> But hey, don’t take it from me. Take it from… the Copilot people. According to The Verge and a bunch of other reputable news sources, Microsoft is openly encouraging their employees to use multiple tools, and as a result, Claude Code has rapidly become dominant across engineering at Microsoft.
Well, that explains the sloppy results Microsoft is delivering lately!
> Jeffrey Emanuel and his 22 accounts at $4400/month
Paying $4.4k per month for the privilege of writing code is absolute madness, I'm not quite so sure with how we got to this point but it's still madness. Maybe Yegge is indeed right, maybe this is just like regular gambling/addiction, which sucks when it comes to being a programmer but at least it gets the dopamine levels higher.
It should be banned in current form. No junior positions available - only those who lasted even have the chance to use them in commercial settings. After layoffs you will get how BAD it is :/ (if you are 35+)
I think Yegge hit the nail on the head: he has an addiction. Opus 4.5 is awesome but the type of stuff Yegge has been saying lately has been... questionable, to say the least. The kids call it getting "one-shotted by AI". Using an AI coding assistant should not be causing a person this much distress.
A lot of smart people think they're "too smart" to get addicted. Plenty of tales of booksmart people who tried heroin and ended up stealing their mother's jewelry for a fix a few months later.
> But if you haven’t used specifically Opus 4.5/4.6 with specifically Claude Code for at least an hour, then you’re in for a real shock. Because all your complaining about AI not being useful for real-world tasks is obsolete. AI coding hit an event horizon on November 24th, 2025. It’s the real deal.
Yeah, it is over for several roles, especially frontend web development given Opus 4.6 is able to one shot your React frontend from a Figma design 90% of the time.
Why would I want to hire 10 senior frontend developers on a $200K asking price salary at this point when one AI can replace 9 of them (yes it can) and require one single junior-level engineer at a significant lower price?
This idea is very tempting for many companies to continue slashing headcount with less employees to find 'cost savings' by using AI to do more with less.
He talks about this new tech for extracting more value from engineers as if it were fracking. When they become impermeable you can now inject a mixed high pressure cocktail of AI to get their internal hydrocarbons flowing. It works but now he feels all pumped out. But the vampire metaphor is hopefully better in that blood replenishes if you don't take too much. A succubus may be an improved comparison, in that a creative seed is extracted and depleted, then refills over a refractory period.
Every time I say I don't see the productivity boost from AI, people always say I'm using the wrong tool, or the wrong model. I use Claude with Sonnet, Zed with either Claude Sonnet 4 or Opus 4.6, Gemini, and ChatGPT 5.2. I use these tools daily and I just don't see it.
The vampire in the room, for me, seems to be feeling like I'm the only person in the room that doesn't believe the hype. Or should I say, being in rooms where nobody seems to care about quality over quantity anymore. Articles like this are part of the problem, not the solution.
Sure they are great for generating some level of code, but the deeper it goes the more it hallucinates. My first or second git commit from these tools is usually closer to a working full solution than the fifth one. The time spent refactoring prompts, testing the code, repeating instructions, refactoring naive architectural decisions and double checking hallucinations when it comes to research take more than the time AI saves me. This isn't free.
A CTO this week told me he can't code or brainstorm anymore without AI. We've had these tools for 4 years, like this guy says - either AI or the competition eats you. So, where is the output? Aside from more AI-tools, what has been released in the past 4 years that makes it obvious looking back that this is when AI became available?
All this praise for AI.. I honestly don't get it. I have used Opus 4.5 for work and private projects. My experience is that all of the AIs struggle when the project grows. They always find some kind of local minimum where they cannot get out of but tell you this time their solution will work.. but it doesn't. They waste my time with this behaviour enormously. In the end I always have to do it myself.
Maybe when AIs are able to say: "I don't know how this works" or "This doesn't work like that at all." they will be more helpful.
What I use AIs for is searching for stuff in large codebases. Sometimes I don't know the name or the file name and describe to them what I am looking for. Or I let them generate some random task python/bash script. Or use them to find specific things in a file that a regex cannot find. Simple small tasks.
It might well be I am doing it totally wrong.. but I have yet to see a medium to large sized project with maintainable code that was generated by AI.
He's totally correct on the extraction that companies do (always has been). What I kinda disagree is the notion that if a company doesn't go the same path as these others, where everyone is "10x'ing" with AI, that they will suddenly disappear. I really don't think it will work that way.
Yeah, some might if another company/startup goes after their business and they build faster, but building faster doesn't mean your building what people want/need. You might be building bloat (Windows/MS) that no one cares about.
Companies still need to know what to build, not just build something/anything faster.
This has been my experience even before AI. We are a small bootstrapped company, and we have major competitors with free offerings and much more resources than we have (due to VC funding or other backing). While they've achieved some success, they've come nowhere near close to out-competing us.
Paying for AI is much more accessible than getting venture funding, so it's less of a differentiator. They could pay for more AI than we could, but that's already been true with humans, and it hasn't necessarily helped.
Knowing what to build is still the game. As well as the actual business side of business - building a trusted brand, relationships with customers, smart marketing etc.
Some interesting parts in the text. Some not so interesting ones. The author seems to be thinking that he's a big deal it seems, though - a month ago, I did not know who he is. My work environment has never heard of him (SDE at FAANG). Maybe I'm an outlier and he indeed influences the whole expectation management at companies with his writing, or maybe the success (?) of gastown got to him and he thinks he's bigger than he actually is. Time will tell. In any case, the glorification of oneself in an article like that throws me off for some reason.
We're certainly in the middle of a whirlwind of progress. Unfortunately, as AI capabilities increase, so do our expectations.
Suddenly, it's no longer enough to slap something together and call it a project. The better version with more features is just one prompt away. And if you're just a relay for prompts, why not add an agent or two?
I think there won't be a future where the world adapts to a 4-hour day. If your boss or customer also sees you as a relay for prompts, they'll slowly cut you out of the loop, or reduce the amount they pay you. If you instead want to maintain some moat, or build your own money-maker, your working hours will creep up again.
In this environment, I don't see this working out financially for most people. We need to decide which future we want:
1. the one where people can survive (and thrive) without stable employment;
2. the one where we stop automating in favor of stable employment; or
3. the one where only those who keep up stay afloat.
> Let’s start with the root cause, which is that AI does actually make you more 10x productive, once you learn how.
> But hey, don’t take it from me. Take it from… the Copilot people. According to The Verge and a bunch of other reputable news sources, Microsoft is openly encouraging their employees to use multiple tools, and as a result, Claude Code has rapidly become dominant across engineering at Microsoft.
And what wonders they've achieved with it! Truly innovative enhancements to notepad being witnessed right now! The inability to shut down your computer! I can finally glimpse the 10x productivity I've been missing out on!
But at scale. Yegge gets close to it in this blog (which actually made me lol, good to see that he is back on form), but shies away from it.
If AI is producing a real productivity boom then we should be seeing a flood of high-quality non-AI related software. If building and shipping software is now easier and faster then all of the software that we have that doesn't quite work right should be displaced by high quality successors. It should be happening right now.
So where is it? Why is all this velocity going into tooling around AI instead? Face it, an entire industry has fallen into the trap of building the automation instead of the product they were trying to automate the production of.
Where is the new high quality C compiler that actually compiles the linux kernel to a measurably higher quality than gcc? If AI is really increasing productivity shouldn't we have that instead of a press-oriented hype flop?
I am a long time fan of Steve Yegge but he's too much part of the groupthink at this point.
You can't win with Claude Code. I understand that his API key isn't on the PID controller, so he gets a less bad deal, but he's still breaking even with some gee whizz factor.
Agents are like people on a long enough timeline: they will eventually do the lazy thing. But this happens in minutes not years.
If you don't have them on tracks made of iron, you are on a sugar high that will crash.
Formal methods, zero sorry, or it's another bounty for the vibecode cleanup guys.
Am I getting Steve's point? It's a bit like what happened with the agricultural revolution.
A long time ago, food took effort to find, and calories were expensive.
Then we had a breakthrough in cost/per/calories.
We got fat, because we can not moderate our food intake. It is killing us.
A long time ago, coding took effort, and programmer productivity was expensive.
Then we had a breakthrough in cost/per/feature.
Now we are exhausted, because we can not moderate our energy and attention expenditure. It is killing us.
I’m in Steve’s demographic, showing similar symptoms, and I’m as worried as he is about how we’re going to cope.
It’s a matter of opportunity cost. It used to be that when I rested for an hour, I lost an hour of output. Now, when I rest for an hour, I lose what used to be a day of output.
I need to rewire my brain and learn how to split the difference. There’s no point in producing a lot of output if I don’t have time to live.
The idea that you’ll get to enjoy the spoils when you grow up is false. You won’t. Just produce 5x and take some time off every day. You may even be more likely to reflect, and end up producing the right thing.
>With a 10x boost, if you give an engineer Claude Code, then once they’re fluent, their work stream will produce nine additional engineers’ worth of value.
I keep hearing about this 10x productivity, but where is it materializing? Most developers at my company use Claude Code, but we don't seem to be shipping new features at ten times the rate. In fact, tickets still take roughly the same amount of time to complete.
It's real and I've been telling all the people around me who get vested in this sort of exponential growth, to be very wary of the impeding burnout, which spares no soul hungry to get high on information. getting high on information is now a thing, it is not cyberpunk fiction anymore, and burnout is a real threat - VR or not. perhaps one can burn out on tiktok these days.
> But if you haven’t used specifically Opus 4.5/4.6 with specifically Claude Code for at least an hour, then you’re in for a real shock. Because all your complaining about AI not being useful for real-world tasks is obsolete.
These hyperbolic takes from Steve are wearing thin.
It wasn't my experience that Opus 4.5/4.6 was a sea change. It was a nice incremental improvement.
> And unfortunately, all your other tools and models are pretty terrible in comparison.
Personally, I like Copilot CLI. $10 a month for 300 requests. Copilot will keep working until it fulfills your request, no matter how many tokens it uses.
Calling all other tools "pretty terrible" without specifics reminds me of crypto FOMO from the 2010s.
Luckily we work for ourselves in our studio, and I have no one to answer to except my business partner and customers, and tech is my domain. But I have concluded "we already build fast enough." Really how much faster do we need to build? Deployments: automated. Tests: automated. Migrations: automated. Frameworks: complete. Stack: stable. Scaling: solved. OKAY so now with AI we can build "MORE!" More of WHAT exactly? What makes our lives better? What makes our customers happier? How about I just directly feed customer support tickets into Claude and let it rip.
I'm increasingly thinking either people were terrible developers, used shit tools to begin with, or are in a mass psychosis. I certainly feel bad for anyone reporting to "the business guy." He never respected you to begin with, and now he literally thinks "why are you so slow? I can build Airbnb in a weekend."
For someone who previously could achieve nothing, these tools are magical, as they can now achieve something. It feels to them like infinity because their base was 0. That alone will create a lot of things they wouldn't have been able to, good for them. However for people who already know what they're doing, I only feel slightly pushed along some asymptote. My bottlenecks simply are not measured in tokens to screen.
The source of the addiction is that an amount of effort is highly likely to result in a fulfilling outcome. That makes you want to make more effort. In the past, a lot of work was very futile, very tedious and often felt hopeless and that made people essentially give up. So this is a very good problem to have. I guess people should monitor their own output and try to pace themselves. But also be grateful that we have these capabilities that allow us to solve so many problems and achieve so many of the things that we want in life.
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Downvoted within 1 minute. This website is a trash fire.
Well, that explains the sloppy results Microsoft is delivering lately!
Paying $4.4k per month for the privilege of writing code is absolute madness, I'm not quite so sure with how we got to this point but it's still madness. Maybe Yegge is indeed right, maybe this is just like regular gambling/addiction, which sucks when it comes to being a programmer but at least it gets the dopamine levels higher.
It should be banned in current form. No junior positions available - only those who lasted even have the chance to use them in commercial settings. After layoffs you will get how BAD it is :/ (if you are 35+)
A lot of smart people think they're "too smart" to get addicted. Plenty of tales of booksmart people who tried heroin and ended up stealing their mother's jewelry for a fix a few months later.
Yeah, it is over for several roles, especially frontend web development given Opus 4.6 is able to one shot your React frontend from a Figma design 90% of the time.
Why would I want to hire 10 senior frontend developers on a $200K asking price salary at this point when one AI can replace 9 of them (yes it can) and require one single junior-level engineer at a significant lower price?
This idea is very tempting for many companies to continue slashing headcount with less employees to find 'cost savings' by using AI to do more with less.
The vampire in the room, for me, seems to be feeling like I'm the only person in the room that doesn't believe the hype. Or should I say, being in rooms where nobody seems to care about quality over quantity anymore. Articles like this are part of the problem, not the solution.
Sure they are great for generating some level of code, but the deeper it goes the more it hallucinates. My first or second git commit from these tools is usually closer to a working full solution than the fifth one. The time spent refactoring prompts, testing the code, repeating instructions, refactoring naive architectural decisions and double checking hallucinations when it comes to research take more than the time AI saves me. This isn't free.
A CTO this week told me he can't code or brainstorm anymore without AI. We've had these tools for 4 years, like this guy says - either AI or the competition eats you. So, where is the output? Aside from more AI-tools, what has been released in the past 4 years that makes it obvious looking back that this is when AI became available?
Maybe when AIs are able to say: "I don't know how this works" or "This doesn't work like that at all." they will be more helpful.
What I use AIs for is searching for stuff in large codebases. Sometimes I don't know the name or the file name and describe to them what I am looking for. Or I let them generate some random task python/bash script. Or use them to find specific things in a file that a regex cannot find. Simple small tasks.
It might well be I am doing it totally wrong.. but I have yet to see a medium to large sized project with maintainable code that was generated by AI.
Companies still need to know what to build, not just build something/anything faster.
Paying for AI is much more accessible than getting venture funding, so it's less of a differentiator. They could pay for more AI than we could, but that's already been true with humans, and it hasn't necessarily helped.
Knowing what to build is still the game. As well as the actual business side of business - building a trusted brand, relationships with customers, smart marketing etc.
Suddenly, it's no longer enough to slap something together and call it a project. The better version with more features is just one prompt away. And if you're just a relay for prompts, why not add an agent or two?
I think there won't be a future where the world adapts to a 4-hour day. If your boss or customer also sees you as a relay for prompts, they'll slowly cut you out of the loop, or reduce the amount they pay you. If you instead want to maintain some moat, or build your own money-maker, your working hours will creep up again.
In this environment, I don't see this working out financially for most people. We need to decide which future we want:
1. the one where people can survive (and thrive) without stable employment;
2. the one where we stop automating in favor of stable employment; or
3. the one where only those who keep up stay afloat.
Let's spare the guy some web traffic.
> But hey, don’t take it from me. Take it from… the Copilot people. According to The Verge and a bunch of other reputable news sources, Microsoft is openly encouraging their employees to use multiple tools, and as a result, Claude Code has rapidly become dominant across engineering at Microsoft.
And what wonders they've achieved with it! Truly innovative enhancements to notepad being witnessed right now! The inability to shut down your computer! I can finally glimpse the 10x productivity I've been missing out on!
But at scale. Yegge gets close to it in this blog (which actually made me lol, good to see that he is back on form), but shies away from it.
If AI is producing a real productivity boom then we should be seeing a flood of high-quality non-AI related software. If building and shipping software is now easier and faster then all of the software that we have that doesn't quite work right should be displaced by high quality successors. It should be happening right now.
So where is it? Why is all this velocity going into tooling around AI instead? Face it, an entire industry has fallen into the trap of building the automation instead of the product they were trying to automate the production of.
Where is the new high quality C compiler that actually compiles the linux kernel to a measurably higher quality than gcc? If AI is really increasing productivity shouldn't we have that instead of a press-oriented hype flop?
You can't win with Claude Code. I understand that his API key isn't on the PID controller, so he gets a less bad deal, but he's still breaking even with some gee whizz factor.
Agents are like people on a long enough timeline: they will eventually do the lazy thing. But this happens in minutes not years.
If you don't have them on tracks made of iron, you are on a sugar high that will crash.
Formal methods, zero sorry, or it's another bounty for the vibecode cleanup guys.
A long time ago, food took effort to find, and calories were expensive. Then we had a breakthrough in cost/per/calories. We got fat, because we can not moderate our food intake. It is killing us.
A long time ago, coding took effort, and programmer productivity was expensive. Then we had a breakthrough in cost/per/feature. Now we are exhausted, because we can not moderate our energy and attention expenditure. It is killing us.
It’s a matter of opportunity cost. It used to be that when I rested for an hour, I lost an hour of output. Now, when I rest for an hour, I lose what used to be a day of output.
I need to rewire my brain and learn how to split the difference. There’s no point in producing a lot of output if I don’t have time to live.
The idea that you’ll get to enjoy the spoils when you grow up is false. You won’t. Just produce 5x and take some time off every day. You may even be more likely to reflect, and end up producing the right thing.
I keep hearing about this 10x productivity, but where is it materializing? Most developers at my company use Claude Code, but we don't seem to be shipping new features at ten times the rate. In fact, tickets still take roughly the same amount of time to complete.
These hyperbolic takes from Steve are wearing thin.
It wasn't my experience that Opus 4.5/4.6 was a sea change. It was a nice incremental improvement.
> And unfortunately, all your other tools and models are pretty terrible in comparison.
Personally, I like Copilot CLI. $10 a month for 300 requests. Copilot will keep working until it fulfills your request, no matter how many tokens it uses.
Calling all other tools "pretty terrible" without specifics reminds me of crypto FOMO from the 2010s.
I'm increasingly thinking either people were terrible developers, used shit tools to begin with, or are in a mass psychosis. I certainly feel bad for anyone reporting to "the business guy." He never respected you to begin with, and now he literally thinks "why are you so slow? I can build Airbnb in a weekend."
For someone who previously could achieve nothing, these tools are magical, as they can now achieve something. It feels to them like infinity because their base was 0. That alone will create a lot of things they wouldn't have been able to, good for them. However for people who already know what they're doing, I only feel slightly pushed along some asymptote. My bottlenecks simply are not measured in tokens to screen.