architecture specifications, which agents can already do adequately for most system today.
- Toutouxc 1mo ago
  Do you have a source for that claim?
  - a2ff6eeb0 1mo ago
    Why wouldn't they be working on better harnesses? Every feature that has gotten popular has gotten integrated so far, and their product managers aren't stupid.

maxrev17 1mo ago

No one seems to mind the quality drop though. The buyers of this stuff could never discern.

inigyou 1mo ago
The Linux desktop just exceeded 10% because Microsoft is such shit.
lomase 1mo ago
[dead]
jvanderbot 1mo ago
You forgot "as long as" ... as long as the buyers could never discern
- ryandrake 1mo ago
  The sad reality is that the vast majority of customers (whoever you are writing software for: clients, management, or end users) simply don't care as much about quality. If you give them the "time, cost, and quality" pick-two choice, 99.9% of customers are going to ask for fast+cheap. It's not the world I wish we were living in.
  - necovek 1mo ago
    This is why I believe true engineering art comes in actually marrying all three: build great quality quickly at reasonable (small) cost! If you need it to work for at least a month or two (instead of one and done, which some demoware is like). Following a few rules early on will ensure you can keep evolving it — even if it's MVP/demoware/whatever — as long as you know you need to evolve it soon after you build it!
  - torginus 1mo ago
    This isn't true. I don't think you or me would want a car/TV/smartphone that's cheap and flashy but breaks every two weeks. Sometimes people are strapped for cash that's why they cheap out on stuff, or really are enthusiastic about it, so they tolerate it breaking all the time, but for everything else, reliability is king.
    - Nextgrid 1mo ago
      Nobody _wants_ it, but in practice if all cars/TVs/smartphones break every two weeks, what choice do people have? In tech, the era of competing based on quality is long gone. The winning strategy is to get a monopoly/oligopoly and then you can let the quality decay to zero and people will have no choice but to keep paying you money (or to your handful of equally-mediocre competitors).
      - torginus 1mo ago
        > Nobody _wants_ it, but in practice if all cars/TVs/smartphones break every two week. Certainly not true for me. One example is Linux. I've been sticking with Ubuntu LTS, and delaying upgrades for as long as I can get away with for any system that's connected with earning or at least not losing money. For the packages whose versions I care about, I compile them from source/use a PPA, and accept the consequences, but I really don't care for shiny features, if the price is random stuff breaking and having to be troubleshooted in the latest version.
    - satvikpendem 1mo ago
      There is a minimum but beyond that people don't care. Asian brands like Toyotas are the most reliable yet the Ford F150 is the best selling vehicle in the world.
sensanaty 1mo ago
I'm definitely noticing, I imagine the populace at large will soon too. I'm not even talking about random software either, the company I work for has more and more fired that need to be put out because people are spamming out ai-generated code that was at best rubber stamped. Not even just the customer-facing stuff either, the internal tooling is on fire more and more often. It's not sustainable in the slightest
- pydry 1mo ago
  It took a while before the MBA hivemind woke up to this happening because of outsourcing two decades ago.
  - inigyou 1mo ago
    In the meantime their slowness should be our opportunity. Indie gaming displaced AAA when AAA started making the same franchiseslop games every year.
- satvikpendem 1mo ago
  Are you the buyer of the stuff?
tombert 1mo ago
I suspect the massive shitshow of Windows 11 and all of its failings is a result of large quantities of vibe code being merged into the OS. People are noticing.
- IshKebab 1mo ago
  Windows 11 was released before vibe coding was viable. And the shit show seems to be that they push ads and bloatware on people, not that it doesn't work reliably. Windows 11 IoT LTSC has been absolutely rock solid for me on both machines I have it on. Waaay more stable and reliable than Linux, and even a bit better than Mac (which is also way better than Linux). If they are vibe coding anything, it hasn't had any bad consequences yet. The ads and bloat are human decisions!
  - JackMorgan 1mo ago
    In the last two years Windows 11 has shipped with increasingly serious bugs. Many of my co-workers report needing to reboot a few times a day because issues just compound. I regularly have major issues with Teams and Outlook. Crashes, not showing messages until hours later, calls dropping every few minutes, and the app just never opening. Just Friday afternoon I could not close Teams from the Task Manager
  - tombert 1mo ago
    It's not just "ads" and "bloatware". Recent updates have broken notepad and calculator.
- satvikpendem 1mo ago
  And when exactly did Windows 11 release?
  - tombert 1mo ago
    Just because some of Windows 11 was released before Claude Code doesn’t mean that the really shitty stuff from the last year wasn’t vibe-coded garbage.
torginus 1mo ago
They do. Most economically viable software already exists today, most people's job is to make .1% improvements, and features on top. For this work it's obviously pivotal that any change should not worsen the existing software, as that instantly nullifies the value of improvements. Another kind of highly valuable software is a new design which digitizes some process, like the ticket management of a rail company. If you don't follow the internal processes and workings of the firm exactly, or you do not interface with existing systems 100% accurately, your software very soon becomes worthless. Figuring out how to create a piece of code that solves the exact problem the customer has, while not breaking anything, and fitting into existing operations seems to be a big head scratcher still, and something humans still need to do, at least that was my experience so far with LLMs.

logicchains 1mo ago

>get a bunch of hyper active child like coding entities with memory deficiencies to build stuff without going off the rail and introducing massive security problems or building something completely mismatched to the requirements Development is essentially becoming management.

cautiouscat 1mo ago
I see this comparison a lot, but I’m not sure I agree. At least not semantically. The list of what an engineer using agents is responsible for, largely hasn’t changed. Engineering managers haven’t changed responsibilities either. Even with wrangling agents, you’re really just making them right the “correct code”. Something EMs don’t do, or at least the good ones don’t do with their ICs.
- pjmlp 1mo ago
  It is quite similar to architecture work when others in the team do the actual coding, and lead devs / architects only have time to try out prototypes. Only now instead of local or offshore devs, it is agents.
  - pydry 1mo ago
    I was mainly doing architectural work as a coder long before LLMs came along. So was everyone else who wasnt slopping out boilerplate.

croes 1mo ago

Code is the written representation of your idea how to solve a problem. Now you tell someone else your idea and have to hope they get it. Otherwise you have to argue, rephrase, start all over again. We are back to the tree-swing project management, but we added another layer

a2ff6eeb0 1mo ago

This is all the stuff that the frontier labs are going to ship by default next year. Except for the architecture specifications, which agents can already do adequately for most system today.

Toutouxc 1mo ago
Do you have a source for that claim?
- a2ff6eeb0 1mo ago
  Why wouldn't they be working on better harnesses? Every feature that has gotten popular has gotten integrated so far, and their product managers aren't stupid.