>When people claim that it’s no longer sustainable to write code by hand, they’re not entirely wrong, but only in the same way that it’s no longer sustainable to sleep in a bed once someone has taken a shit in it.
I think the author is trying to say that a code base once infected with vibes, becomes indecipherable to the average human being. It's still just code, but full of Claudisms.
100%. Although large handwritten software code bases are often indecipherable to the average human being (actually, almost always indecipherable to the average human being, but often indecipherable even to skilled software engineers too); sometimes due to inherent complexities, sometimes due to Enterprise-isms.
This is not representative of what's actually going on, though. It's much more like an artisan carpenter who wants to build houses using bespoke hand-tools and precise joinery. That's great, and there are beautiful works of art created by those skills. But in the last year robots were developed that build homes exactly to spec. The robots work 24/7 and finish entire houses in a few days. That same skilled carpenter is being hired to monitor the robots and check over their work. There is, economically speaking, no place in the process for him to apply his craft. In the time he rips a single board, the robots build the wall. In the time he drives a handful of nails, the drywall is up and the paint is drying. He costs $200/hr, the robots cost $1/hr.
The carpenter is free to exercise his craft as he see's fit, but it's going to take place mostly in his personal workshop, for personal reasons, not to develop homes or run a business in the way he did before.
We can talk for ages about the quality of the robot's work, the maintainability of the resulting home, etc. But it's clear that, at this time, the market and ecosystem are embracing the robots whole-heartedly so those of us used to the old ways are having to rapidly adjust.
For corporations, sales, probability and feature release cycles take priority over maintainability or code quality. AI is allowing businesses to build features faster than ever, so management is happy.
By the time maintainability issues hit, they've either pivoted, raised more capital or can throw money at the problem.
Forget robots, what you're describing already happened in the trades. Modern construction techniques are all about lowering the skill required to build a house and standardizing the process so it can be done with minimal training. E.g. drywall and caulk replacing plaster and precise joinery.
You can find example of this in all of the trades. Often, these are also talked about as "safety improvements" - which they sort of are. Given the same baseline intelligence, it's harder to dangerously fuck up plumbing or electrical in 2026 than it was in 1926.
This analogy hinges on the economic argument (that a robot costs 200x less than a human), but far from being an established fact, that notion is more or less entirely based on vague, misleading and exaggerated claims from the token peddlers.
The truth is no one knows how much the robot costs, and we probably won't know until its too late. Its extremely naive, though, to simply buy into the PR from the peddlers and redistribute their propaganda verbatim in the way you are doing. Although none of us know for sure, considering R&D, infrastructure capex and externalities, the robots are most definitively _not_ cheap.
> Its extremely naive, though, to simply buy into the PR from the peddlers
OK, so don’t buy their PR, and try it yourself.
But if you do this, you will find there is a lot of evidence for the economic argument.
I tested out Google Argon 4 release by having it build a Web app to replace a binder I have for reconciling payments with reimbursable expenses.
It did it, as well as I would have and in much less time. I just set it to high and supervised it, it cost about $2. Even if you throw in a “supervision cost” to account for the time I had to spend interacting with it, it was substantially cheaper than had I done it at normal salary rates. Probably 2 orders of magnitude cheaper, even.
I think the OP was talking about robotics specifically and not tasks like the one you described. Nobody can argue that for tasks like your binder replacement cost savings are enormous.
No, they were carrying on the analogy about artisanal home builders being replaced by mythical robots that do it perfectly.
In this analogy, we human software devs are the artisanal homebuilders and the fancy LLMs are the robots.
And yes, there's quite a cost to build all the datacenters for all the AI that Big Tech believes that people will want. But as you mention, the cost savings are enormous for even despite that, and will make a much larger set of problems accessible to real software solutions, that previously either stayed on paper, in peoples' heads, or maybe an Excel sheet somewhere.
Not that tired old parable again. It doesn't hold.
If someone complains they take pride in understanding and designing deterministic processes, you can't reply that this is just like when robots took over manual labor.
No, because it is not manual labor, and robots hasn't taken over. Robots are computers. Robots are deterministic.
A better comparison would be an artisan architect, a blueprint designer being replaced by a special paint splatter, which when thrown against a piece of paper looks almost exactly like a blueprint of an almost completely liveable house. Great! What's not to like? It will allow anyone to design a house.
> But in the last year robots were developed that build homes exactly to spec.
That is not what's happened at all. That's the entire point of the discussion. The robots aren't as good as humans, they can't follow specs or instuctions as well, and their output is markedly worse than human output in a lot of ways.
The only difference is that the robots are faster and don't need rest. And we're discovering now that that is not good enough.
sounds like bullshit. I'm actually glad that the people that hold this view are getting out of the way, they are the people that gatekept open source and made it annoying to work with. Do I miss having to wait for months to fix a trivial bug because I first need to convince 15 people that the fix is even necessary?
Next time someone complains about software do me a favor and compare it to a nail through the foot or grabbing a hot dish and burning yourself or something else negative in the human experience. There is plenty to choose from.
We don't need 300 variations of enshitification, the folks at Pompeii and Herculaneum have that well covered.
I'm so conflicted about this. I do love being able to create and bring ideas to life at the light of speed. But I also see the unique value in the experience of coding, deeply caring about the craft. Can we have both?
I think it's like any other craft. Buildings and most furniture are built using mass produced lumber and machinery, but many people still enjoy doing woodworking by hand.
Yes, but it may be hard to justify the "experience of coding" from a commercial standpoint.
Casey Muratori had a take on a podcast that I liked comparing writing code vs. using an LLM to generate code to playing guitar by hand vs. playing digital music. Although it's arguably more efficient to play an mp3, people still enjoy the art of playing the guitar.
I really would like to believe that GPL is the answer here but I know it won’t change anything for them. If they can steal and destroy books, nothing will ever stop them.
We need to go beyond GPL and have the government invest in public software programs.
The idea that advertisers and malware merchants are good stewards of the browser or email or social media needs to end. Especially when said tech leaders hold deeply anti-human beliefs.
Paying for something that has been scraped, trained on hundreds of billions of lines of code (mixed up GPL and other licenses) and being resold back to you is trickle down?
Paying 20$ per month to double my productivity, answer many of my health questions with good accuracy, help me with DIY projects around the house and do almost as good of a job as a psychotherapist is trickle down for me.
And you don't even have to pay - there are perfectly fine free tiers and open weight models.
I am pretty sure that the whole open source ideology was developed and disseminated exactly by a cartel of those massive corporations with the sole intention to amass as much human-written code as possible to train AI.
AI algorithms were developed in 1950s, and what all those vultures were waiting for was a good dataset and enough compute power, which they saw coming in advance.
The source is open, but the ownership of the "text" and 130 other gems still resides with the blog author... maybe he could add the projects to https://www.codeshelter.co/ or something.
"But even beyond Rails, the Ruby language itself is now substantially developed using LLM agents. Matz is giving talks repositioning Ruby as a “Programming Language for AI age”, to be emitted by LLM agents, and stating that to be able to do that LLMs need to consume more good human-written Ruby code. You might already have seen the problem here."
Insane. This is the guy who was proclaimed to be "nice" by his followers. The biggest LLM sellouts in open source are Ruby and Scala.
Ironically Oracle with Java is now being the good guy.
Seems unnecessarily harsh. LLMs are a power tool. I'm not on-board with how it's being used in a lot of places, once things shake out I believe it's going to be net positive.
I'm pretty sure someone will soon call Linus a sell-out. The hate / denial / radicalisation is just sad at this point... Do, or don't, but at least don't hate the others. Be and let be. No need to call other people names just because you don't like their sand castle. There's plenty of sand on the beach.
Why would it be wrong to call Linus a sellout? The guy started with a hobby project that eventually became big, was mostly taken over by corporations, and he is now doing mostly corporate friendly things.
At some point in your life you may wonder why you're angry and miserable. Creating burner accounts to call people names should be high on your list of choices to introspect.
One of the most underrated abilities in this industry is knowing when to walk away from something that no longer bring you joy. It's sad that it has come to this, but I'm sure the OP will find something more fun to do with their time.
I have wondered where we are with stuff like this.
I myself have been using an open source lib that I contributed a fix for and inquired about it. I didn't just drop a PR either, opened an issue, was told PRs accepted, opened a PR, signed a license agreement and then the PR just sort hung out for months without response even after some gentle prodding.
Now, they don't owe me anything and they don't have to merge the code, it is their repo after all. However what did I do? use an LLM, fork the repo with my changes and now "I" maintain that private fork and add to it as needed.
As time goes on I think these smaller packages / clients will start to disappear as people/LLMs just spit out a client library or whatever or just implement the same thing over and over. Combined with the opinion of the author I figure oss libs for npm, ruby, pypi etc will start to dwindle.
Eventually maintainers will just throw up their hands and leave the repo under the care of a LLM. "Merge PRs that align with the product's vision/design/intention. Meticulously examine for malicious contributions. Email me if there are doubts."
The top tier LLMs would be as good at this as a lot of maintainers, right?
> The top tier LLMs would be as good at this as a lot of maintainers, right?
In some respects maybe in others less so.
So in my situation I am using a client for a system and am using a very specific part of it even though there is a lot of other complicated code in other parts of the client. A LLM is good enough to maintain the code path I am using and of course any changes are triggered / watched over by me. In this situation I am comfortable letting LLMs do most of the code. I would be less enthused if that was outside of my control and the code changes were more often and faster.
yeah maybe. i think it's become a lot more feasible to fork and modify vs wait for new features or fix bugs. the future might be that the main repo for a project forms the "core", and consumers use their own forks which are automatically kept up to date. the core doesn't need to be as configurable or flexible as the forks can add functionality directly. in theory it could be easier for the maintainers.
I know of at least 3 significant rails projects/donors that are actively discussing AI-lead refactors since DHH's talk declaring rails dead. Even if you like the language it's going to be a total mess in a year or two.
Let a hundred flowers blossom. It's predictable for AI to trigger an explosion of language innovations. I think Matz is right that as a particularly human friendly syntax Ruby is well positioned to contribute.
I'd rather tell LLM to rewrite project in Python. There is no good reason to use Ruby/Rails now, the community and job market is shrinking and the language is nothing special.
I was chatting with a friend who commits on a very well known open source project (~80K stars). He is disillusioned not because the robots aren't good at what they do -- they totally are. The sad thing is that he enjoyed writing code and working with the community on improvements because it was a very human, collaborative thing to do. So, while the robots are great at pushing the project forward even faster and doing fantastic things for security and performance, the joy is gone.
I can totally identify with that feeling. It must be how professional mathematicians are feeling as well.
Everyone in SWE (who got into it for the love of writing code) is experiencing this. I've been direct with my team about it being a legitimate feeling of grief and the grieving process that comes along with it. It's been helpful for folks to hear that they aren't alone in that feeling.
And also that on the other side of that grief is something new and potentially exciting, but very different than what we're all used to.
Its nice to know others feel this way. I do feel some kind of despair when I think about the kind of work I used to do even just a year ago compared to now. A coworker of mine took FMLA recently to figure out what they want to do next because they no longer feel even the slightest fulfillment from swe.
Like many, I became a SWE because I loved writing code. Ruby, in particular (whatever one thinks of its other strengths and weaknesses) can be very expressive and beautiful.
However, most code is corporate CRUD stuff. The world sort of runs on CRUD. But it's rarely particularly fun, or beautiful, or fulfilling. It tends to be pretty ugly because there's rarely time to make it beautiful. So I'm not losing much joy there.
Additionally, even with an agentic workflow, my team still thinks deeply about architecture issues. We believe that well structured code is better for bots and humans alike. So I am still exercising my engineering brain; I'm writing blueprints and supervising the bricklayers now instead of laying bricks.
Does that match your teams' experience at all? Sometimes I feel like folks on these threads are working in a parallel universe where the majority of coding tasks and somehow fulfilling and fun and not 99% tweaking reports, trying to implement arcane and contradictory business logic, or fighting with shitty and frustrating externalities. Maybe people found joy in those aspects. I guess there are all types of people in the world. I mean, I'm a sicko who loves writing SQL, something that most coders seem to hate.
I've been direct with my team about it being a legitimate
feeling of grief and the grieving process that comes along
with it. It's been helpful for folks to hear that they aren't
alone in that feeling.
This is super great. God, I wish all leaders had half this much empathy! Good on you.
I am one of those weirdos that found joy in business software. The clear specifications, reasonable timelines, and enough technical freedom, let you focus on clean, secure, resilient architectures.
I find that I struggle more with personal projects, as I tend to take things where I'm not even in the skirts of the learning curve, and consequently redo my work a few times.
Sorry for the delay. Mostly midrange (AS/400) consulting at manufacturing plants, then full time jobs at a heavy machine dealership, and a bank. Changed to PC development after about 15 years of that, then management, and it hasn't been the same after that, ha ha.
I think the technical freedom plays a big part, not because you're chasing the shiniest, but because you're choosing the tools that will hopefully outlast you. One of my former employers was 'modernizing' their IBM i (former AS/400) systems by porting them to Java and Windows Servers, and they were having all kinds of problems. Couldn't even get the EBCDIC to Unicode conversion quite right. I was lucky not to be there anymore.
I smile whenever I see EBCDIC, probably because I never had to deal with it.
But I'm sorta old and some of my school's texts were outdated so they had programming examples and explanatory text that treated EBCDIC on equal footing with ASCII.
So unlike anybody who dealt with EBCDIC conversions in the wild, seeing that acronym actually takes me back to happier days!
Wow. That was hardly ever the case in my experience in ~30 years in the industry. I enjoy(ed) what you’re describing too but… how common was this for you?
Different person but I’ve been a SWE about ten years now - my favorite work has been improving the CRUD stuff people have left behind. Like the time I took a proprietary document they were using to document their REST apis and wrote a converter to turn those into OpenAI spec compliant yaml files, taking a single tenant application and making it a secure multienant application so instead of 80 different app services we had two, coalescing all their data sources into one normalized DB. There’s a lot of work I’ve done I’m really proud of. I’ve always found myself being the “in the muck” guy fixing up and bettering legacy code, I’ve always felt that was really rewarding and interesting.
Sure. If you get pleasure in fixing really badly broken shite, there’s tons of opportunity for that, but no money in it. Only money in new features, which is why the codebase is what it is. I have, on rare occasion, been the fixit guy called in temporarily to fix another teams work or get it out the door: that was fun. Short lived , but fun.
It's a shame, because there is money in it. It's just (like most sensible preventative maintenance) that the financial benefits are typically delayed. And when it comes to software, they're notoriously impossible to quantify.
Generally the only way to get it done in a corpo environment (and receive any kind of thanks or glory, as opposed to just torpedoing your own career) is to let things get so bad that production stability suffers and/or the team's ability to ship features is severely impacted.
...I realize I'm basically just echoing what you said, except more verbose. I'm venting!
Thats badass! I like doing that kind of work, but I got very jaded about it over the years, because management generally acted as if the engineers took a shit on the conference table in the middle of a Zoom call with their most important customer whenever anybody attempted to address technical debt, as opposed to delivering more more more features. Unless it was billable agency work, in which case they’d hate it even more.
With massive amounts of effort and strong communication it was usually possible to get some tech debt time, but management acted like they were doing YOU a huge favor. It was kind of a career killer, generally.
Alternatively it was possible to get this kind of work done on my own time… but that’s a marriage killer instead of a career killer.
The fun thing is: I don't think this will change that much with AI in the mix ;)
Shitty devs without AI are slowly building BS that wants to be cleaned up.
Shitty devs with AI are much more fasterly building BS that wants to be cleaned up.
I have a similar experience as yours, just add another 10-ish years to the timeline. Literally my first job out of uni, I got to work on a legacy code base that was another 15 years older than that which had a ton of reports all built differently over time with slight variations in both code and end user output that really all wanted to be "the same" both on the code and end user side. So I slowly but surely, one user/PM requested change at a time would build out a common layer of abstractions and shared code that both made the code shared and easier to maintain (great for me!) and consistent for users (great for the PM/users).
Heck, I built a rudimentary TransactSQL parser that'd output stored procedure call graphs to graphviz and then I printed it and hung it on the wall to get through all this and having an LLM to just make a mermaid out of this in 5-ish minutes would definitively have been faster than I was ;)
With an LLM all of that would just have been faster to do but still worthwhile and useful on both levels. I.e. both code abstraction/reuse and PM/user level. Similarly there was a report that one of the devs had to actually run manually and it took him a full week, so users that wanted the report would only request it once a year-ish. When I was asked to learn how to run it from him I was appalled and just took that week to put it into a script that we ran and emailed the report out once a month automatically. They ran that report manually like that for like 10 years prior to that :mindblown:
None of this is an "AI thing". It's a good dev vs. not so good dev thing. And none of it really has to do with coding as in "writing source code" as much as "solving problems for humans" somehow and the "language" you do that in changes over time. If you're the guy that's tied up with the particular language: yeah LLMs are gonna eat your lunch. If you're the problem solver type that uses whatever tools they have available, you're still in demand.
About 80% of the time. It wasn't all about setting a new foundation, even making the existing one solid enough so you can have time to refactor the cruft was enjoyable. I had more trouble in my youth, as I didn't understand why the business didn't change to accommodate my 'masterpieces', and I'd like to think I started enjoying it more as I became wiser.
Disclaimer: I had to take an opportunity at management in cybersecurity, and haven't coded in about five years. It helps a lot when talking to developers about risk mitigation, though.
> The clear specifications, reasonable timelines, and enough technical freedom, let you focus on clean, secure, resilient architectures.
The nicest thing was when you nailed down the architecture and then you are mostly twiddling your thumbs while waiting for the PM guys to have the next feature idea. Maintenance and bug fixing is a breeze.
> The clear specifications, reasonable timelines, and enough technical freedom, let you focus on clean, secure, resilient architectures.
I have no idea where you work but 90% of companies are not like that. In fact, it's the opposite: filled with awful management, terrible timelines and legacy code.
Engineering had always been a nuisance to them and getting basic approval for maintenance regarding technical debt has been an uphill battle.
One of the fun things to do would be to use the 8 hrs of work to spend about 4-5 hrs working on deliverables, which was usually sufficient to exceed expectations, using 2-3 of the remaining hours (I’d keep 1-2 hrs for myself), to make significant architectural improvements.
I’d bring in an improvement every 6 months or so and suddenly the app would get significantly better and I’d get credit for it.
I think this is not "parallel universe". Selection bias: people who love to code often choose non trivial frontier work. They tend to grirf about agentic workflow the most. Myself included.
The Luddites literally turned to violence when their profession was replaced by better technology. This has been happening for generations to every profession. There is joy in learning new things and developing new skills though.
The “violence” was a simple act of sabotage, nobody got hurt except some peace of machinery and the wallets of the rich exploiters.
Well, that is not entirely true. The British parliament made sabotaging work machinery punishable by death. So people did in fact get hurt, the people who were hurt were the Luddites, and the people hurting them was the British state executing them.
The Luddites did not resort to violence (unless you count sabotage of machinery as violence), and they were not protesting against better technology. They were protesting against the exploitation of the workers that these machines enabled. Formerly, weaving textiles was a relatively well paid and highly skilled profession, then these machines largely automated the process. This lead to the means of production being owned by the wealthy, employing badly paid and overworked people, to make themselves even richer.
I got into SWE because I like solving problems. I like solving problems using code. I also like solving problems using AI.
I have very mixed feelings.
- AI lets me plough through issues which previously would
require debugging, troubleshooting, googling, stackoverflow
- my coding abilities are starting to atrophy
- not having to deal with low-level language quirks is nice (parameter differences of subString in C# vs Java).
- but I'm seeing the same as OP: when working on a team, the sense of ownership and community is gone. You have AI un-AI-speak for you to properly read the Jira ticket another dev created using AI. Pull requests are echo chambers between the AI used to create it, review bots, other devs using AI for PR reviews manually.
- there's little denying that we devs are feeding the very machine that will replace us
There's a lot of code I never wanted to be an expert on. I might care about an algorithm. I might care about the UX. There are other things I might let an AI tackle because I don't care about them.
That is a problem though with AI currently. E.g. I've found a severe issue with Claude Code and prose writing when trying to make an explainer site. Instead of "plain" english it likes to use "flowery" phrases and "punchy" statements. This forces the user to spend extra time thinking about it.
And code comments are terrible. It can use 3 paragraphs to describe something when only one sentence is enough. Then further agents (or humans) have to waste their context window to figure out what the "riddle-ly" worded sentences mean.
But the things you care the most about, the AI doesn't unless you tell it to care. And even then, you have to be very careful because it acts more like a contractor with the potential to stop in the middle of a project (lack of tokens) and leave it in a very bad state until it's complete.
Or worse, it forgets what you want and does it's own thing for a while until you remind it.
It’s a point that isn’t made often. AI is mostly saying the quiet part out loud.
The big money valley bros figured it out just before they embraced regressive conservatism for their politics. There’s a reason we went from massages and pet daycare to rentier agriculture executive style management of the peons.
> We were always replacing ourselves: Every "reusable" function or class or library you ever wrote represents lines of code won't get paid to write again
In theory, but not in practice. Instead, somehow we ended up writing essentially the same app over and and over, usually without reusing libs. You know because this time we'll use vue, or svelte, or phoenix, or htmx, or go, because this time we actually know what we're doing. so gotta start from the ground up and figure out how to store a row in a db as if we haven't done the same thing a million times before.
And that all under one roof. Now multiple that by thousands of roofs.
At least the devs were having fun and making good money writing all that code.
> And also that on the other side of that grief is something new and potentially exciting
Well, no, for a lot of us, there really is no other side. Slop farming is not software engineering and it never will be. I didn't want to be a manager when I worked in the industry and I certainly don't want to be one now.
On the bright side, we will probably (eventually) self-organize into communities that will code however they want and leave the other side the fuck alone.
> Well, no, for a lot of us, there really is no other side. Slop farming is not software engineering and it never will be; scribbling some Markdown that begs agents to omit bugs is not equivalent to using high-level languages with thoughtful abstractions to directly define program behavior.
Would you look at a piece of code elegantly using high-level abstractions to model some problem written by a human and go "see, look, code is beautiful"... and then look at the exact same code written by an LLM and say "this is slop"?
> Moreover, it's downright offensive for a purported expert to defer their expertise to a SAAS black box.
With programming, it's just the opposite, though.
Programmers work with abstractions. Understanding the full system down to how atoms work is too much to think of when e.g. writing an API handler. So instead you work with modules and their interfaces.
Pre-LLM, if you need some task done, you wouldn't write it all out yourself if there was some external package which did the work for you.
Of course, when using an LLM, you don't need to surrender your ability to think about the problem and solution.
What is an abstraction? An abstraction is far more than a black box. From a previous comment:
> High-level programming languages use well-defined, limited syntax to encode program behavior in a deterministic way. Compilers translate these directions into programs that should have identical behavior between compiler runs and between different compilers. (If they don't, that's a compiler bug, or else an artifact of UB.) This means you can structurally and provably rely on the high-level programming layer without worrying about what's underneath: the assembly is abstracted away. You also get the massive benefit of being able to tweak and improve the assembly layer independently of the programming language layer, so long as the contract between language and compiler is not violated.
> If AI is a "layer of abstraction," so is working with a bunch of contractors to make your app. The definition is broadened to the point of absurdity. (Solely: "I don't have to think about code anymore," which only touches on the most superficial aspect of an abstraction.)
With a good high-level abstraction, I can mostly think on the level of the abstraction, but I can also dive down through the layers and figure out what's actually going on in each one.
> Would you look at a piece of code elegantly using high-level abstractions to model some problem written by a human and go "see, look, code is beautiful"... and then look at the exact same code written by an LLM and say "this is slop"?
Using is one thing; inventing is another. I have seen no evidence that LLMs have the capacity to discover and leverage new abstractions. To me, that's the most exciting part of programming: finding ways to reify powerful concepts and then turn complex tasks into simple ones, ad infinitum.
> Everyone in SWE (who got into it for the love of writing code) is experiencing this.
I love writing code. But I also love solving problems. AI allows me to solve problems in different ways. And I am totally enjoying that as well. If someone got into this SWE only to code, yes, they may not love where things are today and appear to be going in the future.
The other side is management, instead of being team leader for an offshoring team, which at least were human, those that managed to keep their jobs will be a robot manager.
I certainly did not come to computing to be a manager, in fact I already had that role and freely downgraded myself.
Interesting take and I certainly agree that lots of people think that way.
In my case I had prior experience with tech support and I saw lots of people struggling to use computers and it's interfaces.
So my joy comes equally from coding or seeing people relieved that their problems were solved.
With that mindset that I'm able to fly with Claude or codex.
And even doing my comp sci more than a decade ago many professors told that I should worry more about the outcomes and what problems I'm solving, instead of building this life game around coding only. So I'm grateful for them.
Maybe that can help other people getting out of this dread feeling whenever they are using A?
My frustrations changed, nonetheless, with AI. When it forgets cases that the LLM session and I forgot to cover, that for me is pretty obvious if I had or gave more time to evaluate and review things.
This week I realized that running a separate session and asking dumb questions about the plans and recent pull requests helps grounding again.
I have to agree, but I think some people find the joy in finding their solutions in code rather than from code…meaning that for some it is the puzzle solving that is their interest. That can be rather hard to find an analog for, especially if coding is the skill they are good at.
The lack of AI mental model between conversations or even within the conversation is a definite frustration. “No, I didn’t just decide to entirely change everything I’ve planned based on one ambiguous word…”
Your use of a separate session for q&a is actually something I find interesting in the new Granite Switch architecture’s KV Cache Normalization, where the kv cache is essentially frozen while the model performs certain other tasks in order to prevent the mental ‘conversation’ from getting polluted. However, I’m also assuming what you mean by “helps grounding” is that it helps keep the agent grounded in the context by not introducing a bunch of external information, which is certainly beneficial.
it feels like a transition from artisan level work to factory based industrial manufacturing.
the functionally same product is still being made, but there is less human involvement in the craft, and more of a human management over the manufacturing process
And the same thing will happen to devs that happened to factory workers. Jobs will get moved offshore, and salaries will drop, mass layoffs. And SWE's don't have unions like factory workers did.
It's long since past, and it's not like unions would've saved the industry from AI, like Europe has unions too (and their software industry is quite poor compared to the US in general, partially due to higher regulation on companies and workers both).
Just like with mathematicians, is it all really just about people losing a random, replaceable job and what they enjoyed about it?
Being able to program means in particular, you can read those programs and understand what they do.
What happens when you don't understand them anymore?
Living in a reality where everything is a black box, doing its thing as if by magic, leaves you in a position devoid of control. The objects upholding your life are incomprehensible to you, you cannot change them or even only reliably exchange them with alternatives.
The point isn't some people not understanding whatever stuff with limited effects, it's no people understanding anything important.
Mathematics is about describing fundamental reality, so you can change it. When corporations own it exclusively, they can do whatever they want with it.
> The point isn't some people not understanding whatever stuff with limited effects, it's no people understanding anything important.
Using an LLM doesn't mean "I must write this code in a way that I cannot understand it". I'd encourage using the LLM to write code in a way that you can understand.
> When corporations own it exclusively, they can do whatever they want with it.
This is an argument in favour of open-weight models.
> One wonders whether a generation that demands instant satisfaction of all its needs and instant solution of the world's problems will produce anything of lasting value. Such a generation, even when equipped with the most modern technology, will be essentially primitive — it will stand in awe of nature, and submit to the tutelage of medicine men.
I am always doing everything alone, so I am liking the LLMs a lot. My own code is very good, but nobody but myself cared about that. Even the one job that I got which allowed me to gather the capital needed to move into trading feels like complete luck. This is a new golden age for entrepreneurs and apocalypse for wage workers. Nobody whose status depends on his own productivity would complain about it going up sharply.
Probably the LLMs saved me because deep down I knew that my own power by itself wouldn't be enough to let me do what I really want, but right now the future does seem bright.
It doesn't have to be one or the other. Having a machine that does most of the coding for you means you can have more of the collaborative, human input. You can focus on the UX, you can fix all bugs, you can experiment with new ideas faster than ever. There will be zero excuses for poorly done work - think of all the half-assed corporate apps you have had to use during your career. I think this is the start of a great era in software development.
I am inclined to think this way in a commercial setting, but for open source contributors, where their work was done for the love of coding, I can understand feeling like the end has arrived. In my company, I'm building the mechanics of factory-coding and trying to get the team think in higher-level terms: what needs to be built, what does it need to do when it deploys, and how can we build the factory that gets that done repeatedly? To me, building the factory is an interesting problem and agentic coding does not eliminate the higher-level design that absolutely must be done, all of which is, to me, the interesting part of software dev.
But none of this is going to bring back actually writing code for the love of it. That will become a hobby kind of like knitting or sewing.
This is the end of software development and the beginning of software management. The problem is you don't need a lot of people to do the later. There are going to be a lot of devs out there vying for the same jobs in the future drastically driving down salaries.
Faster than ever is likely part of the problem. When everyone can go faster and faster, competition becomes fierce and what was once a thought provoking puzzle to solve becomes an exhausting, never ending LLM gogogo. Down time? Spin up 5 more LLMs and write some more prompts to prototype a new UI or something.
I imagine it was what it felt like for miners when they went from working next to each other with pickaxes, to operating massive machines by themselves, although that timeline was much longer and less jarring, taking a generation or two.
Yeah the AI companies slurped up all our work and are now selling it back to us in the form of trained LLMs.
What's the point of contributing to OSS if anyone can just LLM wash your work knowingly or unknowingly? You won't even get credit. Heck, you won't even know if anyone is using it!
But then what if you have a larger project than a library. Do all the leg work figuring out what works and what doesn't. What users like. Then anyone can just point an LLM at it and clone it for $50? Fun.
When I forecasted open-source is going down because nobody wants to expose himself only to be robbed off credit and authorship, he did not initially understand what the claim was. Two years now.
Yeah, I never contributed to FOSS to get credit; I contributed because I wanted something improved which I thought was not very good and thought that sharing the improvements with the world would be good (sharing is caring, after all). From a Free Software perspective, I actually quite like that Generative AI allows people to create the software they want and adapt it to their wants and needs. Free Software is about freedom, after all (free as in free speech). Unfortunate GAI tends to be quite resource intensive, which is bad; but local models are getting better all the time, so hopefully eventually anyone can run a GAI model on their own computer and have it create any and all software they want.
It's a bit like Bob Ross' Joy of Painting: if everyone can paint then anyone can make any painting they want to see.
And none of those freedoms are guaranteed today for all software but we effectively killed the the mechanism that guaranteed them at least for open source software.
The entire concept of copyleft and free software depended on copyright: it isn't "take my code and do what you will", it is "here is a very explicit contract that demands you credit my work and even requires you to contribute back in return for my efforts". And like, maybe a world with no copyright at all is better! But that isn't the world we are in: it is no more legal for you to have an AI read my code and then port it into your codebase (which could involve training as an intermediate step or could merely involve the AI searching for it and loading it into its context) than would be for you to directly read my code and port it into your codebase or even for you to utilize a deterministic tool to read my code and port it into your codebase; you only get to do those things if you retain my license on the result and abide by its terms.
FWIW, many of us who do open source would also find that hypothetical world in which the idea of copyright is abolished rather enticing... but you pretending that is this current world whenever you want to steal our code whilst copyright still paints our interests in using and altering the code from companies that have always been in fear of our community and our licenses (Apple, Microsoft, etc.) as theft is not merely a bit shitty... it is kind of evil/cruel.
It depended on copyright as the legal structure to uphold itself, a means to an end, not the end itself. As another comment in this thread nearby says, the point was to support the four fundamental freedoms and ultimately a world without copyright on code at all.
And on the first part about AI reading your code or training from it, it does seem like it's legal now, while you as a human reading and porting is not.
Why do you believe that having an AI read my code and port it into your code base is "legal now"? (Let's call that question A. This is a different question from B whether it is legal to train a model on my code, which is itself a different question from C whether it is legal to use the model you trained on my code to generate code that is in any way similar to my code into your codebase. As far as I know, A is still illegal, B is very likely legal, but B being legal doesn't imply that C is legal and C is where the war is going to be fought. But like, people focus too much on C, hoping for grey area, when what they are actually doing now is often A; and I have heard nothing that makes it sound as if A is "legal now".)
I wonder if we will see new platforms emerge around human-only collaboration. There's nothing stopping someone from continuing to work on a project in the traditional way. It's just harder on big platforms like GitHub which are designed around public bug reports and pull requests.
I hope so, and not only for code but art and even mindless entertainment. But you really need to draw a very hard line or there will be a line of useful idiots insisting that their "minimal" clanker use is OK and that they should still be accepted in your community. And then the next one will want just a little bit more allowed and before you know it your community is no different from any other on the net.
One of my favorite hobbies used to be to explore GitHub and see what interesting projects were created or updated. I loved to checkout and learn from others.
Everything is weird now.
There is this belief amongst software engineers that humans are always part of the process and that AI prompting is just the new IDE. Yet, every new model release is even more optimized to replace programmers and is pushing us one more step closer to that reality.
Right now (Fall 2026), we focus on empowering agents and LLMs and that's the current challenge facing software. However, once we solve that, the LLM really can kind of take it from there.
I know I'm being dramatic when I say this, but it really is how I'm starting to become jaded from all of this AI tech. It looks more and more like we're becoming a world full of really brilliant humans who are bored because there aren't any intellectual problems left to solve. That is not a utopia. That seems like a dystopian nightmare.
I never understood this. It's like home cooking, I don't stop just because a professional chef can make it better. Seems like many OSS contributors wanted to have their cake and eat it too, they're not really contributing for the love of the game but for external factors like credit or admiration or clout.
Would you keep cooking if a Star Trek style replicator existed that could more or less cook anything in a minute? What if all of your friends and family were satisfied with the replicator food and weren’t willing to wait for you to cook anymore?
It's like ordering food from outside versus cooking food yourself. Yes, you could order it and it might be appreciated but cooking something for others will, if they're good people, have them definitely appreciate your effort. And there's a difference between cooking for sustenance daily, in which case I too would use the replicator just to save myself the effort, and cooking for fun and special occasions.
This is analogous to coding as a profession versus for fun. For work I'd use all the tools at my disposal to get the job done because that's what matters in a corporate environment. And for home, well, I'll code some things and vibe code others, depending on how I feel about a certain project. I think OSS maintainers lean too hard in setting themselves and others too high of expectations such that they burn out like this, many such cases, when in reality they shouldn't take it so seriously. Work on your code when you want to and leave it alone when you don't, the license literally says "as-is," so follow that philosophy.
I used to love making the occasional event poster for friends and signs for local businesses as an aside to my day-to-day work. Early in my career I was in advertising and design, and still love my art.
But in the last year you just don't get these jobs anymore, due to AI. It's everywhere and I totally understand the feeling uncreative people get when they are finally given a tool that lets them create something.
What makes me depressed however, is seeing that the vast majority of people are perfectly fine with AI slop posters etc... Highlighting to me that they likely didn't actually value or appreciate the good design to begin with. A lot of people don't care about the human element to anything.
Yeah the most depressing part of the AIpocalypse is the realization that most people simply don't have any taste whatsoever. At least that's the only way I can explain why these horrid slop posters are thriving instead of essentially killing whatever business is putting them on their windows. It's not even just the missing human element (but it is that as well) but the level of quality that the average person seems to be OK with is just so low. Lower than what pretty much everyone should be able to make by hand.
> A lot of people don't care about the human element to anything.
I think this is a crucial point. The AI era seems to bring out two distinct movements in people: Those that always saw the human as a necessary bottle-neck, and those that actively sought and enjoyed interacting with another human brain.
> Those that always saw the human as a necessary bottle-neck, and those that actively sought and enjoyed interacting with another human brain.
Yep. The problem I feel is that humanity and society evolved via human interaction over the span of tens of thousands of years. And then in the space of a decade some of the people who benefited from that development feel so comfortable in their lives that they seek to literally end that method of progression for our species.
> you aren't held hostage by someone else for a library you depend on
Is this really the way you look at open-source libraries that are given to you for free, i.e. as a gift? I hope you look differently at gifts people give you in real life.
I can't speak to Ruby or other programming languages, but as a creator and occasional hacker with a media background, I have found AI to be incredibly liberating.
Now I can build things that would never have been possible without huge investments of time and/or money. The latest project: a hybrid human/AI tech newsroom that leverages LLM-driven advances in translation (https://asia-tech-news.ghost.io).
For my personal passions, LLMs have completely opened up areas that simply were extremely painful to deal with 5 or 10 years ago. Take genealogy: I used to manually transcribe old letters, and documents in foreign languages (often archaic specialized terms) were impossible for me to work with without seeking out specialized experts. The other night I had an AI go through a book of 200-year-old religious records and pick out references to potential ancestors. A few weeks earlier I worked on an old diary transcription (https://youtu.be/P6r1I-4T9is?si=qhaf3Wd5zZNjieEw). Such tasks are no longer a chore. It's fun again.
The closest comparison I can make was stumbling upon an old HTML tutorial on an MIT website 30+ years ago. All of a sudden, as a writer and creator, I was no longer tied to my employer's business model to get my words and images out to the world.
It definitely varies person-by-person. People who enjoyed l33tcoding, the act of programming, and the building process feel one way vs. the people who are in it for the end product, or enjoy the design process feel another. In a way, it's almost like those who enjoy the journey vs. the result (although the design process is also a journey).
Personally I enjoyed the act of programming/building. I'm struggling to put this into words, but software engineers have often been interested in solving technical problems, rather than business problems. At least I've felt this personally. I'm working on shifting that enjoyment toward the requirements gathering/design process. At the end of the day, it's still problem solving (which is the root of what I enjoy). But now it's more focused on solving business problems vs. technical problems. Which at the end of the day, is what is valuable to the business.
From the business perspective, this is great, because the end goal of software for the business is "business value". But it is a tough shift for some people to make (me included).
Edited to add:
Writing code vs. designing software are both creative. Writing code has a much more concrete/objective feedback loop though.
I also particularly hate the feeling of AI being shoved down everyone's throat.
And I don't enjoy digging through the mess that AI creates, whenever I have a particular bug that it can't quite get right.
Transcription is one legitimate use for LLMs that archivists are excited about. It's a case of a tedious task that frees them up to do the more interesting parts of the jobs, and the product is something that can be easily compared to the original and verified. This is very different from something like writing prose or code.
This is an overreaction. Yes, with AI we can all write our own features and bug fixes for open source, but there’s still community benefit in having a canonical version somewhere, rather than everyone writing bespoke solutions for themselves.
> there’s still community benefit in having a canonical version somewhere, rather than everyone writing bespoke solutions for themselves.
There is sharply reduced benefit to the maintainer, however as they are now buried in slop bug reports and PRs, and a bunch of people with no context and a Claude subscription think they can do it better.
I expect a lot of open-source maintainers will walk away from that particular bargain in the near future
while I appreciate the authors contributions to the ecosystem, I dont recommend anyone throw a tantrum on their way out the door. So you disagree with DHH (On what? Just everything I guess? No discussion worth having at all?) and you disagree with Matz (we're supposed to intuit what the 'problem' is; I'm assuming that he uses LLMs?).
Its definitely reasonable to be sad about the loss of our craft, but lashing out at others in a vague and undefined way is not it.
The robots aren't as good as you think. Its just that we're sceamed at all fay by hoardes of people saying they are.
Some of the least skilled people are doing the screaming. They desperately want to establish a consensus that anyome can do what you do now and being skilled doesnt matter...
You know why? Because they have no skills, they're mediocre and the best way they can succeed in a meritocracy without skills is to get people with actual skills to give up, or become meat proxies for the machine like yourself, then maybe you'd stnad a chance.
People will downvote me here, and tell me I dont get it. No I do, you're not skilled and you dont want to have to compete on your own merits. You want me to be impressed with you because you make things with llms. Im not.
But the robots are mostly "fine", and "fine" is good enough for most things we get paid for: enterprise SaaS products, mobile apps, etc.
I was where it sounds like you are a month or so ago (denial), so no downvotes here. It definitely sucks; it's like losing a huge part of my identity. I'm still grieving it.
I'm trying to deal with it by separating my identity from my job. I can still write code or learn new languages in my free time (such as it is). It's mostly a hobby now. And I can choose to not use LLMs at all in my personal life. But I do have bills to pay and a family to support, so at work I'm trying to learn how to do my new job of LLM orchestrator/babysitter. It's way less fun, but the money's still decent, so I'm hoping I can swallow my pride enough to keep going.
This. Enterprise software is going to get a lot worse.
When I signed up for AWS conference in Sydney this year, they listed out all the courses by codes in a vibe-coded React component. It didn't have any search function, so I had to manually scroll through it multiple times to pick my courses. The whole conference was AI-first.
AI is not as good as a team of developers. I don't know if it ever will be, but it definitely isn't today. AI is actually quite terrible at what it does. But it doesn't need to be better than that. Because the point of enterprise isn't to make good software.
That's a fear I have, yes. Not much we can do about it, though. We've collectively been pretty lucky so far, in terms of compensation. Can't last forever, one way or another.
This is going to be happening all over the place. I've released some code in the past but I'm definitely not going to do so again without ironclad agreements in place about AI ingestion. I'm not going to help the likes of Amodei and Altman to a further increase in their power, my goal was to help people not corporations and I suspect that a lot of people that have released code over the years have the same attitude (though obviously not all of them).
Yes when it becomes clear that half the participants aren't playing by the same rules you were its only fair to flip the table and walk away.
I'm no longer motivated to share when that only ends up feeding the machine intent on replacing me and I'm no longer interested in looking at other's contributions when it likely contains vomit from that very same machine, whether disclosed or not. This doesn't bode well for the future of open source or free culture in general and I do hope that well get the societal and legislative changes needed to make sharing a remotely fair proposition again but, considering that the entire economy has been essentially a big casino for over a decade now and all the winners are not held accountable for the issues they cause because doing so would bring the entire system crashing down, I'm not optimistic about that happening within my lifetime.
Many did, however it was never in the open source package. A few tried (Hippocratic license, which guaranteed that your software wouldn't be used by pretty much anyone) but it doesn't work. It is hard to only give things to parties you like - moreover, have a guarantee that you both like them today _and_ will like them in the future.
Having your work hoovered up by Big AI is no different to having your app hosted by AWS whereby AWS makes a ton of money and you get the bug reports to fix for free (if you are lucky). Only before it would take AWS to fork and maintain something like OpenSearch in such a situation.
It's a sad situation but exploitation is hardly new, and hardly unique to software.
Ruby is definitely not bringing me joy since I have to see needlessly depressing articles like this. Rails did not bring me joy 12 years ago when I needed to update dependencies for a legacy cloud service we relied on. Ruby's middling syntax didn't bring me joy either, despite the hype of the time. My child named our cat Ruby, and I had to explain to fellow nerds that it wasn't inspired by the language.
> You want changes? Go ask your agent or something. I’m told that’s what you’re supposed to do now.
Entirely fair. It will be very very interesting to see what happens to software when everyone is running their own vendored fork trying to maintain them with AI agents.
Will the whole thing collapse under its own complexity? Or will smarter agents eventually dig their way out of the hole dug by their predecessors?
A lot of people get involved in open source because of the sense of community or because they like the idea of giving something to the world.
What's the point in contributing to opensource if your work gets violated by vibecoders and corps that disrespect your licensing and give you no credit while simultaneously clamiing your work is useless and you're going to be replaced by a LLM model?
Any ecosystem declines when there are too many cynical grifters compared to well meaning hard working people.
It would not be absurd: Ruby (not Rails, Ruby, I insist) puts very high the "joy of coding", its syntax pleasant to write and read for humans, and its welcoming community. It never was the most performant, it's been a long time since it last was the cool kid on the block, but all those other aspects make it very attractive for very different reasons. That's a big part of why I started writing Ruby a long time ago vs. other languages, and why I enjoyed it so much, and I don't think I'm the only one.
I believe the Ruby community counts many people who resonate with this aspect of the language and of the community. And if you joined and enjoyed Ruby because you love collaborating around elegant code with/for other humans, you're surely not enjoying the current AI trend a lot.
I'm not writing Ruby daily anymore these days, but I still feel this way, and I really do not enjoy my work much these days.
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[ 1.4 ms ] story [ 62.1 ms ] thread>When people claim that it’s no longer sustainable to write code by hand, they’re not entirely wrong, but only in the same way that it’s no longer sustainable to sleep in a bed once someone has taken a shit in it.
I think the author is trying to say that a code base once infected with vibes, becomes indecipherable to the average human being. It's still just code, but full of Claudisms.
The carpenter is free to exercise his craft as he see's fit, but it's going to take place mostly in his personal workshop, for personal reasons, not to develop homes or run a business in the way he did before.
We can talk for ages about the quality of the robot's work, the maintainability of the resulting home, etc. But it's clear that, at this time, the market and ecosystem are embracing the robots whole-heartedly so those of us used to the old ways are having to rapidly adjust.
All of this stuff is so new, and we're supposed to hand wave away quality and maintainability?
For corporations, sales, probability and feature release cycles take priority over maintainability or code quality. AI is allowing businesses to build features faster than ever, so management is happy.
By the time maintainability issues hit, they've either pivoted, raised more capital or can throw money at the problem.
You can find example of this in all of the trades. Often, these are also talked about as "safety improvements" - which they sort of are. Given the same baseline intelligence, it's harder to dangerously fuck up plumbing or electrical in 2026 than it was in 1926.
The truth is no one knows how much the robot costs, and we probably won't know until its too late. Its extremely naive, though, to simply buy into the PR from the peddlers and redistribute their propaganda verbatim in the way you are doing. Although none of us know for sure, considering R&D, infrastructure capex and externalities, the robots are most definitively _not_ cheap.
OK, so don’t buy their PR, and try it yourself.
But if you do this, you will find there is a lot of evidence for the economic argument.
I tested out Google Argon 4 release by having it build a Web app to replace a binder I have for reconciling payments with reimbursable expenses.
It did it, as well as I would have and in much less time. I just set it to high and supervised it, it cost about $2. Even if you throw in a “supervision cost” to account for the time I had to spend interacting with it, it was substantially cheaper than had I done it at normal salary rates. Probably 2 orders of magnitude cheaper, even.
In this analogy, we human software devs are the artisanal homebuilders and the fancy LLMs are the robots.
And yes, there's quite a cost to build all the datacenters for all the AI that Big Tech believes that people will want. But as you mention, the cost savings are enormous for even despite that, and will make a much larger set of problems accessible to real software solutions, that previously either stayed on paper, in peoples' heads, or maybe an Excel sheet somewhere.
If someone complains they take pride in understanding and designing deterministic processes, you can't reply that this is just like when robots took over manual labor.
No, because it is not manual labor, and robots hasn't taken over. Robots are computers. Robots are deterministic.
A better comparison would be an artisan architect, a blueprint designer being replaced by a special paint splatter, which when thrown against a piece of paper looks almost exactly like a blueprint of an almost completely liveable house. Great! What's not to like? It will allow anyone to design a house.
iunno about that boss...
That is not what's happened at all. That's the entire point of the discussion. The robots aren't as good as humans, they can't follow specs or instuctions as well, and their output is markedly worse than human output in a lot of ways.
The only difference is that the robots are faster and don't need rest. And we're discovering now that that is not good enough.
No, not really.
Next time someone complains about software do me a favor and compare it to a nail through the foot or grabbing a hot dish and burning yourself or something else negative in the human experience. There is plenty to choose from.
We don't need 300 variations of enshitification, the folks at Pompeii and Herculaneum have that well covered.
Casey Muratori had a take on a podcast that I liked comparing writing code vs. using an LLM to generate code to playing guitar by hand vs. playing digital music. Although it's arguably more efficient to play an mp3, people still enjoy the art of playing the guitar.
Open-source was always strip-mined by massive corporations. It was main source of free labour for decades.
Unfortunately there are always people willing to subsidise these corporations with their time for a badge of "honour" and few pats on the back.
Great to see more people awaken to the fact corporations thrive on unpaid work whilst making billions for their shareholders.
I am yet to see this trickle down wink
The idea that advertisers and malware merchants are good stewards of the browser or email or social media needs to end. Especially when said tech leaders hold deeply anti-human beliefs.
And you don't even have to pay - there are perfectly fine free tiers and open weight models.
> I am yet to see this trickle down
hmm...these two sentences don't agree with each other.
AI algorithms were developed in 1950s, and what all those vultures were waiting for was a good dataset and enough compute power, which they saw coming in advance.
Totally fair. The source code is open. Thanks for all the fish.
Insane. This is the guy who was proclaimed to be "nice" by his followers. The biggest LLM sellouts in open source are Ruby and Scala.
Ironically Oracle with Java is now being the good guy.
Reminder: oracle is also an acronym, and you might want to take a gander at what its subject is up to.
There is no future in which oracle is the good guy no matter the axis. Least of all the subject of AI.
I'm pretty sure someone will soon call Linus a sell-out. The hate / denial / radicalisation is just sad at this point... Do, or don't, but at least don't hate the others. Be and let be. No need to call other people names just because you don't like their sand castle. There's plenty of sand on the beach.
That's not quite practiced by those who preach "the genie is out of the bottle, and we invested too much to allow him go back, so adapt or die".
What exactly is an LLM sellout? Someone who sees the world moving toward it?
Wouldn't Rust be a sellout too?
Why is Scala an LLM sellout?
I myself have been using an open source lib that I contributed a fix for and inquired about it. I didn't just drop a PR either, opened an issue, was told PRs accepted, opened a PR, signed a license agreement and then the PR just sort hung out for months without response even after some gentle prodding.
Now, they don't owe me anything and they don't have to merge the code, it is their repo after all. However what did I do? use an LLM, fork the repo with my changes and now "I" maintain that private fork and add to it as needed.
As time goes on I think these smaller packages / clients will start to disappear as people/LLMs just spit out a client library or whatever or just implement the same thing over and over. Combined with the opinion of the author I figure oss libs for npm, ruby, pypi etc will start to dwindle.
The top tier LLMs would be as good at this as a lot of maintainers, right?
In some respects maybe in others less so.
So in my situation I am using a client for a system and am using a very specific part of it even though there is a lot of other complicated code in other parts of the client. A LLM is good enough to maintain the code path I am using and of course any changes are triggered / watched over by me. In this situation I am comfortable letting LLMs do most of the code. I would be less enthused if that was outside of my control and the code changes were more often and faster.
I can totally identify with that feeling. It must be how professional mathematicians are feeling as well.
And also that on the other side of that grief is something new and potentially exciting, but very different than what we're all used to.
Speak for yourself.
However, most code is corporate CRUD stuff. The world sort of runs on CRUD. But it's rarely particularly fun, or beautiful, or fulfilling. It tends to be pretty ugly because there's rarely time to make it beautiful. So I'm not losing much joy there.
Additionally, even with an agentic workflow, my team still thinks deeply about architecture issues. We believe that well structured code is better for bots and humans alike. So I am still exercising my engineering brain; I'm writing blueprints and supervising the bricklayers now instead of laying bricks.
Does that match your teams' experience at all? Sometimes I feel like folks on these threads are working in a parallel universe where the majority of coding tasks and somehow fulfilling and fun and not 99% tweaking reports, trying to implement arcane and contradictory business logic, or fighting with shitty and frustrating externalities. Maybe people found joy in those aspects. I guess there are all types of people in the world. I mean, I'm a sicko who loves writing SQL, something that most coders seem to hate.
This is super great. God, I wish all leaders had half this much empathy! Good on you.I find that I struggle more with personal projects, as I tend to take things where I'm not even in the skirts of the learning curve, and consequently redo my work a few times.
Where do you work! :)
I think the technical freedom plays a big part, not because you're chasing the shiniest, but because you're choosing the tools that will hopefully outlast you. One of my former employers was 'modernizing' their IBM i (former AS/400) systems by porting them to Java and Windows Servers, and they were having all kinds of problems. Couldn't even get the EBCDIC to Unicode conversion quite right. I was lucky not to be there anymore.
But I'm sorta old and some of my school's texts were outdated so they had programming examples and explanatory text that treated EBCDIC on equal footing with ASCII.
So unlike anybody who dealt with EBCDIC conversions in the wild, seeing that acronym actually takes me back to happier days!
Generally the only way to get it done in a corpo environment (and receive any kind of thanks or glory, as opposed to just torpedoing your own career) is to let things get so bad that production stability suffers and/or the team's ability to ship features is severely impacted.
...I realize I'm basically just echoing what you said, except more verbose. I'm venting!
With massive amounts of effort and strong communication it was usually possible to get some tech debt time, but management acted like they were doing YOU a huge favor. It was kind of a career killer, generally.
Alternatively it was possible to get this kind of work done on my own time… but that’s a marriage killer instead of a career killer.
I burned out on trying after decades.
Shitty devs without AI are slowly building BS that wants to be cleaned up.
Shitty devs with AI are much more fasterly building BS that wants to be cleaned up.
I have a similar experience as yours, just add another 10-ish years to the timeline. Literally my first job out of uni, I got to work on a legacy code base that was another 15 years older than that which had a ton of reports all built differently over time with slight variations in both code and end user output that really all wanted to be "the same" both on the code and end user side. So I slowly but surely, one user/PM requested change at a time would build out a common layer of abstractions and shared code that both made the code shared and easier to maintain (great for me!) and consistent for users (great for the PM/users).
Heck, I built a rudimentary TransactSQL parser that'd output stored procedure call graphs to graphviz and then I printed it and hung it on the wall to get through all this and having an LLM to just make a mermaid out of this in 5-ish minutes would definitively have been faster than I was ;)
With an LLM all of that would just have been faster to do but still worthwhile and useful on both levels. I.e. both code abstraction/reuse and PM/user level. Similarly there was a report that one of the devs had to actually run manually and it took him a full week, so users that wanted the report would only request it once a year-ish. When I was asked to learn how to run it from him I was appalled and just took that week to put it into a script that we ran and emailed the report out once a month automatically. They ran that report manually like that for like 10 years prior to that :mindblown:
None of this is an "AI thing". It's a good dev vs. not so good dev thing. And none of it really has to do with coding as in "writing source code" as much as "solving problems for humans" somehow and the "language" you do that in changes over time. If you're the guy that's tied up with the particular language: yeah LLMs are gonna eat your lunch. If you're the problem solver type that uses whatever tools they have available, you're still in demand.
Disclaimer: I had to take an opportunity at management in cybersecurity, and haven't coded in about five years. It helps a lot when talking to developers about risk mitigation, though.
The nicest thing was when you nailed down the architecture and then you are mostly twiddling your thumbs while waiting for the PM guys to have the next feature idea. Maintenance and bug fixing is a breeze.
I have no idea where you work but 90% of companies are not like that. In fact, it's the opposite: filled with awful management, terrible timelines and legacy code.
Engineering had always been a nuisance to them and getting basic approval for maintenance regarding technical debt has been an uphill battle.
One of the fun things to do would be to use the 8 hrs of work to spend about 4-5 hrs working on deliverables, which was usually sufficient to exceed expectations, using 2-3 of the remaining hours (I’d keep 1-2 hrs for myself), to make significant architectural improvements.
I’d bring in an improvement every 6 months or so and suddenly the app would get significantly better and I’d get credit for it.
Well, that is not entirely true. The British parliament made sabotaging work machinery punishable by death. So people did in fact get hurt, the people who were hurt were the Luddites, and the people hurting them was the British state executing them.
The Luddites only wanted to keep their jobs.
Brother, they're you. You just don't realize it yet.
I have very mixed feelings.
- AI lets me plough through issues which previously would require debugging, troubleshooting, googling, stackoverflow
- my coding abilities are starting to atrophy
- not having to deal with low-level language quirks is nice (parameter differences of subString in C# vs Java).
- but I'm seeing the same as OP: when working on a team, the sense of ownership and community is gone. You have AI un-AI-speak for you to properly read the Jira ticket another dev created using AI. Pull requests are echo chambers between the AI used to create it, review bots, other devs using AI for PR reviews manually.
- there's little denying that we devs are feeding the very machine that will replace us
That is a problem though with AI currently. E.g. I've found a severe issue with Claude Code and prose writing when trying to make an explainer site. Instead of "plain" english it likes to use "flowery" phrases and "punchy" statements. This forces the user to spend extra time thinking about it.
And code comments are terrible. It can use 3 paragraphs to describe something when only one sentence is enough. Then further agents (or humans) have to waste their context window to figure out what the "riddle-ly" worded sentences mean.
But the things you care the most about, the AI doesn't unless you tell it to care. And even then, you have to be very careful because it acts more like a contractor with the potential to stop in the middle of a project (lack of tokens) and leave it in a very bad state until it's complete.
Or worse, it forgets what you want and does it's own thing for a while until you remind it.
The big money valley bros figured it out just before they embraced regressive conservatism for their politics. There’s a reason we went from massages and pet daycare to rentier agriculture executive style management of the peons.
And that reason is "service businesses are too expensive in California because of high housing costs".
In theory, but not in practice. Instead, somehow we ended up writing essentially the same app over and and over, usually without reusing libs. You know because this time we'll use vue, or svelte, or phoenix, or htmx, or go, because this time we actually know what we're doing. so gotta start from the ground up and figure out how to store a row in a db as if we haven't done the same thing a million times before.
And that all under one roof. Now multiple that by thousands of roofs.
At least the devs were having fun and making good money writing all that code.
Well, no, for a lot of us, there really is no other side. Slop farming is not software engineering and it never will be. I didn't want to be a manager when I worked in the industry and I certainly don't want to be one now.
On the bright side, we will probably (eventually) self-organize into communities that will code however they want and leave the other side the fuck alone.
Would you look at a piece of code elegantly using high-level abstractions to model some problem written by a human and go "see, look, code is beautiful"... and then look at the exact same code written by an LLM and say "this is slop"?
> Moreover, it's downright offensive for a purported expert to defer their expertise to a SAAS black box.
With programming, it's just the opposite, though.
Programmers work with abstractions. Understanding the full system down to how atoms work is too much to think of when e.g. writing an API handler. So instead you work with modules and their interfaces.
Pre-LLM, if you need some task done, you wouldn't write it all out yourself if there was some external package which did the work for you.
Of course, when using an LLM, you don't need to surrender your ability to think about the problem and solution.
> High-level programming languages use well-defined, limited syntax to encode program behavior in a deterministic way. Compilers translate these directions into programs that should have identical behavior between compiler runs and between different compilers. (If they don't, that's a compiler bug, or else an artifact of UB.) This means you can structurally and provably rely on the high-level programming layer without worrying about what's underneath: the assembly is abstracted away. You also get the massive benefit of being able to tweak and improve the assembly layer independently of the programming language layer, so long as the contract between language and compiler is not violated.
> If AI is a "layer of abstraction," so is working with a bunch of contractors to make your app. The definition is broadened to the point of absurdity. (Solely: "I don't have to think about code anymore," which only touches on the most superficial aspect of an abstraction.)
With a good high-level abstraction, I can mostly think on the level of the abstraction, but I can also dive down through the layers and figure out what's actually going on in each one.
> Would you look at a piece of code elegantly using high-level abstractions to model some problem written by a human and go "see, look, code is beautiful"... and then look at the exact same code written by an LLM and say "this is slop"?
Using is one thing; inventing is another. I have seen no evidence that LLMs have the capacity to discover and leverage new abstractions. To me, that's the most exciting part of programming: finding ways to reify powerful concepts and then turn complex tasks into simple ones, ad infinitum.
We had our work stolen and they're squeezing us with it, all for garbage, what in the world are you talking about.
I love writing code. But I also love solving problems. AI allows me to solve problems in different ways. And I am totally enjoying that as well. If someone got into this SWE only to code, yes, they may not love where things are today and appear to be going in the future.
I certainly did not come to computing to be a manager, in fact I already had that role and freely downgraded myself.
In my case I had prior experience with tech support and I saw lots of people struggling to use computers and it's interfaces.
So my joy comes equally from coding or seeing people relieved that their problems were solved.
With that mindset that I'm able to fly with Claude or codex.
And even doing my comp sci more than a decade ago many professors told that I should worry more about the outcomes and what problems I'm solving, instead of building this life game around coding only. So I'm grateful for them.
Maybe that can help other people getting out of this dread feeling whenever they are using A?
My frustrations changed, nonetheless, with AI. When it forgets cases that the LLM session and I forgot to cover, that for me is pretty obvious if I had or gave more time to evaluate and review things.
This week I realized that running a separate session and asking dumb questions about the plans and recent pull requests helps grounding again.
The lack of AI mental model between conversations or even within the conversation is a definite frustration. “No, I didn’t just decide to entirely change everything I’ve planned based on one ambiguous word…”
Your use of a separate session for q&a is actually something I find interesting in the new Granite Switch architecture’s KV Cache Normalization, where the kv cache is essentially frozen while the model performs certain other tasks in order to prevent the mental ‘conversation’ from getting polluted. However, I’m also assuming what you mean by “helps grounding” is that it helps keep the agent grounded in the context by not introducing a bunch of external information, which is certainly beneficial.
the functionally same product is still being made, but there is less human involvement in the craft, and more of a human management over the manufacturing process
Being able to program means in particular, you can read those programs and understand what they do.
What happens when you don't understand them anymore?
Living in a reality where everything is a black box, doing its thing as if by magic, leaves you in a position devoid of control. The objects upholding your life are incomprehensible to you, you cannot change them or even only reliably exchange them with alternatives.
For me it's about losing much of the entire career, because companies will come to expect AI-level work that I can't/won't provide.
> Being able to program means in particular, you can read those programs and understand what they do.
IMO This assumes that one views programming as more than just a job/career, but not everyone does so.
> Living in a reality where everything is a black box, doing its thing as if by magic, leaves you in a position devoid of control.
For some, this is actually relieving. Sometimes we want to be more ignorant, sometimes it makes us happier.
The point isn't some people not understanding whatever stuff with limited effects, it's no people understanding anything important.
Mathematics is about describing fundamental reality, so you can change it. When corporations own it exclusively, they can do whatever they want with it.
Using an LLM doesn't mean "I must write this code in a way that I cannot understand it". I'd encourage using the LLM to write code in a way that you can understand.
> When corporations own it exclusively, they can do whatever they want with it.
This is an argument in favour of open-weight models.
- Eric Hoffer
Wait... What's that you say?
Probably the LLMs saved me because deep down I knew that my own power by itself wouldn't be enough to let me do what I really want, but right now the future does seem bright.
"right now the future does seem bright"
This reads like "Fuck you, I've got mine." Who cares about those wage workers anyway, right?
But none of this is going to bring back actually writing code for the love of it. That will become a hobby kind of like knitting or sewing.
What's the point of contributing to OSS if anyone can just LLM wash your work knowingly or unknowingly? You won't even get credit. Heck, you won't even know if anyone is using it!
But then what if you have a larger project than a library. Do all the leg work figuring out what works and what doesn't. What users like. Then anyone can just point an LLM at it and clone it for $50? Fun.
It's a bit like Bob Ross' Joy of Painting: if everyone can paint then anyone can make any painting they want to see.
FWIW, many of us who do open source would also find that hypothetical world in which the idea of copyright is abolished rather enticing... but you pretending that is this current world whenever you want to steal our code whilst copyright still paints our interests in using and altering the code from companies that have always been in fear of our community and our licenses (Apple, Microsoft, etc.) as theft is not merely a bit shitty... it is kind of evil/cruel.
And on the first part about AI reading your code or training from it, it does seem like it's legal now, while you as a human reading and porting is not.
Everything is weird now.
There is this belief amongst software engineers that humans are always part of the process and that AI prompting is just the new IDE. Yet, every new model release is even more optimized to replace programmers and is pushing us one more step closer to that reality.
Right now (Fall 2026), we focus on empowering agents and LLMs and that's the current challenge facing software. However, once we solve that, the LLM really can kind of take it from there.
I know I'm being dramatic when I say this, but it really is how I'm starting to become jaded from all of this AI tech. It looks more and more like we're becoming a world full of really brilliant humans who are bored because there aren't any intellectual problems left to solve. That is not a utopia. That seems like a dystopian nightmare.
This is analogous to coding as a profession versus for fun. For work I'd use all the tools at my disposal to get the job done because that's what matters in a corporate environment. And for home, well, I'll code some things and vibe code others, depending on how I feel about a certain project. I think OSS maintainers lean too hard in setting themselves and others too high of expectations such that they burn out like this, many such cases, when in reality they shouldn't take it so seriously. Work on your code when you want to and leave it alone when you don't, the license literally says "as-is," so follow that philosophy.
But in the last year you just don't get these jobs anymore, due to AI. It's everywhere and I totally understand the feeling uncreative people get when they are finally given a tool that lets them create something.
What makes me depressed however, is seeing that the vast majority of people are perfectly fine with AI slop posters etc... Highlighting to me that they likely didn't actually value or appreciate the good design to begin with. A lot of people don't care about the human element to anything.
I think this is a crucial point. The AI era seems to bring out two distinct movements in people: Those that always saw the human as a necessary bottle-neck, and those that actively sought and enjoyed interacting with another human brain.
Yep. The problem I feel is that humanity and society evolved via human interaction over the span of tens of thousands of years. And then in the space of a decade some of the people who benefited from that development feel so comfortable in their lives that they seek to literally end that method of progression for our species.
Is this really the way you look at open-source libraries that are given to you for free, i.e. as a gift? I hope you look differently at gifts people give you in real life.
Now I can build things that would never have been possible without huge investments of time and/or money. The latest project: a hybrid human/AI tech newsroom that leverages LLM-driven advances in translation (https://asia-tech-news.ghost.io).
For my personal passions, LLMs have completely opened up areas that simply were extremely painful to deal with 5 or 10 years ago. Take genealogy: I used to manually transcribe old letters, and documents in foreign languages (often archaic specialized terms) were impossible for me to work with without seeking out specialized experts. The other night I had an AI go through a book of 200-year-old religious records and pick out references to potential ancestors. A few weeks earlier I worked on an old diary transcription (https://youtu.be/P6r1I-4T9is?si=qhaf3Wd5zZNjieEw). Such tasks are no longer a chore. It's fun again.
The closest comparison I can make was stumbling upon an old HTML tutorial on an MIT website 30+ years ago. All of a sudden, as a writer and creator, I was no longer tied to my employer's business model to get my words and images out to the world.
Personally I enjoyed the act of programming/building. I'm struggling to put this into words, but software engineers have often been interested in solving technical problems, rather than business problems. At least I've felt this personally. I'm working on shifting that enjoyment toward the requirements gathering/design process. At the end of the day, it's still problem solving (which is the root of what I enjoy). But now it's more focused on solving business problems vs. technical problems. Which at the end of the day, is what is valuable to the business.
From the business perspective, this is great, because the end goal of software for the business is "business value". But it is a tough shift for some people to make (me included).
Edited to add: Writing code vs. designing software are both creative. Writing code has a much more concrete/objective feedback loop though.
I also particularly hate the feeling of AI being shoved down everyone's throat.
And I don't enjoy digging through the mess that AI creates, whenever I have a particular bug that it can't quite get right.
There is sharply reduced benefit to the maintainer, however as they are now buried in slop bug reports and PRs, and a bunch of people with no context and a Claude subscription think they can do it better.
I expect a lot of open-source maintainers will walk away from that particular bargain in the near future
Its definitely reasonable to be sad about the loss of our craft, but lashing out at others in a vague and undefined way is not it.
Some of the least skilled people are doing the screaming. They desperately want to establish a consensus that anyome can do what you do now and being skilled doesnt matter...
You know why? Because they have no skills, they're mediocre and the best way they can succeed in a meritocracy without skills is to get people with actual skills to give up, or become meat proxies for the machine like yourself, then maybe you'd stnad a chance.
People will downvote me here, and tell me I dont get it. No I do, you're not skilled and you dont want to have to compete on your own merits. You want me to be impressed with you because you make things with llms. Im not.
I was where it sounds like you are a month or so ago (denial), so no downvotes here. It definitely sucks; it's like losing a huge part of my identity. I'm still grieving it.
I'm trying to deal with it by separating my identity from my job. I can still write code or learn new languages in my free time (such as it is). It's mostly a hobby now. And I can choose to not use LLMs at all in my personal life. But I do have bills to pay and a family to support, so at work I'm trying to learn how to do my new job of LLM orchestrator/babysitter. It's way less fun, but the money's still decent, so I'm hoping I can swallow my pride enough to keep going.
When I signed up for AWS conference in Sydney this year, they listed out all the courses by codes in a vibe-coded React component. It didn't have any search function, so I had to manually scroll through it multiple times to pick my courses. The whole conference was AI-first.
AI is not as good as a team of developers. I don't know if it ever will be, but it definitely isn't today. AI is actually quite terrible at what it does. But it doesn't need to be better than that. Because the point of enterprise isn't to make good software.
Do you realize it won't last long at such rate?
I'm no longer motivated to share when that only ends up feeding the machine intent on replacing me and I'm no longer interested in looking at other's contributions when it likely contains vomit from that very same machine, whether disclosed or not. This doesn't bode well for the future of open source or free culture in general and I do hope that well get the societal and legislative changes needed to make sharing a remotely fair proposition again but, considering that the entire economy has been essentially a big casino for over a decade now and all the winners are not held accountable for the issues they cause because doing so would bring the entire system crashing down, I'm not optimistic about that happening within my lifetime.
Having your work hoovered up by Big AI is no different to having your app hosted by AWS whereby AWS makes a ton of money and you get the bug reports to fix for free (if you are lucky). Only before it would take AWS to fork and maintain something like OpenSearch in such a situation.
It's a sad situation but exploitation is hardly new, and hardly unique to software.
The list of things you can get canceled for is growing endlessly.
https://davidcel.is/articles/the-dhh-problem
You might already have _been_ the problem here.
Fixed that typo ;)
Entirely fair. It will be very very interesting to see what happens to software when everyone is running their own vendored fork trying to maintain them with AI agents.
Will the whole thing collapse under its own complexity? Or will smarter agents eventually dig their way out of the hole dug by their predecessors?
A lot of people get involved in open source because of the sense of community or because they like the idea of giving something to the world.
What's the point in contributing to opensource if your work gets violated by vibecoders and corps that disrespect your licensing and give you no credit while simultaneously clamiing your work is useless and you're going to be replaced by a LLM model?
Any ecosystem declines when there are too many cynical grifters compared to well meaning hard working people.
I believe the Ruby community counts many people who resonate with this aspect of the language and of the community. And if you joined and enjoyed Ruby because you love collaborating around elegant code with/for other humans, you're surely not enjoying the current AI trend a lot.
I'm not writing Ruby daily anymore these days, but I still feel this way, and I really do not enjoy my work much these days.