This writing is terrible and immediately put me off. The ‘superfluous’ swearing that the author seems to be proud about is instead going to put off a lot of his potential audience. Anyways, the ideas are nothing new that people haven’t read before as far as arguments against AI and the AI industry.
I'm all in favor of talking about drawbacks of AI coding and potential future problems. No problem. But at this point just the blanket statement that you'll never use it is not reasonable. It's the equivalent of a master car mechanic seeing a robot that can pretty reliably rebuild a transmission in a few minutes saying "I'll never use that; I'll always do it myself." Okay, sure buddy. You keep taking 8 hours to do what now takes everyone else 5 minutes. Knock yourself out.
I was a hand tool woodworker, but the first time I had to rip 56 6 foot boards into 7 strips I immediately purchased a table saw. Now I use hand tools rarely because I find the speed and quality of my cuts are better. I still use hand tools for things that require certain standards, but electric tools almost always produce better quality results.
It’s about the same for AI coding, I just get better results.
- Chips are becoming more politicized; I fear artificial scarcity as with housing will be put on chips, driving up prices.
- It causes a lot of centralisation. No, I cannot run deepseek at home. I don´t have 100.000+ USD laying around. 1TB of VRAM is not chump change.
- It can be a threat to the flourishing of open source. There is no longer a reason for me to work with other devs to build something in public together. I just have the LLM write what I need. It isolates.
These are the only drawbacks. Eveything else is clearly the artisans' ego getting in the way. That being said, if a piece of code is critical infra onto which many other things hinge, I will still hand code it.
EDIT: I think software will centralize heavily eventually; all the individual software devs we have now, and all the little custom shops, will all coalesce into a few megacorps per state. Clothing used to be made by famillies (micro scale), for the village, not produced centrally. It's not unthinkable the same will happen with software. The vendors have unprecedented access to all software being made; not just the code, but all the reasoning and iteration behind it. Plus, they can use their own model for development, allowing them to undercut any software house they want. The software world will be completelty unrecognizable in about two decades, I estimate.
> The thing is that even if I was wrong (I'm not) and AI was somehow helpful for software engineering (it isn't), I still wouldn't want to use it.
So even if you were wrong on the facts (you are) you still wouldn't change your mind? In other words, you're unreasonable and know you're unreasonable and think that's totally fine?
As much as I also enjoyed the actual coding part, a lot of it is just .. boring plumbing. I enjoy solving the problems - designing the solutions, the algorithms, choosing the right tech, coming up with nice abstractions.
When doing agentic development, you need to be in control, at least for now. Every frontier model will still do incredibly stupid stuff, and if you let it cook unchallenged, you'll have a codebase that doesn't scale. Claude will happily keep piling turds upon your tower of turds, but at some point, even an LLM will have a hard time working in it.
When you are at the wheel, the engineering hasn't changed. You're still solving all the same problems, but you can iterate a lot faster. Code is now ~free, and the cost of having a bad idea is now much cheaper, because you can quite literally speak the solution out loud and fix it in a few minutes.
It's fine if people don't want to use AI for anything, and honestly I don't even believe you need to justify it. The justification given here is interesting and I think shows misunderstanding.
At one point the author writes
> AI is a tool that can only produce software liabilities
which I would argue is completely caused by misuse of AI. Sure, you can have AI write a ton of code that often comes with subtle bugs. But using AI doesn't mean that it has to write any code for you at all. I've been using LLM often for security analysis and the results are quite good. Vulnerabilities that we had collectively missed were shown and we could fix them ourselves.
In this case, instead of creating liabilities, we were able to use LLM to get more information about our code. It's completely possible we could have deduced this information on our own, but we didn't and LLM is capable of doing it much more quickly than humans.
Passion for code, dedication to the art of it... is what always defined me since 1980 on my Magnavox
Odyssey. So I perfectly understand what he is talking about, and I share most of it. Still, he makes
me smile sometimes with condescension on his stubbornness (I know what I'm talking about, I am
stubborn).
Well now, he just makes me smile, not laugh. I keep my laughs to those who embrace AI yelling
"hooray" that they no longer need to code while they pretended to love it for so many years. No, you
didn't. You though you did, as many people think they love their partner. Or childs. But to which
point? What would you sacrifice for it? Whatever you say, you don't really know, and you probably
have to say it anyway for the sake of looking weird, or a so-called bad person.
I don't care of what people think here, so let's do it: I sacrified my social life to my
passions. My professional life too. I turned down promotions, even early. Because not coding, or
coding less, was not worth any salary. Besides I'm not made to manage teams anyway, they would blame
me for being harsh, too demanding, so no, forget it. I want to remain happy, your employees too. Let
me do what I love and everything will be fine (though don't take me for a grunt, I have things to
say in my field, this is MY field). Yes, I sacrified my life to it. Did you? No, you're not
dedicated enough. That's not a shame, maybe I'm the one to blame, maybe I'm the one pointless, the
one too much this or too much that, but I am what I am.
So I won't blame him for this article. We're probably the same kind of nerds in that regard, and
nerds are just that: living in another dimension. Not only different from a so-called conformity,
but something more unfathomable. That's why they marginaly work together: they can't even understand
each other completely.
However, I would not have written that I don't use AI. Because I do use AI, but undoubtly and
definitey not the way most people do (or pretend to). And probably in a way the author did not
really try. No need for the damn Claude and such, come on. Free options are enough for that way of
using it. Need to refactor? Why would I ask the AI, I prefer to do it with LSP in my Emacs
editor. Takes longer? Maybe. But I'm still aware of the whole thing. My brain cells refresh, like a
RAM.
AI does not write my code. It often suggests, so often that it's not rare I ask it firmly to stop
writting code, only talking about it, about some logic in a specific area. That's a quite different
approach. And even if its code is good, I would be ashamed to kill/yank (you though I would
copy/paste? Come on!). First, it's not my style, not my naming conventions, etc. I know we can lead
it to use our style (users of Claude always talks about config files for such things), but I fucking
don't care. I don't want to depend on this, needless to say what I think about paying for it.
I can say it now: AI is the better companion of the lonely nerd EVER. I wish the author would find
it at some point. Not to write code for him, but to help when in doubt on something. Oh damn, I
always have doubts in many ways. That's sane to doubt. Never leaving the thinking apart, no way! My
brain cells need that.
Also to have clues of the options. Clues of the newer paradigms. Or simply chit-chat
about... code. Common practices. Algorithms (more often, it just responds about things I already
know, so what? It's not in my mind, let's continue). For example, it's very good to embrace modern
C++, there are so many things that changed in that field. It's also good to make sense of sometimes
over-verbose compiler errors, especially when you go crazy with your own templates (omg, yes, in
that damn context it's a typename, such things). Or to work with unreadable regexps too. Such things
again.
That's not an approach for work, for jobs, to make a life. Where we have dead-lines and must respect
it as ...
Two months ago I would have written the same thing.
I have 50 years experience programming. I have adapted to change over time to stay employable. And I have cultivated programming as a craft, taking pride in my experience and expertise and knowing how to write working code "by hand."
Then a couple of months ago my employer adopted AI, and I saw almost immediately that I couldn't keep up with it. I could mock it, criticize, point out the silly mistakes it makes, but I found it hard to argue with the results. The programmers using AI (Claude Code in our case) got their work done faster, and I couldn't honestly say their work looked any worse than it had before AI -- in fact I noticed more unit tests, fewer regressions, and abilities enhanced even from the more junior programmers. I had to get on the bus or get off, so I learned how to use AI and have seen my own productivity increase at least 3x.
I think we need to distinguish between programming as a craft -- the thing the author says he enjoys and won't give up -- and programming as labor someone else pays for. Anyone who has worked in the software development business for very long understands that our employers and customers don't care about our craft. They don't care about readabiity, maintainability, technical debt, best practices. They care about getting things done that address the business problems they have, or think they have.
For a long time we -- programmers or whatever euphemism you prefer -- have held the upper hand. Our bosses and customers had no alternative but to pay us to write code for them. They have had to put up with shockingly unpredictable processes that lead to chronic schedule and budget overruns. They have paid for low-quality software, then paid us to do it over. Only a fraction of software projects succeed (go into production and/or result in profit or cost savings), and an even smaller fraction get delivered on time and within budget. I don't mean to imply that we have done that on purpose, but programmers do like to pat themselves on the back and talk about best practices and clean code and every other method and tool "stack" we present as silver bullets, but have little to show for it, for decades.
Now AI comes along and the curtain gets pulled back, and we're indignant, threatened, defensive. A mere bot can't possibly write code as good as I can! The AI companies reek of fraud, corruption, environmental destruction.
No matter what happens to the current crop of AI companies, or how much money gets wasted or grifted, or how much pollution they cause, the LLMs and the coding tools they enable won't go away. They work, regardless of their owners and the damage they cause. Programming will look like this from now on whether we like it or not.
We can retreat into our craft, like the guy with hand tools carving tables in his garage. But I know I can't feed myself or my family with my software craftsmanship, because no one will pay for that anymore. Faced with this reality I had to decide to either leave the business (I am at retirement age anyway) or adapt and continue to get paid. We will all have to make that choice.
In my so-far limited but overall good experience with AI programming I think knowing how to program, and having a lot of experience, gives me a significant advantage over a non-technical manager or a newb programmer. I know how to tell the tool what I want it to do in clear unambiguous terms, and I know how to decide among alternative approaches, and how to judge the result. I won't call myself a "prompt engineer" anytime soon but that describes what I do now. The author can wait for this all to blow over and for programming to go back to hand-crafted code, but I don't think that will happen.
33 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 53.2 ms ] threadI only commit code that is roughly the same as I would have written anyway.
It feels as good for developer ergonomics as the move away from CRT monitors.
You want to be delivery service that takes 2 days instead of 30 minutes to bring you pizza so that you don't forget how to ride your horse..?
It’s about the same for AI coding, I just get better results.
Not the hill I would die on.
When it comes to employment and other people paying you to code, though, not using AI is increasingly a non-starter for most of us.
- Vendors get to know everything about you
- Chips are becoming more politicized; I fear artificial scarcity as with housing will be put on chips, driving up prices.
- It causes a lot of centralisation. No, I cannot run deepseek at home. I don´t have 100.000+ USD laying around. 1TB of VRAM is not chump change.
- It can be a threat to the flourishing of open source. There is no longer a reason for me to work with other devs to build something in public together. I just have the LLM write what I need. It isolates.
These are the only drawbacks. Eveything else is clearly the artisans' ego getting in the way. That being said, if a piece of code is critical infra onto which many other things hinge, I will still hand code it.
EDIT: I think software will centralize heavily eventually; all the individual software devs we have now, and all the little custom shops, will all coalesce into a few megacorps per state. Clothing used to be made by famillies (micro scale), for the village, not produced centrally. It's not unthinkable the same will happen with software. The vendors have unprecedented access to all software being made; not just the code, but all the reasoning and iteration behind it. Plus, they can use their own model for development, allowing them to undercut any software house they want. The software world will be completelty unrecognizable in about two decades, I estimate.
> The thing is that even if I was wrong (I'm not) and AI was somehow helpful for software engineering (it isn't), I still wouldn't want to use it.
So even if you were wrong on the facts (you are) you still wouldn't change your mind? In other words, you're unreasonable and know you're unreasonable and think that's totally fine?
Well, cool. Next time, lead with that.
When doing agentic development, you need to be in control, at least for now. Every frontier model will still do incredibly stupid stuff, and if you let it cook unchallenged, you'll have a codebase that doesn't scale. Claude will happily keep piling turds upon your tower of turds, but at some point, even an LLM will have a hard time working in it.
When you are at the wheel, the engineering hasn't changed. You're still solving all the same problems, but you can iterate a lot faster. Code is now ~free, and the cost of having a bad idea is now much cheaper, because you can quite literally speak the solution out loud and fix it in a few minutes.
People used to drive manual. Now it’s all automatic transmission. Some cars even drive itself.
People used to proudly use Vi to write code. But now IDE is commonplace.
People used to write asm by hand. Transport Tycoon was written in assembly. But these days that would be insane.
Technological progress is an absolute thing. It produces too much convenience and wealth to ignore.
At one point the author writes
> AI is a tool that can only produce software liabilities
which I would argue is completely caused by misuse of AI. Sure, you can have AI write a ton of code that often comes with subtle bugs. But using AI doesn't mean that it has to write any code for you at all. I've been using LLM often for security analysis and the results are quite good. Vulnerabilities that we had collectively missed were shown and we could fix them ourselves.
In this case, instead of creating liabilities, we were able to use LLM to get more information about our code. It's completely possible we could have deduced this information on our own, but we didn't and LLM is capable of doing it much more quickly than humans.
Well now, he just makes me smile, not laugh. I keep my laughs to those who embrace AI yelling "hooray" that they no longer need to code while they pretended to love it for so many years. No, you didn't. You though you did, as many people think they love their partner. Or childs. But to which point? What would you sacrifice for it? Whatever you say, you don't really know, and you probably have to say it anyway for the sake of looking weird, or a so-called bad person.
I don't care of what people think here, so let's do it: I sacrified my social life to my passions. My professional life too. I turned down promotions, even early. Because not coding, or coding less, was not worth any salary. Besides I'm not made to manage teams anyway, they would blame me for being harsh, too demanding, so no, forget it. I want to remain happy, your employees too. Let me do what I love and everything will be fine (though don't take me for a grunt, I have things to say in my field, this is MY field). Yes, I sacrified my life to it. Did you? No, you're not dedicated enough. That's not a shame, maybe I'm the one to blame, maybe I'm the one pointless, the one too much this or too much that, but I am what I am.
So I won't blame him for this article. We're probably the same kind of nerds in that regard, and nerds are just that: living in another dimension. Not only different from a so-called conformity, but something more unfathomable. That's why they marginaly work together: they can't even understand each other completely.
However, I would not have written that I don't use AI. Because I do use AI, but undoubtly and definitey not the way most people do (or pretend to). And probably in a way the author did not really try. No need for the damn Claude and such, come on. Free options are enough for that way of using it. Need to refactor? Why would I ask the AI, I prefer to do it with LSP in my Emacs editor. Takes longer? Maybe. But I'm still aware of the whole thing. My brain cells refresh, like a RAM.
AI does not write my code. It often suggests, so often that it's not rare I ask it firmly to stop writting code, only talking about it, about some logic in a specific area. That's a quite different approach. And even if its code is good, I would be ashamed to kill/yank (you though I would copy/paste? Come on!). First, it's not my style, not my naming conventions, etc. I know we can lead it to use our style (users of Claude always talks about config files for such things), but I fucking don't care. I don't want to depend on this, needless to say what I think about paying for it.
I can say it now: AI is the better companion of the lonely nerd EVER. I wish the author would find it at some point. Not to write code for him, but to help when in doubt on something. Oh damn, I always have doubts in many ways. That's sane to doubt. Never leaving the thinking apart, no way! My brain cells need that.
Also to have clues of the options. Clues of the newer paradigms. Or simply chit-chat about... code. Common practices. Algorithms (more often, it just responds about things I already know, so what? It's not in my mind, let's continue). For example, it's very good to embrace modern C++, there are so many things that changed in that field. It's also good to make sense of sometimes over-verbose compiler errors, especially when you go crazy with your own templates (omg, yes, in that damn context it's a typename, such things). Or to work with unreadable regexps too. Such things again.
That's not an approach for work, for jobs, to make a life. Where we have dead-lines and must respect it as ...
I have 50 years experience programming. I have adapted to change over time to stay employable. And I have cultivated programming as a craft, taking pride in my experience and expertise and knowing how to write working code "by hand."
Then a couple of months ago my employer adopted AI, and I saw almost immediately that I couldn't keep up with it. I could mock it, criticize, point out the silly mistakes it makes, but I found it hard to argue with the results. The programmers using AI (Claude Code in our case) got their work done faster, and I couldn't honestly say their work looked any worse than it had before AI -- in fact I noticed more unit tests, fewer regressions, and abilities enhanced even from the more junior programmers. I had to get on the bus or get off, so I learned how to use AI and have seen my own productivity increase at least 3x.
I think we need to distinguish between programming as a craft -- the thing the author says he enjoys and won't give up -- and programming as labor someone else pays for. Anyone who has worked in the software development business for very long understands that our employers and customers don't care about our craft. They don't care about readabiity, maintainability, technical debt, best practices. They care about getting things done that address the business problems they have, or think they have.
For a long time we -- programmers or whatever euphemism you prefer -- have held the upper hand. Our bosses and customers had no alternative but to pay us to write code for them. They have had to put up with shockingly unpredictable processes that lead to chronic schedule and budget overruns. They have paid for low-quality software, then paid us to do it over. Only a fraction of software projects succeed (go into production and/or result in profit or cost savings), and an even smaller fraction get delivered on time and within budget. I don't mean to imply that we have done that on purpose, but programmers do like to pat themselves on the back and talk about best practices and clean code and every other method and tool "stack" we present as silver bullets, but have little to show for it, for decades.
Now AI comes along and the curtain gets pulled back, and we're indignant, threatened, defensive. A mere bot can't possibly write code as good as I can! The AI companies reek of fraud, corruption, environmental destruction.
No matter what happens to the current crop of AI companies, or how much money gets wasted or grifted, or how much pollution they cause, the LLMs and the coding tools they enable won't go away. They work, regardless of their owners and the damage they cause. Programming will look like this from now on whether we like it or not.
We can retreat into our craft, like the guy with hand tools carving tables in his garage. But I know I can't feed myself or my family with my software craftsmanship, because no one will pay for that anymore. Faced with this reality I had to decide to either leave the business (I am at retirement age anyway) or adapt and continue to get paid. We will all have to make that choice.
In my so-far limited but overall good experience with AI programming I think knowing how to program, and having a lot of experience, gives me a significant advantage over a non-technical manager or a newb programmer. I know how to tell the tool what I want it to do in clear unambiguous terms, and I know how to decide among alternative approaches, and how to judge the result. I won't call myself a "prompt engineer" anytime soon but that describes what I do now. The author can wait for this all to blow over and for programming to go back to hand-crafted code, but I don't think that will happen.