alt.hn

5/23/2025 at 12:15:56 AM

The copilot delusion

 https://deplet.ing/the-copilot-delusion/

by isaiahwp

5/23/2025 at 12:56:48 AM

> if you want to sculpt the kind of software that gets embedded in pacemakers and missile guidance systems and M1 tanks—you better throw that bot out the airlock and learn.

But the bulk of us aren't doing that... We're making CRUD apps for endless incoming streams of near identical user needs, just with slightly different integrations, schemas, and lipstick.

Let's be honest. For most software there is nothing new under the sun. It's been seen before thousands of times, and so why not recall and use those old nuggets? For me coding agents are just code-reuse on steroids.

Ps. Ironically, the article feels AI generated.

by padolsey

5/23/2025 at 1:06:26 AM

I don't mind your rebuttal of the article, but to suggest that this particular article is AI generated is foolish. The style the author presents is vivid, uses powerful imagery and metaphor and finally, at times, is genuinely funny. More qualitatively, the author incorporates a unique identity that persists throughout the entirety of a long form essay.

All of that is still difficult to get an LLM to do. This isn't AI generated. It's just good writing. Whether you buy the premise or not.

by throwaway314155

5/23/2025 at 4:26:30 AM

Yeah, it feels a very different style of unhinged to LLMs. I can’t yet imagine an LLM producing such a beautiful and contextually-appropriate sentence as “They’ll be out there trying to duct-tape horses to an engine block, wondering why it doesn’t fly.”

by chrismorgan

5/23/2025 at 5:39:44 AM

This brought tears to my eyes:

But you—at your most frazzled, sleep-deprived, raccoon-eyed best—you can try. You can squint at the layers of abstraction and see through them. Peel back the nice ergonomic type-safe, pure, lazy, immutable syntactic sugar and imagine the mess of assembly the compiler pukes up.

Amazing

by nick3443

5/23/2025 at 6:10:14 PM

> The style the author presents is vivid, uses powerful imagery and metaphor and finally, at times, is genuinely funny. More qualitatively, the author incorporates a unique identity that persists throughout the entirety of a long form essay.

This is incredible you would say that because you'll never guess what it reads like.

by a0123

5/24/2025 at 5:30:55 PM

I'm glad I'm not the only one to have thought that...

by petemir

5/23/2025 at 3:37:22 AM

I got slightly LLM vibes for the first few paragraphs ngl. It became very clear it wasn't very fast, though.

by queenkjuul

5/29/2025 at 4:43:23 AM

This rebuttal of the rebuttal does feel earily AI. Perhaps an injection of cynicism?

by yerushalayim

5/23/2025 at 1:08:45 AM

Maybe he meant it was long. Some people seem to think that long walls of text is how you spot AI slop.

by boxed

5/23/2025 at 2:59:17 AM

And god forbid you use an emdash these days.

by nozzlegear

5/23/2025 at 11:52:49 AM

I’ve recently been accused of using ChatGPT because I wrote a message with formal language and bullet points.

by xigoi

5/24/2025 at 4:05:55 AM

I'm unapologetic about using em-dashes. They're in my toolbox, and I reach for them. I can and do manually type em-dashes manually in both Linux and Microsoft Windows using the key-codes.

Anyone who is basing their opinion of the provenance of a piece of writing on whether em-dashes are used, then that opinion is emminently discardable lemming-babble.

by MrVandemar

5/23/2025 at 2:21:07 AM

[flagged]

by aozgaa

5/23/2025 at 2:39:04 AM

[flagged]

by cedric_h

5/23/2025 at 3:50:06 AM

Fundamentally, mission critical low level code isn't the kind of software i want to write anyway. I don't find AI tools super useful for most of the same reasons as the author, but i do kind of get tired of the idea that if you're not writing systems in C you're not really programming.

I like writing front end code. I'm probably never going to have a job where i need or would even want to write a low level graphics library from scratch. Fine, I'm not red-eyed 3am hacker brained, but I'm passionate and good at what i do. I don't think a world where every person working in software has the author's mentality is realistic or desirable.

by queenkjuul

5/23/2025 at 12:38:08 PM

> I like writing front end code. I'm probably never going to have a job where i need or would even want to write a low level graphics library from scratch. Fine, I'm not red-eyed 3am hacker brained, but I'm passionate and good at what i do.

Keep that spirit! All I want from coworkers is genuine interest and curiosity. Not everyone is going to find investigating Linux’s networking stack interesting, just as not everyone is going to find making beautiful pure CSS animations interesting. I think one of the greatest mistakes the tech industry did was to create “full stack,” as though someone would have interest and skill in frontend, backend, and infra. Bring back specialists; we’re all better for it.

by sgarland

5/25/2025 at 6:19:32 PM

I think it’s a fine label. I have skill and interest in all of those areas. Some things requires specialists, most jobs out there don’t.

by _rutinerad

5/26/2025 at 1:17:46 PM

I sometimes imagine, even before LLMs, how much human-written code still matters, like the DNA that has survived evolution. It's got to be a super low percentage.

The trend with Autocomplete Industrialization (AI) is just speeding up the creation of shanty towns of code, as opposed to architecturally robust foundations. The survivability of code is dropping because of the Copilotz. But perhaps this rapidity of creating crude solutions will increase the chances of something truly significant?

p.p.s there are too many times "it's" should be "its" in that blog post to have been AI-generated. That's a different kind of irony IMO, especially since that's just tricky English syntax (the thing AI is supposed to be good at). Maybe the author used AI to come up with the snarky metaphors. I asked ChatGPT for a sarcastic meaning for AI that starts with Autocomplete :)

by Fuhrmanator

5/23/2025 at 2:57:47 PM

from TFA:

> Maybe you’ll never write the code that keeps a plane in the sky. Maybe you’ll never push bits that hold a human life in the balance. Fine. Most don’t. But even if you're just slapping together another CRUD app for some bloated enterprise, you still owe your users respect. You owe them dignity.

by agos

5/23/2025 at 3:42:37 PM

> you still owe your users respect. You owe them dignity.

This is moral grandstanding. You owe your customers a good product at a low cost. If you don't use a tool that can lower costs, you are wronging your users and will go out of business.

Handcrafted CRUD will go the same way as handcrafted anything; an expensive niche hobby.

by Ferret7446

5/24/2025 at 12:11:44 AM

> This is moral grandstanding.

I disagree. For the kind of relationships I want with other humans, respect and dignity are my end of the bargain.

by WarOnPrivacy

5/23/2025 at 3:27:04 PM

> you still owe your users respect. You owe them dignity.

what does that even mean?

Users don't care if code is written by a human or AI; they care that the code gives them what they need, hopefully in a fairly pleasant manner.

by jonaustin

5/23/2025 at 1:34:04 AM

Yeah, and the article talks about those ways in which AI is useful. Overall, the author doesn’t have a problem with experts using AI to help them. The main argument is that we’re calling AI a copilot, and many newbies may be trusting it or leaning on it too much, when in reality, it’s still a shitty coworker half the time. Real copilots are actually your peers and experts at what they do.

> Now? We’re building a world where that curiosity gets lobotomized at the door. Some poor bastard—born to be great—is going to get told to "review this AI-generated patchset" for eight hours a day, until all that wonder calcifies into apathy. The terminal will become a spreadsheet. The debugger a coffin.

On the other hand, one could argue that AI is just another abstraction. After all, some folks may complain that over-reliance on garbage collectors means that newbies never learn how to properly manage memory. While memory management is useful knowledge for most programmers, it rarely practically comes up for many modern professional tasks. That said, at least knowing about it means you have a deeper level of understanding and mastery of programming. Over time, all those small, rare details add up, and you may become an expert.

I think AI is in a different class because it’s an extremely leaky abstraction.

We use many abstractions every day. A web developer really doesn’t need to know how deeper levels of the stack work — the abstractions are very strong. Sure, you’ll want to know about networking and how browsers work to operate at a very high level, but you can absolutely write very nice, scalable websites and products with more limited knowledge. The key thing is that you know what you’re building on, and you know where to go learn about things if you need to. (Kind of like how a web developer should know the fundamental basics of HTML/CSS/JS before really using a web framework. And that doesn’t take much effort.)

AI is different — you can potentially get away with not knowing the fundamental basics of programming… to a point. You can get away with not knowing where to look for answers and how to learn. After all, AIs would be fucking great at completing basic programming assignments at the college level.

But at some point, the abstraction gets very leaky. Your code will break in unexpected ways. And the core worry for many is that fewer and fewer new developers will be learning the debugging, thinking, and self-learning skills which are honestly CRITICAL to becoming an expert in this field.

You get skills like that by doing things yourself and banging your head against the wall and trying again until it works, and by being exposed to a wide variety of projects and challenges. Honestly, that’s just how learning works — repetition and practice!

But if we’re abstracting away the very act of learning, it is fair to wonder how much that will hurt the long-term skills of many developers.

Of course, I’m not saying AI causes everyone to become clueless. There are still smart, driven people who will pick up core skills along the way. But it seems pretty plausible that the % of people who do that will decrease. You don’t get those skills unless you’re challenged, and with AI, those beginner level “learn how to program” challenges become trivial. Which means people will have to challenge themselves.

And ultimately, the abstraction is just leaky. AI might look like it solves your problems for you to a novice, but once you see through the mirage, you realize that you cannot abstract away your core programming & debugging skills. You actually have to rely on those skills to fix the issues AI creates for you — so you better be learning them along the way!!

Btw, I say this as someone who does use AI coding assistants. I don’t think it’s all bad or all good. But we can’t just wave away the downsides just because it’s useful

by anon7000

5/23/2025 at 1:43:27 AM

> Btw, I say this as someone who does use AI coding assistants. I don’t think it’s all bad or all good. But we can’t just wave away the downsides just because it’s useful

Isn't this just the rehashed argument against interactive terminals in the 60s/70s (no longer need to think very carefully about what you enter into your punch cards!), debuggers (no longer spending time looking carefully at code to find bugs), Intellisense/code completion (no need to remember APIs!) from the late 90s, or stackoverflow (no need to sift to answer questions that others have had before!) from the 00s? I feel like we've been here before and moved on from it (hardly anyone complains about these anymore, no one is suggesting we go back to programming by rewiring the computer), I wonder if this time it will be any different? Kids will just learn new ways of doing things on top of the new abstractions just like they've done for the last 70 years of programming history.

by seanmcdirmid

5/23/2025 at 1:53:18 AM

Interactive terminals didn’t write code for you, and also unlocked entirely new paradigms of programs. Debuggers, if anything, enabled deeper understanding. Intellisense is in fact a plague and should not exist. Stack Overflow, when abused, is nearly as bad as AI.

by sgarland

5/23/2025 at 5:43:57 AM

I think we should just agree to disagree. All of those opened up new paradigms for programming, and so will AI even if we aren’t quite sure what that new paradigm is yet. There will always be people claiming the old-fashioned way is better, like Dijkstra’s famous complaint about kids not using punch cards anymore and how that meant they weren’t learning how to be good programmers.

by seanmcdirmid

5/23/2025 at 7:39:13 AM

We're actually quite certain what this new paradigm is, because some poor souls are already practicing it: slop coding. You prompt-whisper poorly-defined changes to make, and if the machine chokes on its own vomit along the way, you delete everything and try again.

It feels reasonable, consistent to see it as another "old man yells at the skies" scenario, but I do think it's unprecedented for a machine to automate thought itself on an unbounded domain and with such unreliability. We know calculators made people worse at mental math, but at least calculators don't give you off-by-one errors 40–60% of the time with no method of verification.

The reason why we haven't lost literacy to Speakwrites and screen readers is because they required more time and effort than doing it yourself. With AI, the supposed time savings are obvious: you don't put hours into reading the source to write an essay, you just ask ChatGPT, you don't learn programming fundamentals, you just ask for a script that does X, Y, and Z, etc... It feels like a good choice, but you're permanently crippling you education, both in a structured course and in the wild, and the supposed oracle is a slot machine, costing you $avg_tokens*$model_rate a pull. The poor news is slot machines sell.

by pona-a

5/23/2025 at 2:29:06 PM

I don’t think we’ve really figured out how to use AI in coding yet, vibe coding doesn’t really feel like it’s it. Vibe coding and just generating code like how some people claim intellisense is just to save on typing, when it’s actually a great in-situ browse what members can be selected on a value of a certain type.

There is definitely a way to abuse AI in programming, but it doesn’t seem to be very compelling and I don’t think it will get people who do that very far (eg relying on intel sense to save on typing rather than just learning how to type).

ChatGPT is a great writing tool if you already know how to write. You can curate and modify on top of it, allowing you to write your paper faster with the same amount of quality. But again people just using it to write essays or paper without knowing how to write themselves aren’t going to get good results.

by seanmcdirmid

5/23/2025 at 3:54:07 PM

I understand what you mean, but let's be honest: this is a rare kind of tool that's more useful to feign competence, deceive yourself and others, and produce industrial volumes of slop than it is to do better work. IntelliSense is just dynamic documentation, which has existed since at least Emacs — it doesn't do the thinking for you.

Professional tools, from music notation and art to typesetting and programming, are about translating an image inside your mind into something physical. When you know what you're doing, the lack of an interpretable mapping between prompt and generation means you spend more time trying to describe what you want to write instead of just writing it. I'd be much happier with code generation if it could take a formal specification and either return an error or something that provably implements it. Maybe interpretability research will one day change that, but as they are now, they're simply not tunable or reliable enough to be used as tools. And yes, prompting doesn't count when they increasingly disregard your instructions.

There are many valid uses: I have a tiny WolframAlpha-like script that lets me type some basic computations and the LLM translates that to Python. I sometimes use LLM completions to get some inspiration when writing prose — while I usually discard them, they still help me think. They can often act as better grammar checkers than LanguageTool, and they make a nice companion to smaller translation models, both having their own quirks.

But most of this doesn't need these larger and larger models; I haven't yet tried, but I think fine-tuning some mid-size open-weights LLMs will yield similar or better results. The industry sold the public AGI, not better auto-complete, a fuzzy parser, or a smarter translator, and now they're burning growing piles of money on a saturated research direction to maintain the delusion singularity is 5 months away.

by pona-a

5/23/2025 at 4:20:02 AM

> On the other hand, one could argue that AI is just another abstraction

I, as a user of a library abstraction, get a well defined boundary and interface contract — plus assurance it’s been put through paces by others. I can be pretty confident it will honor that contract, freeing me up to not have to know the details myself or second guess the author.

by jgraettinger1

5/23/2025 at 1:07:40 AM

It’s funny because I made a few funny clips (to my taste) on Google Whisk and figured, hey why not, let’s make a TikTok. Did you know that all of TikTok is full of millions of ai generated stuff or other people just copying each others stuff? I really thought there was something to this “original creation” stuff.

We are all so simply reproducible. No one’s making anything special, anywhere, for the most part. If we all uploaded a TikTok video of daily coding, it would be the same fucking app over and over, just like the rest of TikTok.

Elon may have be right all along, there’s literally nothing left to do but goto Mars. Some of us were telling many of you that the LLMs don’t hallucinate as much as you think just two years ago, and I think the late to the party crowd need to hear us again - we humans are not really necessary anymore.

!RemindMe in 2 years

by ivape

5/23/2025 at 2:56:48 AM

There's literally genocide and war going on, solve that

by whattheheckheck

5/23/2025 at 3:58:02 AM

Don't encourage them. They'll just build an AI to do the genocide faster.

by queenkjuul

5/23/2025 at 7:49:31 AM

The genocide is televised, it appears no one cares.

by ivape

5/23/2025 at 1:12:45 AM

> The machine is real. The silicon is real. The DRAM, the L1, the false sharing, the branch predictor flipping a coin—it’s all real. And if you care, you can work with it.

This is one of the most beautiful pieces of writing I’ve come across in a while.

by felubra

5/23/2025 at 1:30:30 AM

Same, The author writes like Dave Barry. I burst out laughing more than once. He was able to articulate with a lot of humor exactly what I think of co-pilot.

by bwfan123

5/23/2025 at 1:53:17 AM

The things that's most often missed in these discussions that "writing code" is the end artefact. It doesn't take into account the endless tradeoffs made in producing the said artefact - the journey to get there.

Just try implementing a feature with a junior, in a mildly complex codebase and you'd catch all the unconscious tradeoffs that you're making as an experienced developer. AI has some concept of what these tradeoffs are, but that's mostly by observation.

AI _does_ help with writing code. Keyword there being - "help".

But thinking is the human's job. LLMs can't/don't "think". Thinking how to get the AI to produce the output you want is also your job. You'd think less and less if models get better.

by lunarcave

5/31/2025 at 4:51:34 AM

Exactly. I think the key point from the article is: "When you outsource the thinking, you outsource the learning."

by bulhi

5/23/2025 at 2:10:58 AM

This is the crux of the piece to me:

"We'll enshrine this current bloated, sluggish, over-abstracted hellscape as the pinnacle of software—and the idea of squeezing every last drop of performance out of a system, or building something lean and wild and precise, will sound like folklore."

This somewhat lines up with my concerns about libraries and patterns before 2023 getting frozen in stone once we pass over the event horizon where most new code to train on is generated by LLMs. We aren't innovating, we are going to forever reinforce the screwed up dependency stack and terrible kludges of the last 30 years of development. Javascript is going to live forever.

by jboggan

5/23/2025 at 12:33:04 AM

This resonates with me, for sure; both the benefits and the drawbacks of copilot. But while I think kids and hackers were artisans, engineers were always just engineers. The amazing technical challenges they had to solve to create some of the foundational technologies we have today, exist because they had to solve those challenges. Looking at only these and saying "that's how things used to be" is survivorship bias.

by CGamesPlay

5/23/2025 at 1:16:52 AM

I feel privileged to be able to say that as a software engineer who's been doing it the hard way for 20+ years, I relish the hard problems. The CRUD app updates are unbearable without the random in-between challenges that bend my mind. The rare recursive algorithm, the application of some esoteric knowledge I actually learned in college, actually having to do big-o estimates. These are the gems of my career that keep me sane. I hope the next flock of AI-driven SWEs appreciates these things even more given the AI can spout off answers which sometimes are right and sometimes are horribly wrong. Challenges like these will always have to have someone who actually knows what to do when the AIs start hallucinating or the context of the situation is beyond the context window.

by gleenn

6/1/2025 at 12:45:22 AM

If someone commits to doing it the hard way, I wonder how much they risk being left behind. And will anyone out there really appreciate what it is they're trying to do or their commitment to their integrity? It seems like a deeply dying art. I hope it is the case.

by hollowsunsets

5/23/2025 at 12:30:10 AM

I feel this in my bones. Every day I'm getting challenged by leadership that we're not using AI enough, told that I should halve my estimates because "we'll use AI", and being told that there's a new AI tool that I have to adopt because someone is tracking KPIs related to adoption and if our team doesn't adopt enough AI tools we're going to be fired to give more headcount to those that do.

It's like the world has lost it's goddamn mind.

AI is always being touted as the tool to replace the other guy's job. But in reality it only appears to do a good job because you don't understand the other guy's job.

Management has an AI shaped hammer and they're hitting everything to see if it's a nail.

by malfist

5/23/2025 at 12:37:27 AM

> Management has an AI shaped hammer and they're hitting everything to see if it's a nail.

I really think we need to figure out how to cut back on management so we can get back to the business of actually doing work

by bluefirebrand

5/23/2025 at 12:49:07 AM

Coordinating teams, talking to stakeholders/customers (including spending a lot of time with them), having someone manage individual contributors at some level, etc. is work that can't just be ignored at a company of any size. The only way to avoid (a lot of) it is to be very small and that has its own set of issues.

by ghaff

5/23/2025 at 2:43:23 PM

Sure, but do we really need four layers of people to do all of that?

It's really common to see just layers and layers of management at companies that get big enough

by bluefirebrand

5/23/2025 at 9:32:19 PM

For a big enough company? Probably. Someone isn't going to effectively manage 100 or 500 people.

by ghaff

5/23/2025 at 1:09:19 AM

I mean don't bite the boot that you can lick amirite

by lyu07282

5/23/2025 at 1:05:02 AM

Well how hard would it be to replace management with AI? Perhaps a developer could use AI to recreate the other tasks of the company without all of the overhead of actual people.

by cjbgkagh

5/23/2025 at 4:22:57 AM

Yeah i can't wait to discuss product with a sycophantic chatbot instead of the people who actually have a stake in the product.

Management can and usually does suck but i can reason with a person, for now. And sadly only the product people actually know what they want, usually right when you've built it the way they used to want it lol.

by queenkjuul

5/23/2025 at 3:39:03 PM

Sounds almost has hard as writing code

by cjbgkagh

5/23/2025 at 2:03:57 AM

Clearly the answer is to replace them with AI.

by yencabulator

5/23/2025 at 1:22:35 AM

Yeah, I mean, this is just the current phase of the hype cycle. It'll settle down. Some of the tools and techniques will have staying power, most won't. If you can figure out which is which and influence others, you'll be in good shape.

by sanderjd

5/23/2025 at 12:46:47 AM

> I feel this in my bones. Every day I'm getting challenged by leadership that we're not using AI enough, told that I should halve my estimates because "we'll use AI", and being told that there's a new AI tool that I have to adopt because someone is tracking KPIs related to adoption and if our team doesn't adopt enough AI tools we're going to be fired to give more headcount to those that do.

This--all of this--seems exactly antithetical to computing/development/design/"engineering"/architecture/whatever-the-hell people call this profession as I understood it.

Typically, I labored under the delusion that competent technical decision makers would integrate tooling or choose to use a language, "service", platform, whatever, if they saw benefits and if they could make a "case" for why something was the correct approach, i.e how it met some product's needs, addressed some shortcomings, made things more efficient.

Like "here's my design doc, I chose $THING for caching for $REASON and $DATASTORE as it offers blah blah"

"Please provide feedback and questions"

This is totally alien to that approach.

Ideally, "hey we're going to use CoPilot/other LLM thingy, let us know if it aids your workflow, give us some report in a month and we'll go from there to determine if we want to keep paying for it"

by nyarlathotep_

5/23/2025 at 2:05:52 AM

> AI is always being touted as the tool to replace the other guy's job. But in reality it only appears to do a good job because you don't understand the other guy's job.

This is a well considered point that not enough of us admit. Yes many jobs are rote or repetitive, but many more jobs, of all flavors, done well have subtleties that will be lost when things are automated. And no I do not think that some "80% done by AI is good enough" because errors propagate through a system (even if that system is a company or society), AND the people evaluating that "good enough" are not necessarily going to be those experienced in that same domain.

by lamename

5/23/2025 at 1:04:53 AM

But, management is the one to go soon. The other shoe is going to drop dear brother, this I promise you. Stay strong.

by ivape

5/23/2025 at 12:36:24 AM

Well when you have a hammer big enough everything is indeed a nail.

Have you considered that instead of resisting you should do more to figure out why you're not getting the results that a lot of us are talking about? If nothing has changed for you in the past 2 years in your productivity the problem is most likely you. Don't you think it's your responsibility as an engineer to figure out what you're doing wrong when there are a lot of people telling you that it's a life changing tool? Or did you just assume that everybody was lying and you were doing everything correctly?

Sorry to say it. It's an unpopular opinion but I think it's pretty much a harsh truth.

by abletonlive

5/23/2025 at 12:46:38 AM

> why you're not getting the results that a lot of us are talking about?

IMO the problem occurs when "the results" are hyped up linkedIn posts not based in reality, AI is a boon but it's not lived up to the "IDEs are a thing of the past, youre all prompt engineers now" expectations that we hear from executives

by dpistole

5/23/2025 at 1:10:01 AM

Kind of brutal, but if LLMs drastically improved your productivity I think it speaks more to your baseline productivity than the power of LLMs.

by MeetingsBrowser

5/23/2025 at 1:16:53 AM

What's more likely

A) all of this money being funneled into tech to build out trillions of dollars worth of infrastructure, a month over month increasing user base buying subscriptions for these llm services, every company buying seats for LLM because of the value that it provides - these people are wrong

B) yappers on hackernews that claim they derive no productivity boost out of llms while showing absolutely nothing about their workflow or method when the interface is basically a chat box with no guardrails - these people are wrong

Sorry I'm going to be it's B and you just suck at it

by abletonlive

5/23/2025 at 2:07:19 AM

Just like the trillions poured into blockchain have revolutionized the internet.

All the jaw dropping ICOs, million dollar NFTs, and cryptocurrency price surges. Surely that proves its value in our daily lives.

by MeetingsBrowser

5/23/2025 at 3:25:31 AM

If you think blockchain is a comparable analogy, on the same timeline, you are orders of magnitude off

Actually by the numbers AI is already bigger than bitcoin in both adoption and market value, so I'm not sure if you are making the point that you think you're making.

by abletonlive

5/23/2025 at 2:04:36 AM

Yeah, definitely A, same reason why all banking is done exclusively on the blockchain now and NFTs are the only way to get music

by davidcbc

5/23/2025 at 9:25:06 PM

Given how many times the tech industry as a whole has been collectively and expensively wrong about trends as they dominate the zeitgeist, I think that first option you gave is more damning than you think.

What is populist is rarely what is correct in this context.

by Greed

5/23/2025 at 1:50:12 AM

Regarding A, first time on the hype train? VC and silicon valley funding is often completely divorced from any real value, and is one of the last places I’d look for reliable signal on quality.

Regardless, I’m sure it’s a little of A and a little of B, plus some of C) yappers on Hackernews who think that the majority of the work of software engineering is writing code, and who generally write code in sufficiently simple contexts for the LLMs to produce something equivalent to their normal output.

by mplanchard

5/23/2025 at 7:42:39 AM

Honestly millions of nobodies buying a product from a tech company is basically proof it's nonsense, in my limited mind. Which one have they bought in droves that actually had a massive impact on you as a developer?

by queenkjuul

5/23/2025 at 8:27:41 PM

copilot and openai have changed my entire development work process. if it hasn't for you then you are being left behind. it's that simple.

i've made two QA roles obsolete on my team already...there's more to come

by abletonlive

5/23/2025 at 9:47:27 PM

Can you give a detailed example of how LLMs have changed your entire process? Your experience does not match mine and I would genuinely like to know why. I would love to be more efficient.

by MeetingsBrowser

5/24/2025 at 1:17:53 PM

QA has been obsolete for years. I haven't worked with one for over a decade

by malfist

5/23/2025 at 1:27:30 AM

People keep saying this kind of thing, but sorry, it's nonsense.

Many of my colleagues that I most admire are benefiting greatly and increasingly from LLM tooling.

by sanderjd

5/23/2025 at 2:18:38 AM

LLM tooling is useful. I have been using it on a daily basis for at least a year.

I am maybe 10-20% more productive at certain tasks in the long run (which is pretty good!). Nowhere close to to the 10x or even 2x boost people are claiming.

If LLMS were really making software developers 10x more productive over the last year, we would be seeing massive shifts in the industry. In theory either 90% layoffs or 10x product velocity.

by MeetingsBrowser

5/23/2025 at 4:40:59 PM

Agreed. The noisiest people are those saying "it makes everyone 100x more productive!" and those saying "it's useless, it makes everyone less productive!". But the boring truth is somewhere in between those extremes.

by sanderjd

5/23/2025 at 12:40:46 AM

"Well when you have a hammer big enough everything is indeed a nail."

I think this pretty much speaks for itself.

by oh_my_goodness

5/23/2025 at 12:43:18 AM

Where did you see that I didn't use AI and that _nothing_ has changed for me?

by malfist

5/29/2025 at 1:04:14 PM

I think the difference between A.I. fake intelligence and us, humans, can be summed up to that single quote from Oscar Wilde.

"I have spent most of the day putting in a comma and the rest of the day taking it out."

No A.I. would ever think more than a millisecond about a comma, it's pure data retrieval for it. "how many percent of text there is a coma after this word, how many didn't ? ok, done."

by aucisson_masque

5/24/2025 at 4:49:36 AM

My point of comparison of choice is overseas contractors, not pair programming.

Copilot or Cursor or whatnot is basically a better experience because you do not have to get on Zoom calls (after Slack has failed) to ask why some chunk of your system that cares about root nodes has mysteriously gained a function called isChild (not hasChildren) that returns a boolean based on whether or not the node has children and not whether it has a parent. Or to figure out why a bunch a API parameters that used to accept arrays now don't. Or why an ask to not show a constant literal in a menu resulted in algorithmic derivation of ordinals rather than using i18n.

With AI you probably don't have those kinds of things happen, but if you do, you can instantly tell it, sorry, that's wrong, this is why, and have it changed in a minute. Whereas with contractors, you waste a lot of time on things like communication and understanding gaps and language barriers that are mostly gone with AI.

The second you can interact really easily w/ AI from Jira Tickets, most engineers are going to turn into ticket writers and overseers for 80% of their work. (And yes, you'll still need engineers, because Product can't actually write decent engineering tickets, though telling the AI to write engineering tickets will probably get close, and because somebody with a clue needs to be in the loop, though many organizations will try to forget this and have things they don't understand go terribly wrong.)

by Glyptodon

5/23/2025 at 5:53:25 AM

The author is clearly a C++ programmer. I've been noticing that these AI tools are worse at C++ than other languages, especially scripting languages. Whenever I try to learn from people that are using these tools successfully, they always seem to be using a scripting language and working on some CRUD app.

by OnionBlender

5/23/2025 at 12:48:48 PM

They seem to be a game dev judging by their other posts. I imagine there’s a lot less content online about that for LLMs to scrape than yet another CRUD app.

by sgarland

5/23/2025 at 2:21:02 AM

I couldn't help but read parts of this in Bertram Gilfoyle's voice.

Someone tell me I'm not alone.

by heddycrow

5/23/2025 at 2:33:41 AM

I used to work with someone like this. At first, he really wanted to do things properly. Over time, he gave up. Not because he was lazy, but because he felt like effort didn’t really matter.

Copilot’s fine for boilerplate. But lean on it too much, and you stop thinking. Stop thinking long enough, and you stop growing. That’s the real cost.

by Aziell

5/23/2025 at 1:31:04 AM

I think all arguments pro and against AI assistants for coding should include a preface that describes the programing language, the domain of the app, the model being used and the chosen interface for interacting with the assistant.

Otherwise everyone's just talking past each other.

by airstrike

5/23/2025 at 10:48:10 AM

That’s probably asking for too much but I agree.

Here are some terms/aspects of LLMs that people _regularly_ use, yet 10 people have 10 definitions of what it means (to them)

- Vibe Coding

- Boilerplate

- Copilot

- Cursor/Aider/Claude Code/Codex/OpenHands/etc

- LLM Autocomplete and/or inline code suggestion

- LLM Agent

I’m happy to explain or expand on any of those if it’s not clear what I mean.

by joshstrange

5/23/2025 at 12:29:21 AM

i think the key is always having the ability to telescope - think coding agents enable you to stay high level, but you always need the ability to go down and fix/understand code when needed.

by swyx

5/23/2025 at 12:44:54 AM

As a preface, I think lots of people will not like this take.

A lot of people are going to have to come to the realization that has already been mentioned before but many find it hard to grasp.

Your boss, stakeholders, and especially non-technical people literally give 0 fucks about "quality code" as long as it does what they want it to do. They do not care about tests insofar as if it works it works. Many have no clue about nor do they care about whether something just refetches the world in certain scenarios. And AI whether we like it or not, whether it repeats the same shit and isnt DRY, doesn't follow patterns, reinvents the wheel, etc - is already fairly good at that.

This is exactly why all your stakeholders and executives are pushing you to use it. they've been fed that it just gets shit done and pumps out code like nothing else.

I really think a lot of the reason some people say it doesn't give them as much productivity as they would like is due largely to a desire to write "clean" code based on years and years of our own training, and due to having to be able to pass code review done by your peers. If these obstacles were entirely removed and we went full bandaid off I do think AI even in its current state is fairly capable of replacing plenty of roles. But it does require a competent person to steer to not end up in a complete mess.

If you throw away the guardrails a little bit and not obsess about how nice code looks anymore, it absolutely will move things along faster than you could before.

by Jcampuzano2

5/23/2025 at 1:00:14 AM

A sane person writes clean code because they are going to have to maintain it themselves one day a few years into the future when the baby kept them up all night for three nights in a row and coffee isn't working for them anymore and they can't remember anything about it and it's falling over so it's really urgent and f**** those guys they swore they'd get someone to take this on with a proper handover and surely there was a goddamn sent email somewhere about it but nothing is coming up when you search and goddamnit it used to compile did people ignore your comment about how it won't build with the new version yet so don't update the build tools and and and

You write good code because you own it.

If you get ChatGPT or Copilot or Claude or whateverthe****else to write it, you're going to have a whole lot less fun when it's on fire.

The level of irresponsibility that "vibe coding" is introducing to the world is actually worse than the one that had people pouring their savings into a shitcoin. But it's the same arseholes talking it up.

by allthenopes25

5/23/2025 at 1:57:58 PM

>The level of irresponsibility that "vibe coding" is introducing to the world is actually worse than the one that had people pouring their savings into a shitcoin. But it's the same arseholes talking it up.

It's a broader ethos of irresponsibility and disposability that's infected so much of modern tech. Why polish up a game when you can ship it now and fix it later? Why delay an iPhone release that's "Built for Apple Intelligence (TM)" when you can sell the hype today and maybe deliver next quarter?

Everyone wants the reward but none of the work and accountability. You're not even doing the minimum level of work; you're just putting up the appearance of effort. Who cares if what you built is just a brittle husk? Vibe coding is just the natural progression of that cynical philosophy.

by the_snooze

5/23/2025 at 12:52:40 AM

I suspect experienced folks are well aware of the subjectivity of quality. How? Change control.

Quality control exists until The Business deems otherwise. The reasons vary: vulnerability, promotion, whatever. Usually not my place to say.

Personally, my 'product' isn't code. Even the 'code' isn't code. For every 8 hours of meetings I do, I crank out maybe 20 lines of YAML (Ansible). Then, another 4 hours of meetings handing that out/explaining the same basics for Political Points.

The problem(s) relating to speed or job security have remarkably little to do with code; generated or not. The people I work with are functionally co-dependent because they don't use LLMs or... manuals.

All this talk about "left behind"... to survive a bear, one doesn't have to be the fastest. Just not the slowest.

by bravetraveler

5/23/2025 at 12:54:52 AM

I lost all my snobism about that years ago and I do just follow the paradigm, "does it work". But for some reasons, even with AI I ain't on another level.

And those reasons are, it all collapses very quickly once the complexity reaches an medium amount.

And if I want to rely on things and debug them - I cannot just have a pile of generated garbage, that works as long as the sun is shining. For isolated tasks it works for me. For anything complex, I am faster on my own.

by lukan

5/23/2025 at 1:06:19 AM

Most replies here make the claim that all AI generated code is "garbage". And I can't help but think most of the people who say that do not actually use it in their day to day with the most recent models and actually give it good instructions/requirements.

No, it is not always perfect. Yes you will have to manually edit some of the code it generates. But yes it can and will generate good code if you know how to use it and use sophisticated tools with good guidance. And there are times where it will even write better more performant code than you could given the time requirements.

by Jcampuzano2

5/23/2025 at 2:02:18 AM

It writes code well enough in simple contexts, sometimes. But that code is also easy to write, indeed often easier to write than to review. It struggles in more complex contexts and with more complex constraints. Unfortunately, it’s the latter case where I most often have any desire to reach for an aid, and it has failed so consistently and so often there that I have largely stopped trying.

It’s nice when you need to do something simple in an unfamiliar but simple context, though.

It seems though that a lot of the narrative here from its proponents is that we’re just not trying hard enough to get it to solve our problems. It’s like vimmers who won’t shut up about how it’s worth the weeks of cratered productivity in order to reach editing nirvana (I say this as one of them).

Like with any tool, the learning curve has to be justified by the results, but the calculation is further complicated by the fact that the AI tooling landscape changes completely every 3-6 months. Do I want to spend all that time getting good at it now? No. I’ll probably spend more time learning to use it when it’s either easier to get results that actually feel useful or when it stops changing so often.

Until then I’ll keep firing it up every once in a while to have it write some bash or try to get it to write a unit test.

by mplanchard

5/24/2025 at 5:05:44 AM

I find it very hit or miss, but I definitely use it. I just don't think it's making vastly more productive yet, maybe 30%. I do think it will get good enough that my job may turn into 80% writing tickets or refining tickets for AI "engineers" and 20% fixing/debugging issues with AI output. But not there yet, and still don't think it will be trustworthy enough to let loose without someone technical in the loop doing that review/fixing. But that might be enough to make one generalist CRUD engineer into the equivalent of a team of 4 or 5 in a couple years.

I kind of see it replacing outsourcing, not mid level + engineers so far. But expect to lead to making mid level + about as productive as a small team.

by Glyptodon

5/23/2025 at 1:27:31 AM

I think the root of the argument is that the AI critics are worried because they have the assumption that 1) you aren't experienced enough to know what "good code" looks like, and/or 2) you only care if it "works" and don't understand all the implications bad code will have downstream, again because of inexperience.

by lyu07282

5/23/2025 at 7:25:03 AM

If the code is a isolated module or function, all is well.

Otherwise often not. But I am not worried. Give me a AI tool that can work with my whole codebase reliable and I gladly use it.

by lukan

5/23/2025 at 12:50:10 AM

This is true. But the cost after is high. Creating code, by hand or AI is easier than maintaining or modifying the system.

And this is where a problem (still) appears - except now the AI-assiated authors have even less comprehension of the system.

by edoceo

5/23/2025 at 12:55:44 AM

They will demand use of AI tools for "productivity" and then complain when there are bugs in prod without realizing the root cause.

by lamename

5/23/2025 at 12:58:30 AM

They won't blame the AI as the root cause. They will blame you.

This is why I mention you need to be competent enough to understand what is being generated or they will find someone else who does. There's no 2 ways around it. AI is here to stay.

by Jcampuzano2

5/23/2025 at 2:07:45 AM

Yes I agree. They will and should blame the human. That's a problem when the human isnt given enough time to complete projects because "AI is SO productive"

by lamename

5/23/2025 at 2:00:35 AM

The idea that you will actually really review all that vibecoded slop code comes across as very naive.

The real question is how many companies have to accidentally expose their databases, suffer business-ruining data losses, and have downtime they are utterly unable to recover from quickly before CxOs start adjusting their opinions?

Last time I saw a "Show HN" of someone showing off their vibecoded project, it leaked their OpenAI API key to all users. If that's how you want to run your business, go right ahead.

by yencabulator

5/23/2025 at 1:42:04 AM

> you need to be competent enough to understand what is being generated

We're all competent enough to understand what is generated. That's why everyone is doomer about it.

What insights do you have above us when the LLM generates

    true="false"
    while i < 10 {
      i++
    }
What's the deep philosophical understanding that you have about this that makes us all sheeple for not understanding how this is actually the business's goose laying golden eggs. Not the engineers.

Frankly. Businesses that use this, drop all their actual engineers, and then fall over when the slightest breeze comes.

I am actually in favour, in a accelerationist sense.

by drekipus

5/23/2025 at 11:20:02 PM

Have you actually tried using AI to generate code? Try it with a hobby project. You might be surprised!

by icedchai

5/24/2025 at 5:00:20 AM

In my experience this isn't the case - it gets many details subtly wrong. Unless someone technical can nanny it you get weird fixes. For example, I recently had AI decide to remove a database column because it ran into an execution bug related to the column. Without a human in the loop I have no clue what the end game to that would have been. Similarly, it's getting better, but there've been times where it basically writes security vulnerabilities. Stakeholders in management should be aware of the risk, but seem oblivious to it. Maybe because there's little track record of anyone ever being held accountable for massive screw-ups, but at some point letting AI loose will lead to some kind of major disaster and there'll be some reevaluation.

by Glyptodon

5/23/2025 at 1:49:31 AM

And then you have 0 domain experts because nobody has built the mental model of the code and what it's doing that you inherently build when you're actually doing the problem solving and code-writing yourself.

by joks

5/24/2025 at 3:02:23 AM

> Your boss, stakeholders, and especially non-technical people literally give 0 fucks about "quality code" as long as it does what they want it to do.

We've all already heard this message a thousand times. There's no need to keep repeating it. Don't discourage people, especially young people, who want to do great work.

by mwcampbell

5/23/2025 at 3:10:53 AM

As long as I am going to be the one being called at night when there's a crash, I'll be the one to dictate what's "good enough". Throw away guardrails if you want to, I like sleeping.

by charles_f

5/23/2025 at 12:53:44 AM

> I really think a lot of the reason some people say it doesn't give them as much productivity as they would like is due largely to a desire to write "clean" code based on years and years of our own training, and due to having to be able to pass code review done by your peers.

Machine doesn't get mad when an app takes forever to start or keeps constantly crashing, but we humans do. Writing "clean" code has the least importance when it comes to machine generated code.

by nalekberov

5/23/2025 at 1:01:42 AM

People keep reading off this nonsense that AI generated code is always bad or slow.

This is so far from the truth that I really think anybody who still says this has not actually used it for anything real in at least a couple years.

Yes, I'm not saying it will always generate you the best code, sometimes it may even be bad.

What I am saying is it CAN generate code that is reasonably performant, sometimes even more performant than you would have written it given time constraints, and fulfills requirements (even if sometimes it requires a little bit of manual effort) much faster than we ever could before.

by Jcampuzano2

5/23/2025 at 1:44:01 AM

I can only assume that you have significant experience being a junior engineer

by drekipus

5/23/2025 at 12:47:17 PM

First off, I would hope that everyone had experience being a junior engineer for some time.

But if your assertion is that using AI for code generation and being successful with it makes you a junior engineer, then good luck keeping your job in the future. Just take a look at social media and there are a plethora of examples of prominent engineers using it with success.

by Jcampuzano2

5/23/2025 at 12:46:07 PM

It generates reasonably performant code because most of the industry isn’t writing code that’s computationally bound. If you have to wait for network I/O anyway, it doesn’t really matter if your code is optimal, because that wait will dominate everything else.

by sgarland

5/23/2025 at 12:51:43 AM

Clean code is nice.

Working code is a requirement.

You missed the point. AI slop doesn't just fail on point 1. It fails on point 2.

by boxed

5/23/2025 at 12:55:06 AM

I work in an enterprise company where we just recently got access to use cursor, before that copilot.

We have literally stood up entire services built practically entirely with AI that are deployed right now and consumers are using.

AI does work with competent people behind the wheel. People can't keep hiding behind saying that it always churns out code that doesn't work. We are way past those days. If you don't you will end up losing your job. Theres no way around it. The problem is we may end up losing our jobs either way.

by Jcampuzano2

5/23/2025 at 1:05:16 AM

> entire services built practically entirely with AI

What kind of services and how complex are they?

I've been using Cursor for a year and struggle to get the agent to make competent changes in a medium sized code base.

Even something isolated like writing a test for a specific function usually take multiple rounds of iteration and manual cleanup at the end.

by MeetingsBrowser

5/23/2025 at 1:14:28 AM

Most services that are written today (Not just talking about my company/experience, I'm talking broadly) are not complex. Many are basically a copy paste of the same types of things that have been built thousands of times before. Now with that knowledge and knowing how LLM's should work it should come as no surprise that AI will be able to spin up new ones quite competently and quickly.

Regarding tests: that is also something I find and many of my peers find that LLM's excel at. Given X inputs and Y outputs an llm will spit out a whole suite of tests for every case of your functions without issue except in complicated scenarios. End to end tests it may not do quite as well at since usually it requires a lot of externalities/setup, but it can help with generating some of the setup and given examples it can build from there. Of course this depends on how much you value those tests, since some don't even think tests are that useful nowadays.

by Jcampuzano2

5/23/2025 at 1:11:17 AM

> AI does work with competent people behind the wheel

So does extremely junior devs that are really bad but you code review EVERYTHING.

(Except jr programmers can learn, AI models can't really, they can be retrained from scratch by big corporations)

by boxed

5/23/2025 at 1:16:38 AM

The AI will do it faster and cheaper than the junior does and thats what the company cares about.

Not to mention you should still be code reviewing it anyway. In fact with AI you should be reviewing even more than you were before.

by Jcampuzano2

5/23/2025 at 1:39:13 AM

> The AI will do it faster and cheaper than the junior does and thats what the company cares about.

Short term. Not long term. The AI will never become a staff developer. Shifting review on to the senior developers is shifting responsibility and workload, which will have the expected outcome. Slower development cycles as you have to consider every footgun. Especially when the AI can't explain the reasoning for esoteric changes. I ask a Jr, it's likely they have a test (codified or manual) that led them to the decision.

by Supermancho

5/23/2025 at 3:53:58 AM

I’ve had AI generate code in a few hours that would take some juniors I’ve worked with weeks. Yes, the code was not the best (very long methods) and it took some iteration, but everything has trade offs.

by icedchai

5/23/2025 at 1:16:00 AM

Yep, agreed. I can no longer relate to people who don't recognize how powerful a tool like Cursor can be.

But I also can't relate to people who think they can, today, build fully working software using just AIs, without people who know how software works and are able to understand and debug what is being generated.

Maybe it's true that this will no longer be the case a year from now. I honestly don't know. But at the moment, I think being a skilled practitioner who is also able to effectively use these powerful new tools is actually a pretty sweet spot, despite all the doom and gloom.

by sanderjd

5/23/2025 at 1:36:30 AM

Cursor has been confidently incorrect repeatedly when discussing databases at my job. It doesn’t understand how MySQL works, and wants to make terrible indexing decisions because of it. You wouldn’t know that it’s wrong unless you already know the correct answer, because what it recommended will work, it’ll just be bloated and sub-optimal. And therein lies the problem: computers are so fast, people will happily assume that it worked, and then later will scale the size up when the half-baked solution shows its cracks.

by sgarland

5/23/2025 at 2:18:54 AM

Yeah. But you aren't disagreeing with what I wrote.

I think it's breaking a lot of brains that we have these tools now that are useful but not deterministically useful.

by sanderjd

5/23/2025 at 12:41:59 PM

Fair point. I don’t hate AI, and use it sometimes, but I’m always painfully aware that it can and will make mistakes, some subtle, that must be caught by someone who already knows most of the answer.

by sgarland

5/23/2025 at 1:56:32 AM

When I've seen examples of such cases, my impression was that they could be improved by taking the AI out of the picture and using some "low code" solution.

by pron

5/23/2025 at 3:48:36 AM

I had AI do some tedious work, like migrating to new APIs, upgrading deprecated calls, fixing warnings in old C code. It worked great. Faster than I could do it myself.

by icedchai

5/23/2025 at 2:09:33 AM

Let us know how those services are doing in 2 years

by davidcbc

5/23/2025 at 2:07:48 AM

Then who fixes it when it stops working? Or do you just par each other on the back and fold the company?

by nkrisc

5/23/2025 at 1:01:55 AM

Well that might be true, but I think the reason why they are blatantly acting like that because stakeholders and decision makers are detached from their decisions timewise.

That's why I bring such topics as maintenance and stability very early on into the discussions and ask those stakeholders how much system downtime they can tolerate, so that they can feel the weight of their decision making, and that gives me an opportunity to explain why quality matters.

Then it's up to them to decide how much crap they tolerate.

by rester324

5/23/2025 at 11:31:30 AM

Anthropogenic climate change and resource depletion comes to mind...

by BlueTemplar

5/23/2025 at 2:51:16 AM

It's right, AI does require giving up control and letting things be done differently, depends how much you really use it.

It's the same when you get a junior dev to work on things, it's just not how you would do it yourself and frequently wrong or naive. Sometime is brilliant and better than you would have done yourself.

That doesn't mean don't have junior devs, but having one doesn't mean you don't have to do corrective stuff and refinements to their work.

Most of us aren't changing the world with our code, we're contributing an incredibly small niche part of how it works. People (normal people, lol) only care what your system does for them, not how it works or how great the code is.

by webprofusion

5/23/2025 at 5:24:51 AM

Beautiful and witty prose to say "vibe coding sucks". He's not at all wrong about the state of AI coding in May of 2025. The 3 hours I just burned trying to get it to correct output bugs in a marimo notebook (which I started learning this week) is demonstrable evidence.

But it completely ignores the fact that AI generated code is getting better on a ~weekly basis. The author acknowledges that it is useful in some contexts for some uses, but doesn't acknowledge that the utility is constantly growing. We certainly could plateau sometime soon leaving us in the reckless intern zone, but I wouldn't bet on it.

by dlnovell

5/23/2025 at 7:50:46 AM

Far as I'm concerned, it's getting better every week in the way Tesla self driving got better every week. Is it closer to its goal? Yes. Does it give value to its users? Arguably yes, but not really.

Is it, in 2025, actually better than a real human at its designated task? Pretty universally no.

So i won't be surprised when the "last 10%" of software AI takes 30 years to close the gap that 20 years of "immanent self driving" is still yet to close.

We should all understand, i would think, that the last 10% is the hard part.

by queenkjuul

5/24/2025 at 3:16:16 AM

It's a fair point. It's hard to know where we are in the S curve. Considering how much better it's gotten in the past 12 months I don't get the sense that we're decelerating towards a plateau of capability, but it's certainly possible

by dlnovell

5/23/2025 at 1:28:11 AM

> The real horror isn’t that AI will take our jobs—it’s that it will let people in who never wanted the job to begin with.

I fully agree. This already happened with the explosion of DevOps bullshit, where people with no understanding of Linux got jobs by memorizing abstractions. “Stop gatekeeping,” they say. “Stop blowing up prod, and read docs” I fire back.

by sgarland

5/23/2025 at 2:31:24 AM

> explosion of DevOps bullshit

The fact that somebody can "be DevOps" or work as a "DevOps Engineer" is exemplary of the fact that DevOps as conceived and DevOps as practiced are two very different things. The former would be engineers taking ownership of deployment, collaborating horizontally, and practicing tight feedback loops. DevOps as practiced is the time-honored tradition of a dev team and a cloud team playing tennis with a grenade that is a questionably-stable SaaS that people volley back and forth with rackets like "let's roll the pods" or "it worked on my machine".

> people with no understanding of Linux got jobs

This happens in every industry with every job title. I've worked with Senior+ developers that mutated React props, didn't know how to use Git, couldn't read Java stack traces, etc. I myself have been paid money to do a myriad of things that I have no business doing (like singing or playing guitar or mixing cocktails). It's the way of the world.

by alexjplant

5/23/2025 at 1:01:22 PM

The platonic ideal of DevOps is fine, yes. The problem I’ve consistently run into is there is a vanishingly small percentage of devs who want to do Ops, or even consider that a server with real constraints is running their code. Performance takes a backseat to DX, which AFAICT is code for “I don’t want to do anything but write code and push.”

I should note that I think this is fine, if and only if you have specialist teams who respect each others’ abilities and recommendations. A dev team shouldn’t have to worry about standing up infrastructure, but similarly, when the infra team tells them that their app is consuming far more compute than it should be, the dev team should profile and improve their code instead of asking for more compute.

by sgarland

5/23/2025 at 4:30:00 PM

> there is a vanishingly small percentage of devs who want to do Ops, or even consider that a server with real constraints is running their code. Performance takes a backseat to DX, which AFAICT is code for “I don’t want to do anything but write code and push.”

This is because many tech orgs judge performance by "business impact" and dev and infra teams have different value propositions.

A dev writing and shipping features conspicuously demonstrates value because they write things that users pay for. Product features are novel and specific to a business; a developer can write "Built an automatic cardinal grammeter synchronizer that generates $100M in ARR" on their resume. There is essentially no upper bound on the dollar value of their impact.

Infra teams, on the other hand, have no direct way of quantifying their work. Even though their job is very necessary it's difficult to move the needle as far as cashflow is concerned. People tend to consider infrastructure a commodity so it ends up being one of those things that's only noticed if it breaks. A good day on an ops team means no trouble, not more money. The cherry on top of the sundae is that more users is more money which means more prestige for developers whereas more users means more load which means more problems for the infra and ops teams to contend with.

This incentive structure is why many devs would rather spend all of their time slinging code than worrying about k8s cluster nodes or IAM roles.

As a jack-of-all-trades I don't think this a healthy dynamic. I've led infra teams and dev teams both and know what it looks like on each side of the fence - a little consideration goes a long way and it's one of many reasons why I think that it's healthy for everybody to do a bit of everything in a tech org. People are much less likely to "play defense" if they understand a team's motivations and don't anticipate a negative interaction.

by alexjplant

5/23/2025 at 1:54:05 AM

This is already happening and it’s a colossal mess

by mountainriver

5/23/2025 at 2:14:55 AM

This already happened with Linux where people with no understanding of electrical engineering got jobs memorizing abstractions.

I look forward to a data driven system future where a few functions transform the machines electromagnetic geometry to solve a task based upon the most efficient energy model for solving a task as we continue to compress from the model all the non-essential syntax sugar of modern software.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.10668

by bangertho

5/23/2025 at 2:48:11 AM

Fun fact, I was a Nuclear Electronics Technician, and have a decent understanding – though admittedly not to the level of an EE – of how computers work at a very low level. I also worked for a chip fab for a couple of years, and literally made silicon wafers. I also rewrote the US Navy’s microprocessor training course for Nuke ETs, updating it from the Motorola 68000 to the Intel 386.

I make no claims that I fully understand anything, but I do have a decent understanding of how a CPU works from the level of doped silicon and up. Crucially, I read every doc I could find at every one of those jobs. You can learn enough to do the job, or you can learn more. That is a choice that everyone makes.

More generally, I’ve been playing with Linux and computers in general for over 20 years, and when I finally got a job in tech about five years ago, I was stunned at how little people knew about how computers work. I don’t expect (nor do I think it’s helpful) anyone to know how a bus arbitration cycle works, but I assumed that things like IOPS and throughput would be generally understood.

by sgarland

5/23/2025 at 3:29:08 AM

> More generally, I’ve been playing with Linux and computers in general for over 20 years, and when I finally got a job in tech about five years ago, I was stunned at how little people knew about how computers work. I don’t expect (nor do I think it’s helpful) anyone to know how a bus arbitration cycle works, but I assumed that things like IOPS and throughput would be generally understood.

My expertise is only in sleeping until 11am on weekends, but I too started in "tech" after being a lifelong hobbyist and have been continually shocked at how concepts like "pass by reference" are alien to a seemingly large portion of the people that I've worked with.

People often fail to know things that are basically "table stakes" in the domains they ostensibly work in, to say nothing of even being aware of something like L1 cache or how code they write could interact with it.

by nyarlathotep_

5/23/2025 at 4:02:02 AM

AWS: “We’ve separated compute and storage by a large physical distance, which makes relational databases better.”

People who knew better: wild laughter.

by sgarland

5/23/2025 at 3:22:37 AM

It’s actually kinda terrifying the more you find out how incompetent most of the people writing most of the software most of the world runs on are

by binary132

5/23/2025 at 3:58:57 AM

Much like how the more you know about how computers work, the more mind-boggling it is that they work. The Internet? Magic. CDMA? Wizardry. EUV? Sorcery.

by sgarland

5/23/2025 at 2:46:35 AM

Could you elaborate?

by SirSavary

5/23/2025 at 9:21:15 PM

What a great essay, this make me laugh out loud as I'm finishing my week. Thanks for this masterpiece, just shared in some engineering channels in my company even the AI ones!

People think LLM is magic but its just engineering and we should treat like so, it has flaws, can be improved and in the end many times is just a tool for a job. Not the tool for all the jobs.

by breno12321

5/23/2025 at 1:09:37 AM

> AI has no concept of memory locality. No intuition for cache misses.

Not true at all but you have to ask it.

by wwarner

5/23/2025 at 12:58:17 AM

these tools have no understanding of clean architecture, they are like geeksforgeeks or w3cschools, decades old shitty "tutorials" written by amateurs for amateurs condensed into a chatbot. If you work on cleanly architectured code they can still be useful, they can see the patterns and usually perform better in my experience. But not in a million years will you get to that clean architecture by starting them off from scratch. Keep it turned off until you have a solid foundation would be my advice.

by lyu07282

5/23/2025 at 2:11:15 AM

Despite that this post/blog about AI has some valid points, the truth of the matter is that a good experienced developer _can_ extract the power out of a Coding Agent to get 6 months worth of work done in 3 weeks, and even do it in a language he's never coded in before. AI just isn't AGI yet, so comparing it to a human developer doesn't make any sense, to me. On the other hand, I'd also say AI Coding Agents are "Superhuman" in their vast knowledge and code-writing abilities. This indeed does sound like a contradiction, but the world is nuanced enough for it not to be a contradiction, but just two things that are true in a nuanced way.

by quantadev

5/23/2025 at 1:01:38 AM

The real horror isn’t that AI will take our jobs—it’s that it will let people in who never wanted the job to begin with.

Gross. Also: you could have said this about the spreadsheet.

by tptacek

5/23/2025 at 1:53:51 AM

Meanwhile,

> 88% of the Excel spreadsheets have errors

https://www.cassotis.com/insights/88-of-the-excel-spreadshee...

How many companies mismanaged their finances because they had an enthusiastic spreadsheet user in charge? From that article, we know a country did.

by yencabulator

5/23/2025 at 2:30:31 AM

It's a kind of macabre progress that national policy missteps have advanced to "ChatGPT, generate a table of tariffs for the US to impose on other places."

https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-tariffs-chatgpt-205520...

by Terr_

5/23/2025 at 3:18:12 AM

Idiocracy was a pretty good take on the future of civilization

by delfinom

5/23/2025 at 4:50:24 PM

I agree that all of this is madness, but to be fair, 100% of computer programs have bugs, so I don't think this is any more damning than systematizing all of humanity's processes with computers.

by saulpw

5/23/2025 at 5:01:45 PM

It's about the likelihood and probability distribution of the kinds of bugs.

An Excel sheet made by NASA as part of their official space operations, to that rigor will probably have 0 problems ever. But compared to typical software, just consider this: Excel sheets do not have a culture of any kind of testing. If the output looks plausible, move on. Garbage in, garbage processing, garbage out.

AI slop has a similar but not exactly the same problem: It's highly, highly likely a human "reviewing" the generated code will just nod their head and not think critically/independently, just accepting all things that are superficially plausible. That may be fine for your webdev CRUD but I sure hope those people are never given credentials that can access anything critical.

by yencabulator

5/23/2025 at 1:28:15 AM

I feel this has been the case for 20 years, when a whole generation was shoveled into the Comp Sci dream.

by EdwardKrayer

5/23/2025 at 1:21:07 AM

> let people in who never wanted the job to begin with

I knew plenty of software developers that hate the job: it's a just paid work for many people and AI doesn't change that

by robocat

5/28/2025 at 5:49:39 AM

My favorite thing about this article is that it was released the exact same day as Claude 4 Opus.

If it's satire, it's brilliant: because most of the comments I see (here and elsewhere) are clearly written by people who tried agentic coding before Opus 4, and haven't given it a fair shake over the ensuing five days.

IMO the most important engineering skill in 2025 isn't low-level programming, or the craft of debugging, or even having a firm grasp of system architecture. Believe it or not, I truly believe the vibe-first juniors will learn that stuff too, over the course of their careers, just as we did: through necessity (As an aside: if you don't think they'll encounter such necessity, then it's inherently not one any more than the countless other once-honored, fastidious hallmarks of craft that have since been rendered obsolete. And if you don't think they'll learn even upon encountering a true necessity, then you underestimate them.)

No, the most important engineering skill in 2025 is non-attachment: constantly update your priors, and hold your opinions very loosely. Because those opinions could be fully wrong before the essay even gets shared.

by dorkitude

5/29/2025 at 10:35:03 PM

Attachment leads to suffering. Always has, always will.

by makk

5/23/2025 at 2:35:57 AM

I want everyone to join the programming club who wants to.

by wewewedxfgdf

5/23/2025 at 1:08:17 PM

Wants is the operative word. If you show up to a racetrack with zero experience and a Ferrari, you’re not going to be accepted if you try to pretend that you know how to drive. You’ll probably also hit the wall, which hopefully would provide an opportunity for introspection.

If you have an AI generate all your code for you, and then say that you made an app, you should expect people to push back.

I want to be around people who like learning and knowing things for the sake of learning. AI is a tool, but if you rely on it too heavily (or really at all when starting out), you’re stifling your ability to truly learn.

by sgarland

5/23/2025 at 12:51:23 AM

Ouch! Right in the feels

by dmitrygr

5/26/2025 at 8:05:35 PM

I came here to tell that the story was a rather delightful read regardless agreeing or not with the points being made.

by laacz

5/23/2025 at 12:39:40 AM

I wonder if we'll look back on this period in a couple of years and feel a nostalgic fondness as we think of the fateful moment when people working in software were forced to pull the wool from their eyes and look at the fact that businesses really, really, really dislike losing huge amounts of money paying people to make the software their businesses completely depend on.

I mean, I'm guessing that's true. It'd make a lot of sense if they vehemently disliked that. It's hard to make sense of it all otherwise, really.

by -__---____-ZXyw

5/23/2025 at 12:44:19 AM

Non-technical business owners have always had deep anxiety about software development. They don’t understand it, it’s very expensive, timelines can explode, and a hack or leak can materially damage their business.

A reasonably smart CEO can pretty much understand, in depth, every aspect of their business. But when it comes to tech, which is often the most essential part, they are left grasping, and must rely on the expertise of other people, and thus their destiny is not really in their control, other than by hiring the best they can and throwing money at R&D.

The AI and the hype around it plays into their anxieties, and also makes them feel like they have control over the situation.

In biotech, the Chief Scientific Officer (CSO) is often given much more authority in startups than the CTO in tech startups, I have noticed.

by monero-xmr

5/23/2025 at 1:09:36 AM

> A reasonably smart CEO can pretty much understand, in depth, every aspect of their business. But when it comes to tech, which is often the most essential part, they are left grasping, and must rely on the expertise of other people

I honestly really don't understand why this would be the case. Software isn't more complicated than any of the other aspects of the business. I think a "reasonably smart" CEO could just ... learn how it works? if it's really so critical to their business.

It's been a long time since I worked for a CEO who didn't understand software.

by sanderjd

5/23/2025 at 2:31:00 AM

If you run a trucking company, or a retail business, or a food company, etc. I believe you can understand to a fairly detailed level the logistics and “secret sauce” involved that makes the business tick, even if you are not the core employees operating with the skills and expertise.

But if you are a non-technical CEO and your core business is, say, enterprise SaaS software, you don’t fundamentally understand what the heck is going on, and if you have a key deadline and blow it, don’t really understand why. So if a new VP says they can cut your costs dramatically by offshoring everything to India, etc., or replace half these expensive engineers with AI, it seems as plausible as anything else. Especially given the fawning press and hype, and salesmen pitching you all day.

by monero-xmr

5/23/2025 at 1:13:32 PM

The part of this argument that doesn’t make sense to me is that you’d think any CEO would have a reasonably decent bullshit detector, but maybe since they have to shovel it out so much, they forget how to detect it in others.

by sgarland

5/23/2025 at 9:10:28 PM

> But if you are a non-technical CEO and your core business is, say, enterprise SaaS software, you don’t fundamentally understand what the heck is going on

Why the hell not? It's not that hard! I think this sounds like laziness, honestly.

It is no harder to understand how your enterprise SaaS software works than it is to understand what makes your retail business or trucking company tick. If you're running a company in a business, I really think you should understand how the important pieces of your business work... Is that really so controversial?

by sanderjd

5/25/2025 at 3:15:25 AM

Every CEO I have worked for - and I am an executive - doesn’t know shit about software engineering. I mean I’m paid a lot of money for that. I just explain things in metaphors, but the non-tech execs are clueless

by monero-xmr

5/23/2025 at 12:55:27 AM

CTO can be a funny position at companies. It sometimes does mean head of engineering and responsible for technical direction at a pretty granular level. But it often also can mean being sort of the public face for the company's technology vision. I've definitely seen companies where the two are largely one and the same. I've also seen companies where the CTO was more the outward-facing vision person.

by ghaff

5/23/2025 at 12:58:06 AM

If senior management feels their destiny is not in their control, they're doing it wrong. The best management don't always have the most expertise - but the good ones have an uncanny ability to know when they should defer, when/who to consult with, who to trust, and what to delegate.

by EdwardKrayer

5/23/2025 at 2:14:40 AM

Businesses really, really, really would like to just have profit without any expenses. Ideally all of the money in the world as profit, please. And no taxes either. Just skip straight to splitting all the money in the world between the shareholders.

If you think running the output of an LLM as a serverless function in some cloud is a good way to differentiate your business, build a moat, and make a profit, good luck!

by yencabulator

5/23/2025 at 12:42:27 AM

[dead]

by wetpaws

5/23/2025 at 12:29:02 AM

[flagged]

by phillipcarter

5/23/2025 at 12:39:52 AM

[flagged]

by bobxmax

5/23/2025 at 12:49:51 AM

Is the "relevance" of programmers really at stake? Isn't it more like "what programmers actually do"?

by beepbooptheory

5/23/2025 at 1:11:46 AM

[flagged]

by nsonha

5/23/2025 at 12:42:00 AM

Sounds like it was written by ChatGPT, to be honest.

by elliotbnvl

5/23/2025 at 12:59:53 AM

your comment is more likely to be written by ChatGPT than the blogpost.

by nalekberov

5/23/2025 at 1:42:10 AM

AI writing emits less carbon than human writing.

by vibeCoder007

5/23/2025 at 12:48:46 AM

Clean code is only good for non-profit organization. Your paid to solve problem as fast as possible, not to code.

by vibeCoder007

5/23/2025 at 1:54:24 AM

For profit organizations usually care a hell of a lot about minimizing production issues, actually. What are you talking about?

by joks

5/23/2025 at 12:52:11 AM

You missed the point of the article. It's not about clean code. It's about working code.

by boxed

5/23/2025 at 12:43:22 AM

Adapt or die. Keep up on industry trends and learn how to (responsibly) use the tools to be a better programmer, or be unnaturally selected out.

by focusgroup0

5/23/2025 at 1:05:16 AM

100% agree, but I bet there will be a quality blowback in software much like what we've seen at Boeing over the last few decades. I think there will be a premium on higher-quality software, but most companies don't need it

by meesles

5/23/2025 at 12:54:28 AM

What does 'better' mean in this context? Commercial viability is important if one wants to eat, but doesn't seem to justify the smugness projected...

by ShroudedNight

5/23/2025 at 2:09:34 AM

More like embrace the crap quality (and become a worse programmer) or move to a field that cares about quality.

by yencabulator

5/23/2025 at 1:04:05 AM

We will see, but I can also imagine the pile of shit you vibecoded around you collapsing on top of you.

by lyu07282

5/23/2025 at 1:05:58 AM

The response will be "we adapted to the trends, don't blame us, blame the machines"

by nalekberov

5/23/2025 at 1:09:48 AM

Does it matter? The selling point of AI generated code is, eventually, you won't care what's happening in your code base and things just "work". It's like 95% of people who code (99%?) don't know what compilers do. Throw away what is collapsing, bring up new stuff, rinse and repeat.

by tokioyoyo

5/23/2025 at 1:52:52 AM

The selling point to you is that you can't fix problems, you just have to reimplement everything every time anything fails?

by joks

5/24/2025 at 3:19:51 AM

Not to me, to anyone who is buying up the solution. We work in very general paradigm of "write code, see something wrong, fix it up, deploy, now it works without that problem". The one that's being desired is "here's list of things i want to work, make it automagically work". How it gets there, doesn't matter, because, only us, engineers, care about code. If it needs to be reimplemented to fix up a bug or introduce a new feature, let it be.

by tokioyoyo

5/23/2025 at 1:39:48 AM

There were always people who only cared if it "just works", that part isn't exactly new. I think what we are saying is that good code matters beyond what you can understand or appreciate, until it blows your face off. This isn't something we could ever convince you of, and...

> Throw away what is collapsing, bring up new stuff, rinse and repeat.

hearing you trying to explain yourself makes us even more worried than before.

by lyu07282

5/24/2025 at 3:16:51 AM

Don't get me wrong, I don't support it, but at this point, I've heard enough from the upper-stakeholders to get what they're imagining in their head. Basically, think of a system that takes a long list of requirements, then just magically makes a working code out of it. Then automagically takes bug reports, fixes them, and adds it to the list of the requirements. Rinse and repeat to make sure things just work. The higher up you go in the chain of command, the more you realize that, genuinely nobody cares about code quality, engineers and etc. in any of the companies that are not solely tech companies.

Again, the selling point to higher ups is that you won't need to deal with code anymore, because things will just "work". How? I don't know, but that's what they're imagining and trying to cash into.

by tokioyoyo

5/23/2025 at 1:41:39 AM

This whole thread has to be satire.

by douglasisshiny

5/23/2025 at 1:38:11 AM

Have something else write code for you to be a better programmer? Yeah.... no, that's not how it works

by douglasisshiny

5/23/2025 at 12:41:28 AM

Is the writing here intentionally bad? May be it's not my cup of tea but it's been a while since I've read something so cringey, it's difficult to finish.

by noobermin

5/23/2025 at 1:00:09 AM

I don’t know, this made me kinda laugh:

Because if that programmer—if that thing, that CREATURE—walked into your stand-up in human form, typing half-correct garbage into your codebase while ignoring your architecture and disappearing during cleanup, you’d fire them before they could say "no blockers".

The description of the greenfield project first engineer. They are gone before you know it, or at the very least at some point offer a “well I had no choice you see, they really wanted to release something”.

by ivape

5/23/2025 at 1:03:19 AM

Message aside, I thought it was well written comedy.

by fracus

5/23/2025 at 1:09:55 AM

I liked it. Spotted one grammar mistake though. I like even that - an ai doesn’t make that kind of mistake.

by loloquwowndueo

5/23/2025 at 1:31:01 AM

The main source of the cringe is that the writing is so in your face about how hard it’s trying while the author is clearly unaware.

by willseth

5/23/2025 at 1:08:24 AM

Really? I enjoyed the writing style quite a bit.

by CSMastermind

5/23/2025 at 1:37:32 AM

I loved this article. But for some reason my gut is telling it will age like milk. Can you imagine how effective these coding agents will be in, say, 2036? The concept of coding things by hand for the sake of higher quality will seem so outdated

by holtkam2

5/23/2025 at 1:25:33 AM

Not sure if he talked about photography, Desktop Publishing, spreadsheets, or some other labor-saving invention.

But what I heard over the din of whining was "It was hard for me, it should be hard for you". And... that's not how this or anything works. You get labor-saving stuff, you choose if you want to continue to solve hard problems, or if you want the same problems (which suddenly turned easy).

Yes, it's not perfect. Yes, you need to know how you use it, and misusing it causes horrible disfiguring incidents. Guess what, the same was true about C++. And C before it. And that new-fangled assembly stuff, instead of using blinkenlights like a real programmer. And computers instead of slide rules.

Up the complexity ladder we keep going.

by groby_b

5/23/2025 at 1:32:35 AM

No, you missed the point entirely. The author was correctly pointing out that if you don’t struggle, you will not understand how things work. Claim otherwise all you want; centuries of pedagogy have proven this time and time again. You have to understand the fundamentals to grok the abstractions, and you have to fail to know why the successes worked.

by sgarland

5/23/2025 at 12:44:13 AM

I agree with this article. But, I do think it's important to understand that these tools do have value - especially when learning. I also think a lot of the issues raised will improve when we can increase context length. Googling problems, and having obsolete answers from 2007 also slow down progress, but we're not saying Google is worthless for serving those results.

These tools will get better, and they will eventually allow the best to extend their ability instead of both slowing them down and potentially encouraging bad practices. But it will take time, and increased context length. The world is full of people who don't care about best practice, and if that's all the task requires of them - keep on keeping on.

by EdwardKrayer