I was just listening to a fitting song on the way to work this morning, by Memphis May Fire.
What goes around comes around
That’s how the world turns
You’ll get what’s coming to you
Then maybe you’ll learn
The price that you pay
For being two faced
Is sleeping in the bed that you madeWhen people ask what I do for a living, my response is “software engineer”. Not “programmer” or “coder”, because the actual programming is only part of the job.
The big concerns for software engineers are reliability, maintainability, and scalability. Using LLM-generated code without reviewing and understanding it is antithetical to all three of those big concerns. Personally, I find that the amount of review and revising it takes doesn’t end up saving me any time at all compared with me writing it myself.
Almost anybody can build a bridge given some materials. But there’s a reason we have licensed engineers who review and sign plans for them. If your methed out neighbour built a bridge in an hour by himself, would you drive over it?
Albertatech has a video about a manager who fired his last software engineer because “he could code faster with Claude than an SE” and she was all “most programmers can code faster than an SE even without Claude, the point of an SE isn’t speed, it’s making sure your codebase is maintainable, scalable, and reliable”
These managers decide who stays on their teams without any understanding of what their team does. It’s like a 5 year old firing Davinci because he can draw a lady smiling with long brown hair faster with
Claudecrayons.Cory Doctorow has a really good quote about why AI is so appealing to managers:
If you know in your heart of hearts that if you don’t show up for work, everything’s fine, but if all the workers don’t show up for work, everything stops, you have to, like, confront the possibility that maybe you’re not in the driver’s seat, maybe you’re in the back seat with a toy Fisher-Price steering wheel. And AI is like the possibility of wiring that steering wheel directly into the drive train.
I usually just tell people I’m really good at pressing buttons.
I’m not even a software engineer ( not full stack or anything at least), and I would never use AI code if I didn’t understand and read it first. It’s fast and taught me some tricks I didn’t know, but do you all have management that just lets you submit shit that you have not read or understand?
I’m just amazed.
Most management doesn’t even have a working knowledge of this stuff, so they have no idea whether what you submit is good or bad, only whether it “works”.
(A) Humans are also not deterministic, in fact AI is much closer to determinism than human brains.
I would want to fire this guy so badly. Saying this out loud is such a clear indicator that you’re a liability.
Technically true statistically but ai and all the harnesses around it are just trying to mimic a tint sliver of human behavior. We are quickly learning that determinism isn’t what we want, stability and adaptability is. AI sucks at that very much. If I had to write a prompt for the same sai mistake one more time I’m gonna lose it.
I’m not sure what you’re getting at.
A person is adaptable. Their tools should be predictable. The guy I’m quoting is on some non-sequiter that has nothing to do with anything OP was even talking about. Like, he is actually just parroting pro-AI talking points at random.
I’m so tired
This is the point I’ve been making on this shit for 2 years - LLM code generation reduces the costs of code creation by adding massive costs in terms of reviewing and maintenability.
LLMs don’t do software design, and that includes things like designing for maintenability.
I’ve maintained for years that my engineering job is, sarcastically, “to move entropy around.” This is no different, as we’ve squeezed the envelope at one end only to balloon it at the other.
I would add that once you’re all-in on codegen for a project that escapes human comprehension, you have to keep using more codegen to maintain it. It effectively hands off the whole game to the robots, and probably keeps growing in scale all the time. By way of your observation of increasing cost of human involvement, it resembles a massive tech-debt scheme to me. Which is to say that it’ll work impressively well in the short term until someone has to get their hands dirty with the gordian knot of code that has been quietly cooked by LLMs for years. At that point, the bill comes due.
I think this is the best argument for human-in-the-loop, or even my personal favorite “LLM as an advisor or intern” instead. I’ve also had traction with AI codegen for disposable/single-use programs, where I just need to know if something works.
I’ve pondered on the feasibility of using codegen to manage projects done by codegen and the problem I see with that is that regenerating a project just replaces known bugs with unknown bugs rather than actually fixing bugs, plus the user interface will also change even if the requirements specification is so complete and well done that it manages to have the same features, and user really dislike that plus there are actual costs in retraining people to use a whole new UI.
I agree. Although I’ve been thinking more along the lines of bug fixing, adding features, and incrementally changing said app. So like you would with a human team, disallow large-scale refactors as a rule. As far as I can tell, that relies on codegen to be well-skilled and well-behaved - a whole other area that requires labor with possibly diminishing returns.
Management was always like this long before AI.
They ask their assistants to do something and after a few years they lost touch with how anything works.
Management was always like this long before AI.
That doesn’t mean they haven’t gotten worse. For the past few years they’ve been emboldened to threaten and fire employees that disagree with them with little short term risk.
CEOs being managers of ass-kissers is very spiritually AI, and it does cook their brains dry.
This is the full post
A year ago leadership told us everything goes through agents now. Hand written code needed a reason. It felt great for about 6 months, we shipped more than we ever had.
Now the codebase is around 3x the size it was and nobody can explain how most of it works. The agents struggle too, they keep re-implementing helpers that already exist somewhere else because there are 4 versions of everything.
The part that actually hurts is who is left. The two people who used to read every PR and push back left in the spring, one quit, one was “restructured”.
coderabbit still comments on every PR, but there’s nobody left who can tell if a comment matters or not, so people just resolve them all.
This month management started quietly asking us to “write more of it ourselves” again. Except half of us haven’t written anything non trivial in a year and it shows. I spent 2 days on something I would have done in an afternoon in 2024.
Not sure what I want from posting this.
Is anyone else at the point where the mandate is being walked back, and how did you get the understanding back?
My company is in the depths of the sub agent experiment. I am one of the ones who push back usually with the comment “this came out too complicated, can it be simplified?”. I’m afraid I’m not long for the company because I use ai the same way I used to use an offshore team; To execute more of the work I planned.
Maybe this is the AI game plan and why the big AI companies want the local models regulated.
Currently they’re more or less using the follow the free sales tactic but with the difference that the customers are already used to paying, just by far not what is required to cover the operational costs.
They can soon crank up the price and companies will have to accept that. They’re going to get extorted – either pay or basically lose your product.
this reads like one of these erowid posts from trainwreck category
What is that for the uninitiated
erowid is an old drug website that has an “experiences” category where people post their experiences on various drugs.
Was there a category for being hit by a train?
“trainwreck” here is figurative and means some kind of potent personal disaster, you can find there retrospectives after things like multi-year long addiction or waking up with four open fractures in another country
That’s what I’m afraid of for the rest of the development department. They have adopted AI to the core, and barely accept that my part can’t be AI’d for a number of reasons. Once the LLM providers will have to actually charge costs+profits, they’ll lose their whole toolbox, and I doubt they understand what they did to their code base.
This will easily be solved by the smaller models being capable of making smaller changes on an already AI-ified code base. Sadly AI is here to stay in some way or form and I’m more worried about the removal of satisfaction from my job than anything else. Also think of having to help a colleague which has an AI codebase you’d have to help debug
The person in the original post said that the frontier models were struggling to make good changes to the AI-ified code base, so what makes you think smaller ones will fare better?
Also, what happens when non-small changes need to be made?
I hope I never have to debug the AI crap I’ve seen. My job requires serious thinking about what I do, way deeper than the usual application programming. If I make mistakes, it is not about some app closing, it starts at system crashes and might end with bricked or even burned hardware. Which in turn could become rather expensive. I have to be very disciplined and defensive in my programming, but i also have way better numbers in bugs/loc than others.
Here’s a really good article- with illustrations- about something that theoretically can and so definitely will go wrong with “agentic coding” on any sufficiently large project. The Decoherence Trap
It warms my heart to read first-hand accounts of this starting to happen at real companies. I hope the financial AI crash holds off just a little longer to make sure they’ve all had enough time to dig themselves into holes past the point of no return.
I once rewrote a large component in our codebase, which was the right move because it was unmaintainable. When I was done, I was quite proud of myself and I also think that i designed it nicely and extensible (coherent pipes) while keeping the constraints of the rest of the system in mind. Then the slop commits came in and you could watch it deteriorate so fast it is insane and sad. And additionally, I stopped caring, which is an additional loss
Locked into a development model that slowly degrades our systems no matter how much effort we put into fixing them.
This is the ultimate dream of the ai bros. We are trapped forever, using their service at an ever increasing rate.
Thanks, this is indeed a good article!
Great article, thanks for sharing!
Really articulates the issues with vibe coding. If you don’t spend the tokens focusing on coherence you’re lost. And if the model can’t increase coherence you’re fucked!
Your well-wishing is appreciated (sorrynotsorry).
That is a very accurate description of how i’ve felt lately. I hope more people see this.
Its more likely that it will hold on just long enough for the big players to offload their stakes to pension funds who will then cop the loss …
I’m fairly confident that the post is written by a human, but one that has used AI so much that they literally are using AI’isms like “The part that actually hurts” or “except … and it shows”.
I think that’s just from using reddit too much, not AIs. That place has its own writing style too. But at this point it’s hard to distinguish between the two of them.
Well there’s a feedback loop between the two. AIs were trained on reddit threads, and reddit is rife with AI bots which influences the way people interacting with them speak.
I’m a bit unsure what we’re supposed to do here. It sounds believable to me, too. On the other hand, if it quacks like a duck… And there’s “Anti-AI” engagement farming written by chatbots out there.
Nightmare comment section. Just comment upon comment of ‘what you’re describing isn’t true’ and ‘tell your agents to make fewer mistakes.’
Unfortunately Hacker News has turned way too much into AI bros. I still read read it, but have learned to skip any AI related posts because of this. I do wonder how drive off these companies are going to dig themselves out of the hole they have dug and are digging with the overly verbose code…
You are not wrong but I think this was a Reddit post to /r/ClaudeCode
Which is like AI Bros central.
Im not a programmer or anything but I also noticed hacker news losing touch. Everyone claimed ai was good at coding, nobody could ever give concrete examples, I guess the reason is the code is embarassing
I also wonder how much of it is simply paid propaganda by AI investors. As the top forum for software engineers and technologists, it’s the most likely place to promote and influence AI adoption for financial gain; to make all codebases tightly coupled and dependent on AI.
There’s a chap in the comments suggesting to stop worrying, you only need to keep to the spec. The sheer stupidity of that… good god the stupidity.
Another says that they should audit the AI code using AI. Basically saying lets wrap the blackbox with another blackbox but this time with markerpen writing on top of the blackbox.
Idk how’s that supposed to help, i’m not a programmer, but i’d assume if Claude misunderstood the code that they themselves wrote, the project became unfixable, and they might have to see themselves writing the whole thing from the ground up.
What you are describing is specifically why I left programming and became a carpenter.
Reminds me of that company I was interviewing with back in May where the department lead proudly told me that all of their specs, code, docs and tests are now generated by LLMs.
They were seeking a replacement for a lady that had suddenly left…
They were seeking a replacement for a lady that had suddenly left…
Let me guess: they’re completely at a loss how this happened so unexpectedly.
I’m certain at some points only idiots have a job and the rest of us are jobless and homeless. Idiocracy.
That is literally now lol. It’s a cycle because stupid people are easily scared and poor people are quicker to anger. The stupid people think they are geniuses because when they ignore the smart people it feels like people are less mean to them.
I take it the lady’s position was not filled by you?
What is a spec? Like what the code is meant to do?
On a very basic level, it is indeed a description/definition of what your resulting code is supposed to do. The chap’s proposal is basically let ai read the spec and build the software. Tomorrow you find out it’s missing something so you only adapt the spec and let the ai build it from scratch. Now, it doesn’t take too much imagination to see where this can and absolutely will go wrong, and especially in what unknown and very interesting ways especially.
lol that comment caught my eye as well. On some level I’m telling myself it’s just really dry sarcasm. Because i mean it’s just so dumb.
This month management started quietly asking us to “write more of it ourselves” again.
I think… I think there’s a chance that if I was in-person, and this happened, there would be violence.
The Basilisk is going to be unhappy with those managers. 👀
Yeah. If they want us to write more ourselves, they should hire more people.
