All of it smells of a (lousy) junior software engineer: from configuring root logger at the top, module level (which relies on module import caching not to be reapplied), over not using a stdlib config file parser and building one themselves, to a raciness in load_json where it's checked for file existence with an if and then carrying on as if the file is certainly there...
In a nutshell, if the rest of it is like this, it simply sucks.
The more I browse through this, the more I agree. I feel like one could delete almost all comments from that project without losing any information – which means, at least the variable naming is (probably?) sensible. Then again, I don't know the application domain.
Also…
def _save_current_date_time(current_date_time_file: str, current_date_time: str) -> None:
with Path(current_date_time_file).open("w") as f:
f.write(current_date_time)
there is a lot of obviously useful abstraction being missed, wasting lines of code that will all need to be maintained.
The scary thing is: I have seen professional human developers write worse code.
> I feel like one could delete almost all comments from that project without losing any information
I far from a heavy LLM coder but I’ve noticed a massive excess of unnecessary comments in most output. I’m always deleting the obvious ones.
But then I started noticing that the comments seem to help the LLM navigate additional code changes. It’s like a big trail of breadcrumbs for the LLM to parse.
I wouldn’t be surprised if vibe coders get trained to leave the excess comments in place.
More tokens -> more compute involved. Attention-based models work by attending every token with each other, so more tokens means not only having more time to "think" but also being able to think "better". That is also at least part of the reason why o1/o3/R1 can sometimes solve what other LLMs could not.
Anyway, I don't think any of the current LLMs are really good for coding. What it's good at is copy-pasting (with some minor changes) from the massive code corpus it has been pre-trained. For example, give it some Zig code and it's straight unable to solve even basic tasks. Same if you give it really unique task, or if you simply ask for potential improvements of your existing code. Very, very bad results, no signs of out-of-box thinking whatsoever.
BTW: I think what people are missing is that LLMs are really great at language modeling. I had great results, and boosts in productivity, just by being able to prepare the task specification, and do quick changes in that really easily. Once I have a good understanding of the problem, I can usually implement everything quickly, and do it in much much better way than any LLM can currently do.
I have tried getting gemini 2.5 to output "token efficient" code, i.e. no comments, keep variables to 1 or 2 letters, try to keep code as condensed as possible.
It didn't work out that great. I think that all the context in the verbose coding it does actually helps it to write better code. Shedding context to free up tokens isn't so straightforward.
What’s worse, I get a lot of comments left saying what the AI did, not what the code does or why. Eg “moved this from file xy”, “code deleted because we have abc”, etc. Completely useless stuff that should be communicated in the chat window, not in the code.
LLMs are also good at commenting on existing code.
It’s trivial to ask Claude via Cursor to add comments to illustrate how some code works. I’ve found this helpful with uncommented code I’m trying to follow.
I haven’t seen it hallucinate an incorrect comment yet, but sometimes it will comment a TODO that a section should be made more more clear. (Rude… haha)
I have seldomly seen insightful comments from LLMs. It is usually better than "comment what the line does" usefull for getting a hint about undocumented code, but not by much. My experience is limited, but what I have I do agree with. As long as you keep on the beaten path it is ok. Comments are not such a thing.
> there is a lot of obviously useful abstraction being missed, wasting lines of code that will all need to be maintained.
This is a human sentiment because we can fairly easily pick up abstractions during reading. AIs have a much harder time with this - they can do it, but it takes up very limited cognitive resources. In contrast, rewriting the entire software for a change is cheap and easy. So to a point, flat and redundant code is actually beneficial for a LLM.
Remember, the code is written primarily for AIs to read and only incidentally for humans to execute :)
>The scary thing is: I have seen professional human developers write worse code.
This is kind of the rub of it all. If the code works, passes all relevant tests, is reasonably maintainable, and can be fitted into the system correctly with a well defined interface, does it really matter? I mean at that point its kind of like looking at the output of a bytecode compiler and being like "wow what a mess". And it's not like they can't write code up to your stylistic standards, it's just literally a matter of prompting for that.
> If the code works, passes all relevant tests, is reasonably maintainable, and can be fitted into the system correctly with a well defined interface, does it really matter?
You're not wrong here, but there's a big difference in programming one-off tooling or prototype MVPs and programming things that need to be maintained for years and years.
We did this song and dance pretty recently with dynamic typing. Developers thought it was so much more productive to use dynamically typed languages, because it is in the initial phases. Then years went by, those small, quick-to-make dynamic codebases ended up becoming unmaintainable monstrosities, and those developers who hyped up dynamic typing invented Python/PHP type hinting and Flow for JavaScript, later moving to TypeScript entirely. Nowadays nobody seriously recommends building long-lived systems in untyped languages, but they are still very useful for one-off scripting and more interactive/exploratory work where correctness is less important, i.e. Jupyter notebooks.
I wouldn't be surprised to see the same pattern happen with low-supervision AI code; it's great for popping out the first MVP, but because it generates poor code, the gung-ho junior devs who think they're getting 10x productivity gains will wisen up and realize the value of spending an hour thinking about proper levels of abstraction instead of YOLO'ing the first thing the AI spits out when they want to build a system that's going to be worked on by multiple developers for multiple years.
I think the productivity gains of dynamic typed languages were real, and based on two things: dynamic typing (can) provide certain safety properties trivially, and dynamic typing neatly kills off the utterly inadequate type systems found in mainstream languages when they were launched (the 90s, mostly).
You'll notice the type systems being bolted onto dynamic languages or found in serious attempts at new languages are radically different than the type systems being rejected by the likes of javascript, python, ruby and perl.
> those small, quick-to-make dynamic codebases ended up becoming unmaintainable monstrosities
In my experience, type checking / type hinting already starts to pay off when more than one person is working on an even small-ish code base. Just because it helps you keep in mind what comes/goes to the other guy's code.
And in my experience "me 3 months later" counts as a whole second developer that needs accommodating. The only time I appreciate not having to think about types is on code that I know I will never, ever come back to—stuff like a one off bash script.
Yep, I've seen type hinting even be helpful without a type checker in python. Just as a way for devs to tell each other what they intend on passing. Even when a small percent of the hints are incorrect, having those hints there can still pay off.
I'm certainly extremely happy for having an extensive type system in my daily driver languages especially when working with AI coding assistance — it's yet another very crucial guard rail that ensures that keeps the AI on track and makes a lot of fuckups downright impossible.
>The ML world being nearly entirely in Python, much of it untyped (and that the Python type system is pretty weak) is really scary
I think this has a ton to do with the mixed results from "vibe coding" we've seen as the codebase grows in scope and complexity. Agents seem to break down without a good type system. Same goes for JS.
I've just recently started on an Objective-C project using Cline, and it's like nirvana. I can code out an entire interface and have it implemented for me as I'm going. I see no reason it couldn't scale infinitely to massive LOC with good coding practices. The real killer feature is header files. Being able to have your entire projects headers in context at all time, along with a proper compiler for debugging, changes the game for how agents can reason on the whole codebase.
> You're not wrong here, but there's a big difference in programming one-off tooling or prototype MVPs and programming things that need to be maintained for years and years.
Humans also worry about their jobs, especially in PIP-happy companies; they are very well known for writing intentionally over-complicated code that only they understand so that they are irreplaceable
If your TC is 500k-1M and you don’t feel like job hopping anymore, you’d certainly not want to get hit by a random layoff due to insufficient organizational masculinity or whatever. Maintaining a complex blob of mission critical code is one way of increasing your survival chances, though of course nothing is guaranteed.
The challenge is that sufficiently bad code could be intentional or it could be from a lack of skill.
For example, I've seen a C# application where every function takes in and outputs an array of objects, supposedly built that way so the internal code can be modified without ever having to worry about the contract breaking. It was just as bad as you are imagining, probably worse. Was that incompetence or building things to be so complicated that others would struggle to work on it?
what are you going to do when something suddenly doesn't work and cursor endlessly spins without progress no matter how many "please don't make mistakes" you add? delete the whole thing and try to one-shot it again?
The point is because it generally produces crap code you have to one shot or else iteration becomes hard. Similar to how a junior would try to refactor their mess and just make a bigger mess
I find it hard to believe that when the AI generates crap code, there is absolutely nothing you can do (change the prompt, modify context, add examples) to make it do what you want. It has not been my experience either. I only use AI to make small modules and refactor instead of one-shoting.
Also I find "AI makes crap code so we should give it a bigger task" illogical.
>No one says you have to code like those influencers. You are a software engineer, use AI like one, iteratively.
This is my issue with all the AI naysayers at this point. It seems to all boil down to "haha, stupid noob can't code so he uses AI" in their minds. It's like they are incapable of understanding that there could simultaneously be a bunch of junior devs pushing greenfield YouTube demos of vibe coding, while at the same time expert software engineers are legitimately seeing their productivity increase 10x on serious codebases through judicious use.
Go ahead and keep swinging that hammer, John Henry.
> expert software engineers are legitimately seeing their productivity increase 10x
It's funny you would say this, because we are really commenting on an article where a self-proclaimed "expert" has done that and the "10x" output is terrible.
I have just checked my article — the word "expert" isn't in it, so not quite sure where you got this from.
I'm working in the field professionally since June 1998, and among other things, I was the tech lead on MyHammer.de, Germany's largest craftsman platform, and have built several other mid-scale online platforms over the decades.
How well I have done this, now that's for others to decide.
Quite objectively though, I do have some amount of experience — even a bad developer probably cannot help but pick up some learnings over so many years in relevant real-world projects.
However, and I think I stated this quite clearly, I am expressively not an expert in Python.
And yet, I could realize an actually working solution that solves an actual problem I had in a very real sense (and is nicely humming away for several weeks now).
And this is precisely where yes, I did experience a 10x productivity increase; it would have certainly taken me at least a week or two to realize the same solution myself.
Apologies for implying you are claiming to be an expert software engineer: I took the "senior" in the title and "25 years of experience" in the post to mean similar things as "expert".
I don't doubt this is doing something useful for you. It might even be mostly correct.
But it is not a positive advertisement for what AI can do: just like the code is objectively crap, you can't easily trust the output without a comprehensive review. And without doubting your expertise, I don't think you reviewed it, or you would have caught the same smells I did.
What this article tells me is that when the task is sufficiently non-critical that you can ignore being perfectly correct, you can steer AI coding assistants into producing some garbage code that very well might work or appear to work (when you are making stats, those are tricky even with utmost manual care).
Which is amazing, in my opinion!
But not what the premise seems to be (how a senior will make it do something very nice with decent quality code).
Out of curiosity why did you not build this tool in a language you generally use?
Because I wanted exactly this experience: can I get to the desired result — functionality-wise, if not code-wise! — even if I choose the stack that makes sense in terms of technology, not the one that I happen to be proficient in?
And if I cannot bring language-proficiency to the table — which of my capabilities as a seasoned software&systems guy can I put to use?
In the brown-field projects where my team and I have the AI implement whole features, the resulting code quality — under our sharp and experienced eyes — tends to end up just fine.
I think I need to make the differences between both examples more clear…
Ok, I guess you shouldn't complain that you really got exactly what you wanted.
However, your writing style implied that the result was somehow better because you were otherwise an experienced engineer.
Even your clarification in the post sits right below your statement how your experience made this very smooth, with no explanation that you were going to be happy with bad code as long as it works.
I guess we are slowly but steadily approaching splitting-hairs-territory, so not sure if this is still worth it…
However. I‘m not quite sure where I complained. Certainly not in the post.
And yes, I’m very convinced that the result turned out a lot better than it would have turned out if an unexperienced „vibe coder“ had tried to achieve the same end result.
Actually pretty sure without my extensive and structured requirements and the guard rails, the AI coding session would have ended in a hot mess in the best case, and a non-functioning result in the worst case.
I‘m 100% convinced that these two statements are true and relevant to the topic:
And that b) using said document as the basis for the agent-powered AI coding session had a significant impact on the process as well as the end result of the session.
Like AI could write code perfectly as soon as I thought of it, and that would not improve my productivity 10x. Coding was never the slow part. Everything that goes around coding (like determining that the extra load here is not going to overload things, getting PMs to actually make their mind up what the feature is going to do, etc.), means that there's simply not that much time to be saved on coding activities.
Same argument can be said for not using any tooling really. "Tech is the easy part". No difference typing code on notepad and having zero process/engineering infrastructure I guess. Because stakeholder management is the main engineering skill apparently.
Btw, AI doesn't just code, there are AIs for debugging, monitoring etc too.
1. Tooling obviously does improve performance, but not so huge a margin. Yes, if AI could automate more elements of tooling, that would very much help. If I could tell an AI "bisect this bug, across all projects in our system, starting with this known-bad point", that would be very helpful -- sometimes. And I'm sure we'll get there soon enough. But there is fractal complexity here: what if isolating the bug requires stepping into LLDB, or dumping some object code, or running with certain stressors on certain hardware? So it's not clear that "LLM can produce code from specs, given tight oversight" will map (soon) to "LLM can independently assemble tools together and agentically do what I need done".
2. Even if all tooling were automated, there's still going to be stuff left over. Can the LLM draft architectural specs, reach out to other teams (or their LLMs), sit in meetings and piece together the big picture, sus out what the execs really want us to be working on, etc.? I do spend a significant (double-digit) percentage of my time working on that, so if you eliminate everything else -- then you could get 10x improvement, but going beyond that would start to run up against Amdahl's Law.
If you were to really measure speed improvement of notepad vs a tricked out IDE, it's probably not much. The problem would be the annoyance caused to an engineer who has to manually type out everything.
No, coding speed is really not the bottleneck to software engineer productivity.
> coding speed
> the annoyance caused to an engineer
No one said productivity is this one thing and not that one thing, only you say that because it's convenient for your argument. Productivity is a combination of many things, and again it's not just typing out code that's the only area AI can help.
My grievances are simple: an expert programming utilizing AI will be a truly dangerous force.
But that's not what we get in this early stage of grifting. We get 10% marketing buzz on how cool this is with stuff that cannot be recreated in the tool alone, and 89% of lazy or inexperienced developers who just turn in slop with little or no iteration. The latter don't even understand the code they generated.
That 1% will be amazing, it's too bad the barrel is full of rotten apples hiding that potential. The experts also tend to keep to themselves, in my experience. the 89% includes a lot of dunning-kruger as well which makes those outspoken experts questionable (maybe a part of why real experts aren't commenting on their experience).
Good insight, and indeed quite exactly my state of mind while creating this particular solution.
Iin this case, I did put in the guard rails to ensure that I reach my goal in hopefully a straight line and a quickly as possible, but to be honest, I did not give much thought to long-term maintainability or ease of extending it with more and more features, because I needed a very specific solution for a use case that doesn't change much.
I'm definitely working differently in my brown-field projects where I'm intimately familiar with the tech stack and architecture — I do very thorough code reviews afterwards.
I think this code is at least twice the size than it needs to be compared to nicer, manually produced Python code: a lot of it is really superfluous.
People have different definitions of "reasonably maintainable", but if code has extra stuff that provides no value, it always perplexes the reader (what is the point of this? what am I missing?), and increases cognitive load significantly.
But if AI coding tools were advertised as "get 10x the output of your least capable teammate", would they really go anywhere?
I love doing code reviews as an opportunity to teach people. Doing this one would suck.
Right, and the reason why professional developers are writing worse code out there is most likely because they simply don't have the time/aren't paid to care more about it. The LLM is then mildly improving the output in this brand of common real world scenario
> The scary thing is: I have seen professional human developers write worse code.
That's not the scary part. It's the honest part. Yes, we all have (vague) ideas of what good code looks like, and we might know it when we see it but we know what reality looks like.
I find the standard to which we hold AI in that regard slightly puzzling. If I can get the same meh-ish code for way less money and way less time, that's a stark improvement. If the premise is now "no, it also has to be something that I recognize as really good / excellent" then at least let us recognize that we have past the question if it can produce useful code.
I do believe it's amazing what we can build with AI tools today.
But whenever someone advertises how an expert will benefit from it yet they end up with crap, it's a different discussion.
As an expert, I want AI to help me produce code of similar quality faster. Anyone can find a cheaper engineer (maybe five of them?) that can produce 5-10x the code I need at much worse quality.
I will sometimes produce crappy code when I lack the time to produce higher quality code: can AI step in and make me always produce high quality code?
That's a marked improvement I would sign up for, and some seem to tout, yet I have never seen it play out.
In a sense, the world is already full of crappy code used to build crappy products: I never felt we were lacking in that department.
And I can't really rejoice if we end up with even more of it :)
I think there’s a difference in that this is about as good as LLM code is going to get in terms of code quality (as opposed to capability a la agentic functionality). LLM output can only be as good as its training data, and the proliferation of public LLM-generated code will only serve as a further anchor in future training. Humans on the other hand ideally will learn and improve with each code review and if they don’t want to you can replace them (to put it harshly).
At the very least, if a professional human developer writes garbage code you can confidently blame them and either try to get them to improve or reduce the impact they have on the project.
With AI they can simply blame whatever model they used and continually shovel trash out there instantly.
I don't see the difference there. Whether I've written all the code myself or an AI wrote all of it, my name will be on the commit. I'll be the person people turn to when they question why code is the way it is. In a pull request for my commit, I'll be the one discussing it with my colleagues. I can't say "oh, the AI wrote it". I'm responsible for the code. Full stop.
If you're in a team where somebody can continuously commit trash without any repercussions, this isn't a problem caused by AI.
I can say it isn't any better for JS/Node/Deno/Bun projects that I've seen or tried. About the only case it's been helpful (GitHub CoPilot) is in creating boilerplate .sql files for schema creation, and in that it became kind of auto-complete on overdrive. It still made basic missteps though.
Ok - not wrong at all. Now take that feedback and put it in a prompt back to the LLM.
They’re very good at honing bad code into good code with good feedback. And when you can describe good code faster than you can write it - for instance it uses a library you’re not intimately familiar with - this kind of coding can be enormously productive.
> They’re very good at honing bad code into good code with good feedback.
And they're very bad at keeping other code good across iterations. So you might find that while they might've fixed the specific thing you asked for—in the best case scenario, assuming no hallucinations and such—they inadvertently broke something else. So this quickly becomes a game of whack-a-mole, at which point it's safer, quicker, and easier to fix it yourself. IME the chance of this happening is directly proportional to the length of the context.
This typically happens when you run the chat too long. When it gives you a new codebase, fire up a new chat so the old stuff doesn't poison the context window.
But it rarely gives me a totally-new codebase unless I'm working on a very small project -- so I have to choose between ditching its understanding of some parts (e.g. "don't introduce this bug here, please") and avoiding confusion with others.
Nah. This isn’t true. Every time you hit enter you’re not just getting a jr dev, you’re getting a randomly selected jr dev.
So, how did I end up with a logging.py, config.py, config in __init__.py and main.py? Well I prompted for it to fix the logging setup to use a specific format.
I use cursor, it can spit out code at an amazing rate and reduced the amount of docs I need to read to get something done. But after its second attempt at something you need to jump in and do it yourself and most likely debug what was written.
Are you reading a whole encyclopedia each time you assigned to a task? The one thing about learning is that it compounds. You get faster the longer you use a specific technology. So unless you use a different platform for each task, I don't think you have to read that much documentation (understanding them is another matter).
This is an important distinction though. LLMs don't have any persistent 'state': they have their activations, their context, and that's it. They only know what's pre-trained, and what's in their context. Now, their ability to do in-context learning is impressive, but you're fundamentally still stuck with the deviations and, eventually, forgetting that characterizes these guys -- while a human, while less quick on the uptake, will nevertheless 'bake in' the lessons in a way that LLMs currently cannot.
In some ways this is even more impressive -- every prompt you make, your LLM is in effect re-reading (and re-comprehending) your whole codebase, from scratch!
I do plan on experimenting with the latest versions of coding assistants, but last I tried them (6 months ago), none could satisfy all of the requirements at the same time.
Perhaps there is simply too much crappy Python code around that they were trained on as Python is frequently used for "scripting".
Perhaps the field has moved on and I need to try again.
But looking at this, it would still be faster for me to type this out myself than go through multiple rounds of reviews and prompts.
Really, a senior has not reviewed this, no matter their language (raciness throughout, not just this file).
I would not say it is “very good” at that. Maybe it’s “capable,” but my (ample) experience has been the opposite. I have found the more exact I describe a solution, the less likely it is to succeed. And the more of a solution it has come up with, the less likely it is to change its mind about things.
Every since ~4o models, there seems to be a pretty decent chance that you ask it to change something specific and it says it will and it spits out line for line identical code to what you just asked it to change.
I have had some really cool success with AI finding optimizations in my code, but only when specifically asked, and even then I just read the response as theory and go write it myself, often in 1-15% the LoC as the LLM
I’ve found AI tools extremely helpful in getting me up to speed with a library or defining an internal override not exposed by the help. However, if I’m not explicit in how to solve a problem the result looks like the bad code it’s been ingesting.
Note how it has invented the faster parameter for the zpool command. It is possible that the blog writer hallucinated a faster parameter themselves without needing a LLM - who knows.
I think all developers should add a faster parameter to all commands to make them run faster. Perhaps a LLM could create the faster code.
I predict an increase of man page reading, and better quality documentation at authoritative sources. We will also improve our skills at finding auth sources of docs. My uBlacklist is getting quite long.
How can this article be written by LLM? Its date is November 2021. Not judging the article as a whole but the command you pointed out seems to be correct. Faster is the name of the pool.
The date can be spoofed. It first showed up on archive.org in December 2022, and there's no captures for the site before then, so I'm liable to believe the dates are spoofed.
There was alot going on in the years before ChatGPT. Text generation was going strong with interactive fiction before anyone were talking about OpenAI.
I suspect they might actually have a pool named faster -- I know I've named pools similarly in the past. This is why I now name my pools after characters from the Matrix, as is tradition.
This really gets to an acceleration of enshittification. If you can't tell its an LLM, and there's nobody to verify the information, humanity is architecting errors and mindfucks into everything. All of the markers of what is trustworthy has been coopted by untrustworthy machines, so all of the way's we'd previously differentiated actors have stopped working. It feels like we're just losing truth as rapidly as LLMs can generate mistakes. We've built a scoundrels paradise.
How useful is a library of knowledge when n% of the information is suspect? We're all about to find out.
You know, things looked off to me, but thinking it was the output of an LLM just didn't seem obvious -- even though that was the claim! I feel ill-equipped to deal with this, and as the enshittification has progressed I've found myself using "the web" less and less. At this point, I'm not sure there's much left I value on the web. I wish the enshittification wasn't seemingly pervasive in life.
I believe in people, but I start to think that scrolling is the Fox News or AM radio of a new generation, it just happens to be the backbone of the economy because automation is so much cheaper than people.
An extremely useful and insightful comment. Then you look where it's actually used,
# Ensure the directory exists and is writable
ensure_dir_exists(work_dir)
work_path = Path(work_dir)
if not work_path.exists() or not os.access(work_dir, os.W_OK):
... so like, the entire function and its call (and its needlessly verbose comment) could be removed because the existence of the directory is being checked anyway by pathlib.
This might not matter here because it's a small, trivial example, but if you have 10, 50, 100, 500 developers working on a codebase, and they're all thoughtlessly slinging code like this in, you're going to have a dumpster fire soon enough.
I honestly think "vibe coding" is the best use case for AI coding, because at least then you're fully aware the code is throwaway shit and don't pretend otherwise.
edit: and actually looking deeper, `ensure_dir_exists` actually makes the directory, except it's already been made before the function is called so... sigh. Code reviews are going to be pretty tedious in the coming years, aren't they?
In my opinion this isn't even too relevant. I am no python expert but I believe defining a logger at the top for the average one file python script is perfectly adequate or even very sensible in many scenarios. Depends on what you expect the code to do. Ok, the file is named utils.py...
Worse by far is still the ability of AI to really integrate different problems and combine them into a solution. And it also seems to depend on the language. In my opinion especially Python and JS results are often very mixxed while other languages with presumably a smaller training set might even fare better. JS seems often fine with asynchronous operation like that file check however.
Perhaps really vetting a training set would improve AIs, but it would be quite work intensive to build something like that. That would require a lot of senior devs, which is hard to come by. And then they need to agree on code quality, which might be impossible.
It'll be really interesting to see if the tech advances fast enough that future AI can deal with the tech debt of present day AI or if we'll see a generational die off of apps/companies.
You’re objectively correct in a business context, which is what most software is for. For me, seeing AI slop code more and more is just sad from a craft perspective.
Software that’s well designed and architected is a pleasure to read and write, even if a lower quality version would get the job done. I’m watching one of the things I love most in the world become more automated and having the craftsmanship stripped out of it. That’s a bit over dramatic from me, but it’s been sad to watch.
It’s probably the same way monks copying books felt when the printing press came along. “Look at this mechanical, low-quality copy. It lacks all finesse and flourish of the pen!”
I agree with you that it is sad. And what is especially sad is that the result will probably be lower quality overall, but much cheaper. It’s the inevitable result of automation.
Also somewhat strangely, I've found Python output has remained bad, especially for me with dataframe tasks/data analysis. For remembering matplotlib syntax I still find most of them pretty good, but for handling datagframes, very bad and extremely counter productive.
Saying that, for typed languages like TypeScript and C#, they have gotten very good. I suspect this might be related to the semantic information can be found in typed languages, and hard to follow unstructured blobs like dataframes, and there for, not well repeated by LLMs.
>to a raciness in load_json where it's checked for file existence with an if and then carrying on as if the file is certainly there...
Explain the issue with load_json to me more. From my reading it checks if the file exists, then raises an error if it does not. How is that carrying on as if the file is certainly there?
There is a small amount of time between the `if` and the `with` where another process can delete the file, hence causing a race condition. Attempting to open the file and catching any exceptions raised is generally safer.
As an actually unseasoned Python developer, would you be so kind as to explain why the problems you see are problems and their alternatives? Particularly the first two you note.
The call to logging.basicConfig happens at import time, which could cause issues in certain scenarios. For a one-off script, it's probably fine, but for a production app, you'd probably want to set up logging during app startup from whatever your main entry point is.
The Python standard library has a configparser module, which should be used instead of custom code. It's safer and easier than manual parsing. The standard library also has a tomllib module, which would be an even better option IMO.
But the alternative would be the tool doesn't get built because the author doesn't know enough Python to even produce crappy code, or doesn't have the money to hire an awesome Python coder to do that for them.
> This is especially noteworthy because I don’t actually know Python.
> However, my broad understanding of software architecture, engineering best practices, system operations, and what makes for excellent software projects made this development process remarkably smooth.
If the seniors are going to write this sort of Python code and then talk about how knowledge and experience made it smooth or whatever, might as well hire a junior and let them learn through trials and tribulations.
I asked $random_llm to give me code to recursively scan a directory and give me a list of file names relative to the top directory scanned and their sizes.
It gave me working code. On my test data directory it needed ... 6.8 seconds.
After 5 min of eliminating obvious inefficiencies the new code needed ... 1.4 seconds. And i didn't even read the docs for the used functions yet, just changed what seemed to generate too many filesystem calls for each file.
Depends on how toxic the culture is in your workplace. This could have been an opportunity to "work" on another JIRA task showing 600% improvement over AI generated code.
AI actually doesn't really work for the "a couple days" scale yet. As a heavy AI user, this sort of iterative correction would usually be priced in in a 10-minute AI session. That said-
> Acting like a LLM now :P
Hey, if we're going to be like that, it sure sounds like you gave the employee an incomplete spec so you could then blame it for failing. So... at least I'm not acting like a PM :P
So, most low level functions that enumerate the files in a directory return a structure that contains the file data from each file. Including size. You already have it in memory.
Your brilliant AI calls another low level function to get the file size on the file name. (also did worse stuff but let's not go into details).
Do you call reading the file size from the in memory structure that you already have a speed optimization? I call it common sense.
Yep exactly, LLMs blunder over the most simple nonsense and just leaves a mess in their wake. This isn't a mistake you could make if you actually understood what the library is doing / is returning.
It's so funny how these AI bros make excuse after excuse for glaring issues rather than just accept AI doesn't actually understand what it's doing (not even considering it's faster to just write good quality code on the first try).
The "AI" are useful for one thing. I had no idea what functions to use to scan a directory in a native C++ Windows application. Nor that they introduced an abstraction in C++ 2017?. They all work the same (needless fs access should be avoided no matter the OS) but it did give me the names*.
Stuff that google search from 10 years ago would have done without pretending it's "AI". But not google search from this year.
* it wasn't able to simply list the fields of the returned structure that contained a directory entry. But since it gave me the name, i was able to look it up via plain search.
Yeah I find myself doing that too, use the AI to generate a bunch of names I can put into google to find a good answer. I also think if google hadn't gotten as sh*t as it has AI wouldn't be nearly as useful to most people.
While I would have hoped for a better result, I'm not surprised. In this particular case, I really didn't care about the code at all; I cared about the end result at runtime, that is, can I create a working, stable solution that solves my problem, in a tech stack I'm not familiar with?
(While still taking care of well-structured requirements and guard rails — not to guarantee a specific level of code quality per se, but to ensure that the AI works towards my goals without the need to intervene as much as possible).
I will spin up another session where I ask it to improve the implementation, and report back.
Makes sense given that so much of the training data for so many of these tools are trained on hello world examples where this kind of configuration is okay. Not like this will matter in a world where there are no juniors to replace aged-out seniors because AI was "good enough"...
> to a raciness in load_json where it's checked for file existence with an if and then carrying on as if the file is certainly there...
It's not a race. It's just redundant. If the file does not exist at the time you actually try to access it you get the same error with slightly better error message.
Just imagine a callsite that configured a logger in another way, and then imports the utils module for a single function: its configuration getting overridden by the one in utils.
There are plenty of ways to structure code so this does not happen, but simply "do not do anything at the top module level" will ensure you don't hit these issues.
Usually you would do it in your main function, or a code path starting from there. Executing code with non-local side effects during import is generally frowned upon. Maybe it's fine for a project-local module that won't be shared, but it's a bad habit and can make it had to track down.
I disagree, I think it's absolutely astounding that they've gotten this good in such a short time, and I think we'll get better models in the near future.
By the way, prompting models properly helps a lot for generating good code. They get lazy if you don't explicitly ask for well-written code (or put that in the system prompt).
It also helps immensely to have two contexts, one that generates the code and one that reviews it (and has a different system prompt).
Yup this tracks with what I have seen as well. Most devs who use this daily are usually junior devs or javascript devs who both write sloppy questionable code.
Where things are placed in the project seems rather ad hoc too. Put everything in the same place kind of architecture. A better strategy might be to separate out the I and the O of IO. Maybe someone wants SMS or group chat notifications later on, instead of shifting the numbers in filenames step11_ onwards one could then add a directory in the O part and hook it into an actual application core.
As a long time hobby coder, like 25 years and I think I’m pretty good(?), this whole LLM /vibecoding thing has zapped my creativity the past year or so. I like the craft of making things. I used tools I enjoy working with and learn new ones all the time (never got on the JS/react train). Sometimes I have an entrepreneur bug and want to create a marketable solution, but I often just like to build. Im also the kind of guy that has a shop he built, builds his own patio deck, home remodeling, Tinker with robotics, etc. Kind of just like to be a maker following my own creative pursuit.
All said, it’s hard on me knowing it’s possible to use llm to spit out a crappy but functional version of whatever I’ve dreamt up with out satisfaction of building it. Yet, it also seems to now be demotivating to spend the time crafting it when I know I could use llm to do a majority of it. So, I’m in a mental quagmire, this past year has been the first year since at least 2000 that I haven’t built anything significant in scale. It’s indirectly ruining the fun for me for some reason. Kind of just venting but curious if anyone else feels this way too?
I'm the complete opposite. After being burnt out and feeling an almost physical repulsion to starting anything new, using AI has renewed my passion. I've almost finished a side project I started 4 weeks ago and it's been awesome. Used AI from the beginning for a Desktop app with a framework I'd never heard of before and the learning curve is almost non-existent. To be able to get the boring things done in minutes is amazing.
Similar sentiment here. I taught myself python a decade ago after college, and used it in side projects, during my masters degree, in a few work projects. So it's been handy, but also required quite a bit of time and effort to learn.
But I've been using Claude to help with all kinds of side projects. One recently was to help create and refine some python code to take the latest Wikipedia zipped XML file and transform/load it locally into a PostgreSQL DB. The initial iteration of the code took ~16 hours to unzip, process, and load into the database. I wanted it to be faster.
I don't know how to use multiple processes/multi-threading, but after some prompting, iterating, and persistent negotiations with Claude to refine the code (and an SSD upgrade) I can go from the 24gb zip file to all cleaned/transformed data in the DB in about 2.5 hours. Feels good man.
Do I need to know exactly what's happening in the code (or at lowers levels, abstracted from me) to make it faster? not really. Could someone who was more skilled, that knew more about multi-threading, or other faster programming languages, etc..., make it even faster? probably. Is the code dog shit? it may not be production ready, but it works for me, and is clean enough. Someone who better knew what they were doing could work with it to make it even better.
I feel like LLMs are great for brainstorming, idea generation, initial iterations. And in general can get you 80%+ the way to your goal, almost no matter what it is, much faster than any other method.
That's awesome! That's a lot of data and a great speed increase. I think that as long as you test and don't just accept exactly what it outputs without a little thought, it can be really useful.
I take it as an opportunity to learn too. I'm working on a video library app that runs locally and wanted to extract images when the scene changed enough. I had no idea how to do this, and previously would have searched StackOverflow to find a way and then struggled for hours or days to implement it. This time I just asked Aider right in the IDE terminal what options I had, and it came back with 7 different methods. I researched those a little and then asked it to implement 3 of them. It created an interface, 3 implementations and a factory to easily get the different analyzers. I could then play around with each one and see what worked the best. It took like an hour. I wrote a test script to loop over multiple videos and run each analyzer on them. I then visually checked the results to see which worked the best. I ended up jumping into the code it had written to understand what was going on, and after a few tweaks the results are pretty good. This was all done in one afternoon - and a good chunk of that time was just me comparing images visually to see what worked best and tweaking thresholds and re-running to get it just right.
I'm on this boat. I can use LLMs to skip the boring bits like generating API glue classes or simple output functions.
Example:
I'm building a tool to grab my data from different sites like Steam, Imdb, Letterboxd and Goodreads.
I know perfectly well how to write a parser for the Goodreads CSV output, but it doesn't exactly tickle my brain. Cursor or Cline will do it in minutes.
Now I've got some data to work with, which is the fun bit.
Again if I want to format the output to markdown for Obsidian, the LLM can do it in a few minutes and maybe even add stuff I didn't think about at first.
Yeah, I've found it great at XML too. All sorts of boilerplate stuff works so well. As it the project gets bigger Ive had to think for longer about things and step in more, but as you said, that's usually the fun, meaty bit that you want to work on anyway. My app is about 15k lines of code now, and it's a bit more work than at the beginning.
this is the key idea right here. LLMs are not replacing good coders, they're electric yak shavers that we should all learn how to use. The value add is real, and incremental, not revolutionary.
Same for me. The lack of effort to get started is amazing, as well as the ability to farm the parts I don't like out to the AI. (As opposed to me, it's actually passable at graphical design.)
I can echo your sentiment. Art is the manifestation of creativity, and to create any good art you need to train in whatever medium you choose. For the decade I've been a professional programmer, I've always argued that writing code was a creative job.
It's been depressing to listen to people pretend that LLM generated code is "the same thing". To trivialize the thoughtful lessons one has learned honing their craft. It's the same reason the Studio Ghilbi AI image trend gives me the ick.
I agree, but only to an extent. For me, the passion changed over time. I used to love getting an O'Reilly tome and learning something new, but now I don't really want to learn the latest UI framework, library/API or figure out how a client configures their DI container. If the AI can do most of that stuff, and I just leverage my knowledge of all the frameworks I've had to use, it's a huge timesaver and means I can work on more things at once. I want to work on the core solution, not the cruft that surrounds it.
I agree though that the Studio Ghibli trend feels off. To me, art like this feels different to code. I know that's probably heresy around these parts of the internet, and I probably would have said something different 15-20 years ago. I know that coding is creative and fulfilling. I think I've just had the fun of coding beat out of me over 25 years :) AI seems to be helping bring the fun back.
I've become so much more productive in my hobby programming projects, because it lets me skip over the tedious parts that suck the life out of me (boilerplate, figuring out library dependencies, etc), and I can focus on the parts that are actually interesting like experimenting with different solutions, iterating and learning new things.
It also lets me explore other libraries and languages without having to invest too much time and effort before knowing if it's right for what I want to do. I know that if I want to continue in a different direction, I haven't wasted tons of time/effort and getting started in the new direction will be much less effortful and time consuming.
I know what you mean. It takes the satisfaction out of a certain class of problems knowing that you can just generate the solution.
On the other hand, most tasks aren't fun nor satisfying and frankly they are a waste of time, like realizing you're about to spend the afternoon recredentializing in some aspect of Webpack/Gradle/BouncyCastle/Next.js/Combine/x/y/z just to solve one minor issue. And it's pure bliss when the LLM knows the solution.
I think the best antidote to the upset in your comment is to build bigger and more difficult things. Save your expertise for the stuff that could actually use your expertise rather than getting stuck wasting it on pure time burn like we had to in the past.
I like the antidote and does remind me that I tried to create a game, which gamedev has always been a challenge for me. I’ve attempted a few times and didn’t get very far with this one either. I think I could do the coding even though scale is large, but I’m not artistic and asset generation/iteration is my block. I tried a handful of ai tools specifically for this and found they were all really far behind. I don’t particularly like working with asset store art, maybe for parts but characters and the vibe of the game usually would excite and motivate me early on and I can’t quite get there to sustain the effort
I had this in my comment but deleted it, maybe you were responding to it, but in case you didn't see it: I found multiplayer browser games to be a good example of a hard project that LLMs help a lot with so that you can focus on the rewarding part.
LLMs can one-shot pretty good server-authority + client-prediction + rollback netcode, something I've probably spent weeks of my life trying to build and mostly failing. And they can get a basic frontend 'proof' working. And once you verify that the networked MVP works, you can focus on the game.
But the cool thing about multiplayer games is that they can be really small in scope because all of the fun comes from mechanics + playing with other people. They can be spaceships shooting at each other in a single room or some multiplayer twist on a dumbed down classic game. And that's just so much more feasible than building a whole game that's expected to entertain you as a single player.
I’ve actually been considering it. Although I think I’m probably tone deaf or rhythmically challenged and my rotator cuff is kinda messed up from an old injury, I’ve been trying to convince my 6 year old to take it up so I could justify having a kit around the house
I'm mixed on the "craft" aspect of it. I don't hate coding, but there's definitely times where it feels like it's just some time plumbing. I don't get satisfaction out of that kind of stuff.
I'm pragmatic and simply don't trust current LLM's to do much in my domain. All that tribal knowledge is kept under lock and key at studios, so good luck scraping the net to find more than the very basic samples of how to do something. I've spent well over a decade doing that myself; the advanced (and even a lot of intermediate) information is slim and mostly behind paywalls or books.
Fascinating. it's gone the other way for me. because I can now whip up a serious contender to any SaaS business in a week, it's made everything more fun, not less.
I followed a lot of Twitter people who were vibecoding their way to SaaS platforms because I thought it would be interesting to follow.
So far none of them are having a great time after their initial enthusiasm. A lot of it is people discovering that there’s far more to a business than whipping up a SaaS app that does something. I’m also seeing a big increase in venting about how their progress is slowing to a crawl as the codebase gets larger. It’s interesting to see the complaints about losing days or weeks to bugs that the LLM introduced that they didn’t understand.
I still follow because it’s interesting, but I’m starting to think 90% of the benefit is convincing people that it’s going to be easy and therefore luring them into working on ideas they’d normally not want to start.
Yeah, I see that perspective bu I guess my thought process is “what’s the point, if everyone else can now do the same”
I had long ago culled many of those ideas based on my ability to execute the marketing plan or the “do I really even want to run that kind of business?” test. I already knew I could build whatever I wanted to exist so My days of pumping out side projects ended long ago and I became more selective with my time.
I guess it depends why you're writing the code. I'm writing a local video library desktop app to categorise my home and work videos. I'm implementing only the features I need. No one else will use it, I'll be finished the first version after about 4 weeks of weekend and night coding, and it's got some pretty awesome features I never would have thought possible (for me). Without AI I probably never would have done this. I'm sold, even just for the reduction of friction in getting a project off the ground. The first 80% was 80% AI developed and the last 20% has flipped to 80% coded by me. Which is great, because this part is the meat of the app and where I want most input.
like an Eventbrite or a shopmonkey. but yeah, you don't think you could? Salesforce is a whole morass. not every customer uses every corner of it, and Salesforce will nickel and dime you with their consultants and add ons and plugins. if you can be more specific as to which bit of Salesforce you want to provide to a client we can go deep.
But you said "I can now whip up a serious contender to any SaaS business in a week".
Any SaaS business. In a week. And to be a "serious contender", you have to have feature parity. Yet now you're shifting the goalposts.
What's stopping you? There are 38 weeks left in 2025. Please build "serious contenders" for each of the top 38 most popular SaaS products before the end of the year. Surely you will be the most successful programmer to have ever lived.
The rest of the business is the issue. I can whitelabel a Spotify clone but licensing rights and all that business stuff is outside my wheelhouse. An app that serves mp3s and has a bunch of other buttons? yeah, done. "shifting goalposts?" no, we're having a conversation, I'm not being deposed under a subpoena.
My claim is that in a week you could build a thing that people want to use, as long as you can sell it, that's competitive with existing options for a given client. Salesforce is a CRM with walled gardens after walled garden. access to each of which costs extra, of course. they happened to be in the right place at the right time, with the right bunch of assholes.
A serious contender doesn’t have to start with everything. It starts by doing the core thing better—cleaner UX, clearer value, easier to extend. That’s enough to matter. That’s enough to grow.
I’m not claiming to replace decades overnight. But momentum, clarity, and intent go a long way. Especially when you’re not trying to be everything to everyone—just the right thing for the right people.
I'm not sure what you are trying to say here - that this website is comparable to Spotify? Even if you are talking about just the "core experience", this example supports the opposite argument that you are trying to make.
The way I see it, the core user experience is that the user listens to music. There's playlist management on top of that and some other bits, sure, but I really don't see it as being that difficult to build those pieces. This is a no code widget I had lying around with a track that was produced last night because I kept asking the producer about a new release. I linked it because it was top of mind. It allows the user to listen to music, which I see as the core of what Spotify offers its users.
Spotify has the licensing rights to songs and I don't have the business acumen to go about getting those rights, so I guess I could make Pirate Spotify and get sued by the labels for copyright infringement, but that would just be a bunch of grief for me which would be not very fun and why would I want to screw artists out of getting paid to begin with?
i think ive detected the root cause of your problem.
and, funnily enough, it goes a long way to explaining the experiences of some other commentators in this thread on “vibe coding competitive SaaS products”.
As much as I'd like to pretend otherwise, I'm just a programmer. Say I build,
I dunno, an Eventbrite clone. Okay, cool I've got some code running on Vercel. What do I do next? I'm not about to quit my day job to try and pay my mortgage on hopes and dreams, and while I'm working my day job and having a life outside of that. There's just not enough hours left in the day to also work on this hypothetical EventBrite clone. And there are already so many competitors of them out there, what's one more? What's my "in" to the events industry that would have me succeed over any of their numerous existing competitors? Sure, Thants to LLMs I can vibe code some CRUD app, but my point is there's so much I don't know that I don't even know what I don't know about business in order to be successful. So realistically it's just a fun hobby, like how some people sew sweaters.
Salesforce is and pretty much always has been a set of code generation platforms. If you can produce a decent code generation platform, do it. It's one of the most sure ways to making money from software since it allows you to deploy systems and outsource a large portion of design to your customers.
Spotify is not the audio player widget in some user interface. It started off as a Torrent-like P2P system for file distribution on top of a very large search index and file storage. That's the minimum you'd build for a "whitelabel [...] Spotify clone". Since then they've added massive, sophisticated systems for user monitoring and prediction, ad distribution, abuse and fraud detection, and so on.
Use that code generation platform to build a product off any combination of two of the larger subsystems at Spotify and you're set for retirement if you only grab a reasonable salesperson and an accountant off the street. Robust file distribution with robust abuse detection or robust ad distribution or robust user prediction would be that valuable in many business sectors.
If building and maintaining actually is that effortless for you, show some evidence.
> Since then they've added massive, sophisticated systems for user monitoring and prediction, ad distribution, abuse and fraud detection, and so on.
Use that code generation platform to build a product off any combination of two of the larger subsystems at Spotify
I'm listening. I fully admit that I was looking at Spotify as a user and thus only as a music playing widget so I'd love to hear more about this side of things. What is user prediction?
I'm not quite 40 but starting to feel the effects of age, AI has been a great tool if not for the fact it saves my hands. I don't have it write the logic for me, mostly just stuff like smart autocomplete etc. I battle really severe tendonitis, I've noticed a definite improvement since I started using code complete.
As far as knowledge/experience, I worry about a day where "vibe coding" takes over the world and it's only the greybeards that have any clue WTF is going on. Probably profitable, but also sounds like a hellscape to me.
The biggest thing I worry about with AI is that its current incarnation is anathema to the directions I think software needs to go next, and I’m at a loss to see what the judo-throw will look like that achieves that.
Rob Pike has the right idea but the wrong execution. As the amount of second and third party code we use increases, the search time goes up, and we need better facilities to reduce the amount of time you need to spend looking at the internals of one package because you need that time to look at three others. So clarity and discoverability both need to matter, and AI has no answers here, only more problems.
IMO, a lot of the success of Java comes from having provided 80% of the source code with the JDK. You could spend so much time single stepping into code that was not yours to figure out why your inputs didn’t cause the outputs you expected. But those are table stakes now.
> The very experience and accumulated know-how in software engineering and project management — which might seem obsolete in the age of AI — are precisely what enable the most effective use of these tools.
I agree with the author here, but my worry is that by leaning on the LLMs, the very experience that allows me to uniquely leverage the LLMs now will start to atrophy and in a few years time I'll be relying on them just to keep up.
Increasingly I’m realizing that in most cases there is a SIGNIFICANT difference between how useful AI is on greenfield projects vs how useful it is on brownfield projects. For the former: pretty good! For the brownfield, it’s often worse than useless.
It’s also interesting to see how quickly the greenfield progress rate slows down as the projects grow.
I skimmed the vibecoding subreddits for a while. It was common to see frustrations about how coding tools (Cursor, Copilot, etc) were great last month but terrible now. The pattern repeats every month, though. When you look closer it’s usually people who were thrilled when their projects were small but are now frustrated when they’re bigger.
The real issue is context size. You kinda need to know what you are doing in order to construct the project in pieces, and know what to tell the LLM when you spin up a new instance with fresh context to work on a single subsection. It's unwieldy and inefficient, and the model inevitably gets confused when it can effectively look at the whole code base.
Gemini 2.5 is much better in this regard, it can make decent output up to around 100k tokens compared to claude 3.7 starting to choke around 32k. Long term it remains to see if this will remain an issue. If models can get to 5M context and perform like current model with 5k context, it would be a total game changer.
I struggle to wrap my head around how this would work (and how AI can be used to maintain and refine software in general). Brownfield code got brown by being useful and solving a real problem, and doing it well enough to be maintained. So the AI approach is to throwaway the code that's proved its usefulness? I just don't get it.
I think there's a similar analogy here for products in the AI era.
Bolting AI onto existing products probably doesn't make sense. AI is going to produce an entirely new set of products with AI-first creation modalities.
You don't need AI in Photoshop / Gimp / Krita to manipulate images. You need a brand new AI-first creation tool that uses your mouse inputs like magic to create images. Image creation looks nothing like it did in the past.
You don't need Figma to design a webpage. You need an AI-first tool that creates the output - Lovable, V0, etc. are becoming that.
You don't need AI in your IDE. Your IDE needs to be built around AI. And perhaps eventually even programming languages and libraries themselves need AI annotations or ASTs.
You don't need AI in Docs / Gmail / Sheets. You're going to be creating documents from scratch (maybe pasting things in). "My presentation has these ideas, figures, and facts" is much different than creating and editing the structure from scratch.
There is so much new stuff to build, and the old tools are all going to die.
I'd be shocked if anyone is using Gimp, Blender, Photoshop, Premiere, PowerPoint, etc. in ten years. These are all going to be reinvented. The only way these products themselves survive is if they undergo tectonic shifts in development and an eventual complete rewrite.
Photoshop is a tool designed for the 1% of people who want that level of control for their vision. Adobe has several other tools for other markets.
Even the latest model from this week, which is undeniably impressive, can’t get close to the level of control that photoshop gives me. It often edits parts of the image I haven’t asked it to touch among other issues. I use photoshop as a former photojournalist, and AI manipulated images are of no use to me. My photos are documentary. They represent a slice of reality. I know that AI can create a realistic simulacrum of that, but I’m not interested.
This is like saying we won’t need text editors in the future. That’s silly, there are some things that we won’t need text editors for, but the ability of ai to generate and edit text files doesn’t mean that we won’t ever need to edit them manually.
> This rhymes with still developing your own film.
Well, guilty, I actually do occasionally develop my own film.
Film photography is actually expanding as an industry right now. We are well past the point where digital photography can do everything a film camera can do, and in most cases it can do it far better (very minor exceptions like large format photography still exist, where you can argue that film still has the edge).
I think that whether you embrace AI photo editing or not has more to do with the purpose of your photos. If you are trying to create marketing collateral for a valentines day ad campaign, AI is probably going to be the best tool. If you are trying to document reality, even for aesthetic purposes, AI isn't great. When I make a portrait of my wife, I don't need AI to reinterpret her face for me.
Not a chance. Photoshop is about having maximum control and power. AI requires relinquishing a degree of control in exchange for speed. Totally different audiences.
Lol photoshop has been integrating AI features since at least "content aware" stuff was released. Photoshop has a massive audience of people who want to be able to edit images quickly and easily.
I've been thinking about this a lot and agree. I think the UI will change drastically, maybe making voice central and you just describe what you want done. When language, image and voice models can be run locally things will get crazy.
I am not going to spend half an hour coming up with that prompt, tweaking it, and then spend many hours (on the optimistic side) to track down all the hallucinated code and hidden bugs. Have been there once, never going to do that again.
I wonder how much time it would take with some samples from GitHub, and various documentation about python laying around (languages, cheatsheet, libraries)...
10 minutes tops, once you have the idea and you've thought it through a bit just spamming out the code isn't that hard nor does it take that long. If there's anything surprising (e.g. function call returns something a bit different than expected) it's fast enough to just read the docs and change your mental model slightly.
Aah.. I have been repeating this to my team for several days now. Thanks for putting this together.
I start every piece of work, green or brown, with a markdown file that often contains my plan, task breakdown, data models (including key fields), API / function details, and sample responses.
For the tool part, though, I took a slightly different approach. I decided to use Rust primarily for all my projects, as the compile-time checks are a great way to ensure the correctness of the generated code. I have noticed many more errors are detected in AI-generated Rust code than in any other language. I am happy about it because these are errors that I would have missed in other languages.
> I have noticed many more errors are detected in AI-generated Rust code than in any other language.
Is that because the Rust compiler is just a very strong guardrail? Sounds like it could work well for Swift too. If only xcodebuild were less of a pain for big projects.
Yes, exactly. AI isn’t gonna check things like memory management, data type overflows and such, during generation. It would be great if we catch them at compile time.
Regarding swift, totally hear you :) Also I haven’t tried generating swift code - wondering how well that would be trained as there are fewer open source codebases for that.
I agree, and I really like the concrete examples here. I tried relating it to the concept of “surprise” from information theory — if what the LLM is producing is low surprise to you, you have a high chance of success as you can compare to the version you wrote in your experienced head.
If it’s high surprise then there’s a greater chance that you can’t tell right code from wrong code. I try to reframe this in a more positive light by calling it “exploration”, where you can ask follow up questions and hopefully learn about a subject you started knowing little about. But it’s important for you to realize which mode you are in, whether you are in familiar or unfamiliar waters.
The other benefit an experienced developer can bring is using test-driven development to guide and constrain the generated code. It’s like a contract that must be fulfilled, and TDD lets you switch between using an LLM or hand crafting code depending on how you feel or the AI’s competency at the task. If you have a workflow of writing a test beforehand it helps with either path.
I find myself spending so much time correcting bad -- or perhaps, more appropriately, misguided -- code that I constantly wonder if I'm saving time. I think I am, but a much higher percentage of my time is doing hard work of evaluating and thinking about things rather than mentally easy things the AI is good at, but what used to give me a little bit of a break.
Sometimes I liken the promise of AI to my experience with stereoscopic images (I have never been able to perceive them) -- I know there's something there but I frequently don't get it.
Very good concrete examples. AI is moving very fast so it can become overwhelming, but what has held true is focusing on writing thorough prompts to get the results you want.
Senior developers have the experience to think through and plan out a new application for an AI to write. Unfortunately a lot of us are bogged down by working our day jobs, but we need to dedicate time to create our own apps with AI.
Building a personal brand is never more important, so I envision a future where dev's have a personal website with thumbnail links (like a fancy youtube thumbnail) to all the small apps they have built. Dozens of them, maybe hundreds, all with beautiful or modern UIs. The prompt they used can be the new form of blog articles. At least that's what I plan to do.
The main questions I have with using LLMs for this purpose in a business setting are:
1. Is the company providing the model willing to indemnify _your_ company when using code generation? I know GitHub Copilot will do this with the models they provide on their hardware, but if you’re using Claude Code or Cursor with random models do they provide equal guarantees? If not I wonder if it’s only a matter of time before that landmine explodes.
2. In the US, AFAICT, software that is mostly generated by non-humans is not copyrightable. This is not an issue if you’re creating code snippets from an LLM, but if you’re generating an entire project this way then none or only small parts of the code base you generate would then be copyrightable. Do you still own the IP if it’s not copyrightable? What if someone exfiltrates your software? Do you have no or little remedy?
The bit about being able to get something workable going in an unfamiliar tech stack hits home. In a similar vein I was able to configure a VyOS router, a nushell based api client and some MSOffice automation in Powershell with AI assistance. Not a big deal in and of itself but still very useful.
I’ve been pretty moderate on AI but I’ve been using Claude cli lately and it’s been pretty great.
First, I can still use neovim which is a massive plus for me. Second it’s been pretty awesome to offload tasks. I can say something like “write some unit tests for this file, here are some edge cases I’m particularly concerned about” then I just let it run and continue with something else. Come back a few mins later to see what it came up with. It’s a fun way to work.
This post is pretty much my exact experience with the coding tools.
Basically the state of the art right now can turn me into an an architect/CTO that spends a lot of time complaining about poor architectural choices. Crucially Claude does not quite understand how to greenfield implement good architectures. 3.7 is also JUST . SO. CHATTY. It’s better than 3.5, but more annoying.
Gemini 2.5 needs one more round of coding tuning; it’s excellent, has longer context and is much better at arch, but still occasionally misformats or forgets things.
Upshot — my hobby coding can now be ‘hobby startup making’ if I’m willing to complain a lot, or write out the scaffolding and requirements docs. It provides nearly no serotonin boost from getting into flow and delivering something awesome, but it does let me watch YouTube on the side while it codes.
This is extremely fascinating and finally something that feels extremely tangible as opposed to vibes based ideas around how AI will "take everyone's jobs" while failing to fill in the gaps between. This feels extremely gap filling.
I find it quite interesting how we can do a very large chunk of the work up front in design, in order to automate the rest of the work. Its almost as if waterfall was the better pattern all along, but we just lacked the tools at that time to make it work out.
When I first started in dev, on a Unix OS, we did 'waterfall' (though we just called it releasing software, thirty years ago). We did a a major release every year, minor releases every three months, and patches as and when. All this software was sent to customers on mag tapes, by courier. Minor releases were generally new features.
Definitely times were different back then. But we did release software often, and it tended to be better quality than now (because we couldn't just fix-forward). I've been in plenty of Agile companies whose software moves slower than the old days. Too much haste, not enough speed.
The difference between agile and waterfall only really matters at the start of a project. Once it is deployed/released/in-use, the two approaches converge, more or less.
sure, but if you're generating the code in a very small amount of time from the specs then suddenly its no longer the code that is the source, its the specs.
That's what waterfall always wanted to be and it failed because writing the code usually took a lot longer than writing the specs, but now perhaps, that is no longer the case.
As a frontend designer, not a developer, I'm intrigued by the techniques presented by the author, though most devs commenting here seem to be objecting to the code quality. (Way above my pay grade, but hopefully a solvable problem.)
As someone who loves to nerd out on creative processes, it's interesting indeed to contemplate whether AI assisted dev would favor waterfall vs incremental project structure.
If indeed what works is waterfall dev similar to the method described in TFA, we'll want to figure out how to use iterative process elsewhere, for the sake of the many benefits when it comes to usability and utility.
To me that suggests the main area of iteration would be A) on the human factors side: UX and UI design, and B) in the initial phases of the project.
If we're using an AI-assisted "neo waterfall" approach to implementation, we'll want to be highly confident in the specifications we're basing it all on. On regular waterfall projects it's critical to reduce the need for post-launch changes due to their impact on project cost and timeline.[1] So for now it's best to assume we need to do the same for an AI-assisted implementation.
To have confidence in our specs document we'll need a fully fledged design. A "fully humane", user approved, feature complete UX and UI. It will need to be aligned with users' mental models, goals, and preferences as much as possible. It will need to work within whatever the technical constraints are and meet the business goals of the project.
Now all that is what designers should be doing anyway, but to me the stakes seem higher on a waterfall style build, even if it's AI-assisted.
So to shoulder that greater responsibility, I think design teams are going to need a slightly different playbook and a more rigorous process than what's typical nowadays. The makeup of the design team may need to change as well.
Just thinking about it now, here's a first take on what that process might be. It's an adaptation of the design tecniques I currently use on non-waterfall projects.
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::Hypothesis for a UX and UI Design Method for AI-assisted, "Neo-Waterfall" Projects::
Main premise:
Designers will need to lead a structured, iterative, comprehensive rapid prototyping phase at the beginning of a project.
| Overview: |
• In my experience, the DESIGN->BUILD->USE/LEARN model is an excellent guide for wrangling the iterative cycles of a rapid prototyping phase. With each "DBU/L" cycle we define problems to be solved, create solutions, then test them with users, etc.
• We document every segment of the DBU/L cycle, including inputs and outputs, for future reference.
• The USE/LEARN phase of the DBU/L cycle gives us feedback and insight that informs what we explore in the next iteration.
• Through multiple such iterations we gain confidence in the tradeoffs and assumptions baked into our prototypes.
• We incrementally evolve the scope of the prototypes and further organize the UX object model with every iteration. (Object Oriented UX, aka OOUX, is the key to finding our way to both beautiful data models and user experiences).
• Eventually our prototyping yields an iteration that fulfills user needs, business goals, and heeds technical constraints. That's when we can "freeze" the UX and UI models, firm up the data model and start writing the specifications for the neo-waterfall implementation.
• An additional point of technique: Extrapolating from the techniques described in TFA, it seems designers will need to do their prototyping in a medium that can later function as a keyframe constraint for the AI. (We don't want our AI agent changing the UI in the implementation phase of the waterfall project, so UI files are a necessary reference to bound its actions.)
• Therefore, we'll need to determine which mediums of UI design the AI agents can perceive and work with. Will we need a full frontend design structured in directories containing shippable markup and CSS? Or can the AI agent work with Figma files? Or is the solution somewhere in between, say with a combination of drawings, design tokens, and a generic component library?
• Finally, we'll need a method for testing the implemented UX and UI against the USE criteria we arrived at during prototyping. We should be able to synthesize these criteria from the prototyping documentation, data modeling and specification documents. We need a reasonable set of tests for both human and technical factors.
• Post launch, we should continue gathering feedback. No matter how good our original 1.0 is, software learns, wants to evolve. (Metaphorically, that is. But maybe some day soon--actually?) Designing and making changes to brownfield software originally built with AI-assistance might be a topic worthy of consideration on its own.
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So as a designer, that's how I would approach the general problem. Preliminary thoughts anyway. These techniques aren't novel; I use variations of them in my consulting work. But so far I've only built alongside devs made from meat :-)
I'll probably expand/refine this topic in a blog post. If anyone is interested in reading and discussing more, I can send you the link.
Email me at:
scott [AT] designerwho [DOT] codes
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[1] For those who are new to waterfall project structure, know that unmaking and remaking the "final sausage" can be extremely complex and costly. It's easy to find huge projects that have failed completely due to the insurmountable complexity. One question for the future will be whether AI agents can be useful in such cases (no sausage pun intended).
One of the possibly obsolete things I enjoy about working with a human junior dev is that they learn and improve. It's nice to feel all this interaction is building something.
It’s common practice to put your preferences and tips/advice into a readme solely for the LLM to consume to learn about what you want it to do.
So you’d set things like code standards (and hopefully enforce them via feedback tools), guides for writing certain architectures, etc. Then when you have the LLM start working it will first read that readme to “learn” how you want it to generally behave.
I’ve found that I typically edit this file as time goes on as a way to add semi-permanent feedback into the system. Even if your context window gets too large when you restart the LLM will start at that readme to prime itself.
Interesting post, but this perspective seems to be the main focus, like all the time. I find this statement to be completely wrong usage of AI:
“This is especially noteworthy because I don’t actually know Python. Yes, with 25+ years of software development experience, I could probably write a few lines of working Python code if pressed — but I don’t truly know the language. I lack the muscle memory and intimate knowledge of its conventions and best practices.”
You should not use AI to just “do” the hard job, since as many have mentioned, it does it poorly and sloppy. Use AI to quickly learn the advantages and disadvantages of the language, then you do not have to navigate through documentation to learn everything, just validate what the AI outputs. All is contextual, and since you know what you want in high level, use AI to help you understand the language.
This costs speed yes, but I have more control and gain knowledge about the language I chose.
I agree 100%, but in this very specific case, I really just wanted a working one-off solution that I'm not going to spend much time on going forward, AND I wanted to use it as an excuse to see how far I can go with AI tooling in a tech stack I don't know.
That being said, using AI as a teacher can be a wonderful experience. For us seniors, but also and probably more importantly, for eager and non-lazy juniors.
I have one such junior on my team who currently speed-runs through the craft because he uses AI to explain EVERYTHING to him: What is this pattern? Why should I use it? What are the downsides? And so on.
Of course I also still tutor him, as this is a main part of my job, but the availability of an AI that knows so much and always has time for him and never gets tired etc is just fantastic.
This is interesting, thanks for posting. I've been searching for some sort of 'real' usage of AI-coding. I'm a skeptic of the current state of things, so it's useful to see real code.
I know Python, but have been coding in Go for the last few years. So I'm thinking how I'd implement this in Go.
There's a lot of code there. Do you think it's a lot, or it doesn't matter? It seems reasonably clear though, easy to understand.
I'd have expected better documentation/in-line comments. Is that something that you did/didn't specify?
As much as I am still sceptical about AI tools, the past month has been a revolution as a senior dev myself.
I'm blasting through tickets, leaving more time to tutor and help junior colleagues and do refactoring. Guiding them has then been a multiplier, and also a bit of an eye opener about how little real guidance they've been getting up until now. I didn't realise how resource constrained we'd been as a team leading to not enough time guiding and helping them.
I don't trust the tools with writing code very often but they are very good at architecture questions, outputting sample code etc. Supercharged google
As a generalist, I feel less overwhelmed
It's probably been the most enjoyable month at this job.
Senior developer skills haven't changed. Wrangling paragraphs of business slop into real technical requirements, communicating these to various stakeholders, understanding how all the discrete parts of whatever system you're building fit together, being responsible for timelines, getting the rest of the team coordinated/aligned and on-track, etc.
Actually coding is a relatively small part of my job. I could use an LLM for the others parts but my employer does not appreciate being given word salad.
I yesterday set chatgpt to a coding task. It utterly failed. Its error handling was extensive, but wrong. It didn't know file formats. It couldn't write the code when i told it the format. The structure of the code sucked. The style was worse. I've never had to work so hard for such garbage. I could have knocked it out from scratch faster with higher quality.
Look, I honestly think this is a fair article and some good examples, but what is with this inane “I didn’t write any of it myself” claim that is clearly false that every one of these articles keeps bringing up?
What’s wrong with the fact you did write some code as part of it? You clearly did.
Not OP but did you edit the code via prompts, or was the whole thing a one-shot? That particular aspect is very confusing to me, I think you should clarify it.
Skimming through the article, it lacks clear structure and I am not sure what is the author attempting to show? Some new skills he had to use? Formulating requirements? That he can write extremely long prompts? The Conclusion section looks just like something a GenAI tool would produce. Or a first-year student in an essay.
I've taken this feedback to heart and tried to improve the structure a bit.
The main message I want to bring across is two-fold:
1. Senior developers are in a great position to make productive use of AI coding tools
2. I have (so far) identified three measures that make AI coding sessions much more successful
I hope the reworked version makes these more central and clear. I'm not a native English speaker, thus it's probably not possible for me to end up with an optimal version.
Still, I hope the new approach works a bit better for you — would love to receive another round of feedback.
Hey, thanks for not being offended about an honest comment, not a lot folks could take it as maturely, as you did :) May I suggest to add a short summary, half page max, of the important results that you consider to have achieved at the beginning of the article? Kind of like how scientific articles prepend the content with an abstract. I think it would help a lot in building the expectations for reading the rest of it.
I didn’t see anything of substance in the article. For example if they benefited from AI just how beneficial was it? Did it shrink their code by any amount or reduce execution time?
No, the article was just something about enjoying AI. This is hardly anything related to senior software developer skills.
Is better price-performance than going lighter on 1-3 and instead of 4, spending that time writing the code yourself with heavy input from LLM autocomplete, which is what LLMs are elite at.
The agent will definitely(?) write the code faster, but quality and understanding (tech debt) can suffer.
IOW the real takeaway is that knowing the requirements, architecture, and tooling is where the value is. LLM Agent value is dubious.
We're just in a transitional moment. It's not realistic to expect LLM capabilities to leapfrog from marginally better autocomplete to self-guided autocoder without passing through a phase where it shows tantalizing hints of being able to go solo yet lacks the ability to follow through. Over the next couple years, the reliability, versatility, and robustness of LLMs as coders will steadily increase.
I completely agree, as a fellow senior coder. It allows me to move significantly faster through my tasks and makes me much more productive.
It also makes coding a lot less painful because I'm not making typos or weird errors (since so much code autocompletes) that I spend less time debugging too.
I dunno, I just had Copilot sneak in a typo today that took about ten minutes of debugging to find. I certainly could have made a similar typo myself if copilot hadn't done it for me, but, all the same copilot probably saved me a minute worth of typing today but cost me 10 minutes of debugging.
Even if you made a similar typo you'd have a better understanding of the code having written it yourself. So it likely wouldn't have take 10 minutes to debug.
Conceptually it was a really simple bug (I was returning a bounding box and it returned (min, min) instead of (min, max)). So, I mean, the amount that AI broke it was pretty minor and it was mostly my fault for not seeing it when I generated it. But you know, if it's messing stuff up when it's generating 4 lines of code I'm not really going to trust it with an entire file, or even an entire function.
True, I didn't have five paragraphs on the proper way to handle bounding boxes and the conceptual use of bounding boxes and "please don't confuse lower for upper". All my fault!
Those lamenting the loss of manual programming: we are free to hone our skills on personal projects, but for corporate/consulting work, you cannot ignore 5x speed advantage. It's over. AI-assisted coding won.
Is it really 5x? I'm more surprised about 25+ years of experience, and being hard pressed to learn enough python to code the project. It's not like he's learning programming again, or being recently exposed to OOP. Especially when you can find working code samples about the subproblems in the project.
It is 5x if you are already a senior SE knowing your programming language really well, constantly suggesting good architecture yourself ("seed files" is a brilliant idea), and not accepting any slop / asking to rewrite things if something is not up to your standards (of course, every piece of code should be reviewed).
Otherwise, it can be 0.2x in some cases. And you should not use LLMs for anything security-related unless you are a security expert, otherwise you are screwed.
(this is SOTA as of April 2025, I expect things to become better in the near future)
> It is 5x if you are already a senior SE knowing your programming language really well, constantly suggesting good architecture yourself ("seed files" is a brilliant idea), and not accepting any slop / asking to rewrite things if something is not up to your standards (of course, every piece of code should be reviewed).
If you know the programming language really well, that usually means you know what libraries are useful, memorized common patterns, and have some project samples laying out. The actual speed improvement would be on typing the code, but it's usually the activity that requires the least time on any successful project. And unless you're a slow typist, I can't see 5x there.
If you're lacking in fundamental, then it's just a skill issue, and I'd be suspicious of the result.
"Given this code, extract all entities and create the database schema from these", "write documentation for these methods", "write test examples", "write README.md explaining how to use scripts in this directory", "refactor everything in this directory just like this example", etc etc
Everything boring can be automated and it takes five seconds compared to half an hour.
It can only be automated if the only thing you care about is having the code/text, and not making sure they are correct.
> Given this code, extract all entities and create the database schema from these
Sometimes, the best representation for storing and loading data is not the best for manipulating it and vice-versa. Directly mapping code entities to database relations (assuming it's SQL) is a sure way to land yourself in trouble later.
> write documentation for these methods
The intent of documentation is to explain how to use something and the multiple why's behind an implementation. What is there can be done using a symbol explorer. Repeating what is obvious from the name of the function is not helpful. And hallucinating something that is not there is harmful.
> write test examples
Again the type of tests matters more than the amount. So unless you're sure that the test is correct and the test suite really ensure that the code is viable, it's all for naught.
...
Your use cases assume that the output is correct. And as the hallucination risk from LLM models is non-zero, such assumption is harmful.
This is actually a pretty compelling reason for me to suggest that my company not hire consultants/contractors to write code for us. A ton of our dev budget is already spent on untangling edge-case bugs from poorly written/understood code.
As of 2025, it's no longer the case that older developers (like me at 57) are at a disadvantage just due to potentially lessened sheer brain power, as we had in our 20s. The reason is simple: We know what all the terminologies are, how to ask for things with proper and sufficient levels of detail and context, we know what the pitfalls and common error patterns are, and on and on, from decades of experience. Working with AI has similarities to management positions. You need to be a generalist. You need to know a little about everything, more so than a lot about one thing. All this can ONLY come with age, just like wisdom can only come thru experience.
I just hope that most hiring managers now realize this. With AI the productivity of younger developers has gone up by a factor of 10x, but the productivity of us "Seasoned" developers has gone up 100x. This now evens the playing field, I hope, where us experienced guys will be given a fair shake in the hiring process rather than what's been happening for decades where the 20-somethings pretend to be interviewing the older guys, because some boss told them to, but they never had any actual intentions of hiring anyone over 40, just on the bases of age alone, even if some older guy aces the interview.
Sure, you have my permission. However, in my own case, I'm not currently looking for a job, and never in my life did it take more than 2 weeks to FIND a job, when looking. Been coding 24x7x365 since 1981. :)
...however I'm absolutely certain there are many interviews I've aced and not gotten the job, primarily for being in an several undesirable categories that Silicon Valley progressive wokesters despise with a passion: 1) Over 40. 2) White 3) Male 4) Straight 5) Handsome 6) Rich 7) American, speaking perfect English.
All 7 of those demographic stats about me are absolutely despicable to Silicon Valley hiring managers, and any one alone is enough for them to pass by a candidate over a different one lacking the trait.
You can also quote, this post about Silicon Valley too, and there was even a time when such rants like this would've been CENSORED immediately by HackerNews. Thankfully they've lightened up a bit.
If your productivity is up 1% due to AI, that only means one of two things 1) You're not a developer, or 2) Your prompts are 99% poorly written, so that's a you problem not an AI problem.
When working with AI for software engineering assistance, I use it mainly to do three things -
1. Do piddly algorithm type stuff that I've done 1000x times and isn't complicated. (Could take or leave this, often more work than just doing it from scratch)
2. Pasting in gigantic error messages or log files to help diagnose what's going wrong. (HIGHLY recommend.)
3. Give it high level general requirements for a problem, and discuss POTENTIAL strategies instead of actually asking it to solve the problem. This usually allows me to dig down and come up with a good plan for whatever I'm doing quickly. (This is where real value is for me, personally.)
This allows me to quickly zero in on a solution, but more importantly, it helps me zero in strategically too with less trial and error. It let's me have an in-person whiteboard meeting (as I can paste images/text to discuss too) where I've got someone else to bounce ideas off of.
Same 3 is the only use case I've found that works well enough. But I'll still usually take a look on google / reddit / stackoverflow / books first just because the information is more reliable.
But it's usually an iterative process, I find pattern A and B on google, I'll ask the LLM and it gives A, B and C. I'll google a bit more about C. Find out C isn't real. Go back and try other people commenting on it on reddit, go back to the LLM to sniff out BS, so on and so on.
> Context on Code Quality (via HackerNews): The HackerNews discussion included valid critiques regarding the code quality in this specific Python project example (e.g., logger configuration, custom config parsing, potential race conditions). It’s a fair point, especially given I’m not a Python expert. For this particular green-field project, my primary goal was rapid prototyping and achieving a working solution in an unfamiliar stack, prioritizing the functional outcome over idiomatic code perfection or optimizing for long-term maintainability in this specific instance. It served as an experiment to see how far AI could bridge a knowledge gap. In brown-field projects within my areas of expertise, or projects demanding higher long-term maintainability, the human review, refinement, and testing process (using the guardrails discussed later) is necessarily much more rigorous. The critiques highlight the crucial role of experienced oversight in evaluating and refining AI-generated code to meet specific quality standards.
We all know how big companies handle software, if it works ship it. Basically once this shit starts becoming very mainstream companies will want to shift into their 5x modes (for their oh so holy investors that need to see stock go up, obviously.)
So once this sloppy prototype is seen as working they will just ship the shit sandwhich prototype. And the developers won’t know what the hell it means so when something breaks in the future, and that is when not if. They will need AI to fix it for them, cause once again they do not understand what is going on.
What I’m seeing here is you proposing replacing one of your legs with AI and letting it do all the heavy lifting, just so you can lift heavier things for the moment.
Once this bubble crumbles the technical debt will be big enough to sink companies, I won’t feel sorry for any of the AI boosties but do for their families that will go into poverty
Hot take: I don't see a problem with this and in fact we will see in a few years that senior engineers will be needed less in the future.
I have a business which is turning in millions in ARR at the moment (made in the pandemic) it's a pest control business and we have got a small team with only 1 experienced senior engineer, we used to have 5 but with AI we reduced it to one which we are still paying well.
Even with maintenance, we plan ahead for this with an LLM and make changes accordingly.
I think we will see more organizations opting for smaller teams and reducing engineer count since now the code generated is to the point that it works, it speeds up development and that it is "good enough".
That free GitHub Copilot though. Microsoft is a relentless drug dealer. If you haven't tried Copilot Edits yet, hold on to your hat. I started using it in a clean Express project and a Vue3 project in VS Code. Basically flawless edits from prompt over multiple files, new files...the works. Easy.
Other devs will say things like "AI is just a stupid glorified autocomplete, it will never be able to handle my Very Special Unique Codebase. I even spent 20 minutes one time trying out Cursor, and it just failed"
Nope, you're just not that good obviously. I am literally 10x more productive at this point. Sprint goals have become single afternoons. If you are not tuned in to what's going on here
and embracing it, you are going to be completely obsolete in the next 6 months unless you are some extremely niche high level expert. It wont be a dramatic moment where anyone gets "fired for AI". Orgs will just simply not replace people through attrition when they see productivity staying the same (or even increasing) as headcount goes down.
At all the jobs I had, the valuable stuff was shipped features. The baseline was for them to work well and to be released on time. The struggle was never writing the code, it was to clarify specifications. By comparison, learning libraries and languages was fun.
I don't really need AI to write code for me, because that's the easy part. The aspect that it needs to be good at is helping me ship features that works. And to this date, there's never been a compelling showcase for that one.
That's the problem. The new norm will be 10x of pre-AI productivity, nobody will be able justify hand-writing code. And until the quality bar of LLM's/their successors get much better (see e.g. comments above looking at the details in the examples given), you'll get accumulation of errors that are higher than what decent programmers get. With higher LOC and more uninspected complexity, you'll get significantly lower quality overall. The coming wave of AI-coded bugs will be fun for all.
GOTO FAIL;
After spending a week coding exclusively with AI assistants, I got functional results but was alarmed by the code quality. I discovered that I didn't actually save much time, and the generated code was so complex and unfamiliar that I was scared to modify it. I still use Copilot and Claude and would say I'm able to work through problems 2-3x faster than I would be without AI but I wouldn't say I get a 10x improvement.
My projects are much more complex than standard CRUD applications. If you're building simple back-office CRUD apps, you might see a 10x productivity improvement with AI, but that hasn't been my experience with more complex work.
Giving your anecdotal experience is only useful if you include anecdotal context: seniority, years of experience, technology, project size, sprint goal complexity…
Can you talk through specifically what sprint goals you’ve completed in an afternoon? Hopefully multiple examples.
Grounding these conversations in an actual reality affords more context for people to evaluate your claims. Otherwise it’s just “trust me bro”.
And I say this as a Senior SWE who’s successfully worked with ChatGPT to code up some prototype stuff, but haven’t been able to dedicate 100+ hours to work through all the minutia of learning how to drive daily with it.
If you do want to get more into it, I'd suggest something that plugs into your IDE instead of Copy/Paste with ChatGPT. Try Aider or Roo code. I've only used Aider, and run it in the VS terminal. It's much nicer to be able to leave comments to the AI and have it make the changes to discrete parts of the app.
I'm not the OP, but on your other point about completing sprint goals fast - I'm building a video library app for myself, and wanted to add tagging of videos. I was out dropping the kids at classes and waiting for them. Had 20 minutes and said to Aider/Claude - "Give me an implementation for tagging videos." It came back with the changes it would make across multiple files: Creating a new model, a service, configuring the DI container, updating the DB context, updating the UI to add tags to videos and created a basic search form to click on tags and filter the videos. I hit build before the kids had finished and it all worked. Later, I found a small bug - but it saved me a fair bit of time. I've never been a fast coder - I stare at the screen and think way too much (function and variable names are my doom ... and the hardest problem in programming, and AI fixes this for me).
Some developers may be able to do all this in 20 minutes, but I know that I never could have. I've programmed for 25 years across many languages and frameworks, and know my limitations. A terrible memory is one of them. I would normally spend a good chunk of time on StackOverflow and the documentation sites for whatever frameworks/libraries I'm using. The AI has reduced that reliance and keeps me in the zone for longer.
I think experiences vary. AI can work well with greenfield projects, small features, and helping solve annoying problems. I've tried using it on a large Python Django codebase and it works really well if I ask for help with a particular function AND I give it an example to model after for code consistency.
But I have also spent hours asking Claude and ChatGPT with help trying to solve several annoying Django problems and I have reached the point multiple times where they circle back and give me answers that did not previously work in the same context window. Eventually when I figure out the issue, I have fun and ask it "well does it not work as expected because the existing code chained multiple filter calls in django?" and all of a sudden the AI knows what is wrong! To be fair, there was only one sentence in the django documentation that mentions not chaining filter calls on many to many relationships.
The gap between Sr and Jr skills with close as AI gets better. AI is coming for the SR developer, be assured.
Also, Keyframing can be done in a more autonomous fashion. Sr Engineers can truly vibe code if they setup a proper framework for themselves. Key framing as described in the article is too manual.
> The gap between Sr and Jr skills with close as AI gets better.
Sorry, but as the wind blows, we only have indications of the opposite so far and it's wildly reported as a generating losing their ability for deep thought, relying too much on automated code generation. This is especially damaging for juniors, who never get the chance to learn the tricks of the trade in the first place, and they're the ones having a hard time explaining what the code the LLM generated even does.
Seniors will be few and far between, and we will charge premium for fixing up the crap LLM created, which will fit us great before retirement.
The premise might possibly be true, but as an actually seasoned Python developer, I've taken a look at one file: https://github.com/dx-tooling/platform-problem-monitoring-co...
All of it smells of a (lousy) junior software engineer: from configuring root logger at the top, module level (which relies on module import caching not to be reapplied), over not using a stdlib config file parser and building one themselves, to a raciness in load_json where it's checked for file existence with an if and then carrying on as if the file is certainly there...
In a nutshell, if the rest of it is like this, it simply sucks.
The more I browse through this, the more I agree. I feel like one could delete almost all comments from that project without losing any information – which means, at least the variable naming is (probably?) sensible. Then again, I don't know the application domain.
Also…
there is a lot of obviously useful abstraction being missed, wasting lines of code that will all need to be maintained.The scary thing is: I have seen professional human developers write worse code.
> I feel like one could delete almost all comments from that project without losing any information
I far from a heavy LLM coder but I’ve noticed a massive excess of unnecessary comments in most output. I’m always deleting the obvious ones.
But then I started noticing that the comments seem to help the LLM navigate additional code changes. It’s like a big trail of breadcrumbs for the LLM to parse.
I wouldn’t be surprised if vibe coders get trained to leave the excess comments in place.
More tokens -> more compute involved. Attention-based models work by attending every token with each other, so more tokens means not only having more time to "think" but also being able to think "better". That is also at least part of the reason why o1/o3/R1 can sometimes solve what other LLMs could not.
Anyway, I don't think any of the current LLMs are really good for coding. What it's good at is copy-pasting (with some minor changes) from the massive code corpus it has been pre-trained. For example, give it some Zig code and it's straight unable to solve even basic tasks. Same if you give it really unique task, or if you simply ask for potential improvements of your existing code. Very, very bad results, no signs of out-of-box thinking whatsoever.
BTW: I think what people are missing is that LLMs are really great at language modeling. I had great results, and boosts in productivity, just by being able to prepare the task specification, and do quick changes in that really easily. Once I have a good understanding of the problem, I can usually implement everything quickly, and do it in much much better way than any LLM can currently do.
I have tried getting gemini 2.5 to output "token efficient" code, i.e. no comments, keep variables to 1 or 2 letters, try to keep code as condensed as possible.
It didn't work out that great. I think that all the context in the verbose coding it does actually helps it to write better code. Shedding context to free up tokens isn't so straightforward.
It doesn't hurt that the model vendors get paid by the token, so there's zero incentive to correct this pattern at the model layer.
or the model get trained from teaching code which naturally contains lots of comments.
the dev is just lazy to not include them anymore, wheres the model doesn't really need to be lazy, as paid by the token
What’s worse, I get a lot of comments left saying what the AI did, not what the code does or why. Eg “moved this from file xy”, “code deleted because we have abc”, etc. Completely useless stuff that should be communicated in the chat window, not in the code.
LLMs are also good at commenting on existing code.
It’s trivial to ask Claude via Cursor to add comments to illustrate how some code works. I’ve found this helpful with uncommented code I’m trying to follow.
I haven’t seen it hallucinate an incorrect comment yet, but sometimes it will comment a TODO that a section should be made more more clear. (Rude… haha)
I have seldomly seen insightful comments from LLMs. It is usually better than "comment what the line does" usefull for getting a hint about undocumented code, but not by much. My experience is limited, but what I have I do agree with. As long as you keep on the beaten path it is ok. Comments are not such a thing.
> there is a lot of obviously useful abstraction being missed, wasting lines of code that will all need to be maintained.
This is a human sentiment because we can fairly easily pick up abstractions during reading. AIs have a much harder time with this - they can do it, but it takes up very limited cognitive resources. In contrast, rewriting the entire software for a change is cheap and easy. So to a point, flat and redundant code is actually beneficial for a LLM.
Remember, the code is written primarily for AIs to read and only incidentally for humans to execute :)
>The scary thing is: I have seen professional human developers write worse code.
This is kind of the rub of it all. If the code works, passes all relevant tests, is reasonably maintainable, and can be fitted into the system correctly with a well defined interface, does it really matter? I mean at that point its kind of like looking at the output of a bytecode compiler and being like "wow what a mess". And it's not like they can't write code up to your stylistic standards, it's just literally a matter of prompting for that.
> If the code works, passes all relevant tests, is reasonably maintainable, and can be fitted into the system correctly with a well defined interface, does it really matter?
You're not wrong here, but there's a big difference in programming one-off tooling or prototype MVPs and programming things that need to be maintained for years and years.
We did this song and dance pretty recently with dynamic typing. Developers thought it was so much more productive to use dynamically typed languages, because it is in the initial phases. Then years went by, those small, quick-to-make dynamic codebases ended up becoming unmaintainable monstrosities, and those developers who hyped up dynamic typing invented Python/PHP type hinting and Flow for JavaScript, later moving to TypeScript entirely. Nowadays nobody seriously recommends building long-lived systems in untyped languages, but they are still very useful for one-off scripting and more interactive/exploratory work where correctness is less important, i.e. Jupyter notebooks.
I wouldn't be surprised to see the same pattern happen with low-supervision AI code; it's great for popping out the first MVP, but because it generates poor code, the gung-ho junior devs who think they're getting 10x productivity gains will wisen up and realize the value of spending an hour thinking about proper levels of abstraction instead of YOLO'ing the first thing the AI spits out when they want to build a system that's going to be worked on by multiple developers for multiple years.
I think the productivity gains of dynamic typed languages were real, and based on two things: dynamic typing (can) provide certain safety properties trivially, and dynamic typing neatly kills off the utterly inadequate type systems found in mainstream languages when they were launched (the 90s, mostly).
You'll notice the type systems being bolted onto dynamic languages or found in serious attempts at new languages are radically different than the type systems being rejected by the likes of javascript, python, ruby and perl.
> those small, quick-to-make dynamic codebases ended up becoming unmaintainable monstrosities
In my experience, type checking / type hinting already starts to pay off when more than one person is working on an even small-ish code base. Just because it helps you keep in mind what comes/goes to the other guy's code.
And in my experience "me 3 months later" counts as a whole second developer that needs accommodating. The only time I appreciate not having to think about types is on code that I know I will never, ever come back to—stuff like a one off bash script.
> "me 3 months later" counts as a whole second developer
A fairly incompetent one, in my experience. And don't even get me started on "me 3 months ago", that guy's even worse.
"How has that shit ever worked?"
Me, looking at code 100% written by me last year.
It gets worse with age and size of the project. I’m getting the same vibes, but for code written by me last month.
Yep, I've seen type hinting even be helpful without a type checker in python. Just as a way for devs to tell each other what they intend on passing. Even when a small percent of the hints are incorrect, having those hints there can still pay off.
I'm certainly extremely happy for having an extensive type system in my daily driver languages especially when working with AI coding assistance — it's yet another very crucial guard rail that ensures that keeps the AI on track and makes a lot of fuckups downright impossible.
The ML world being nearly entirely in Python, much of it untyped (and that the Python type system is pretty weak) is really scary.
>The ML world being nearly entirely in Python, much of it untyped (and that the Python type system is pretty weak) is really scary
I think this has a ton to do with the mixed results from "vibe coding" we've seen as the codebase grows in scope and complexity. Agents seem to break down without a good type system. Same goes for JS.
I've just recently started on an Objective-C project using Cline, and it's like nirvana. I can code out an entire interface and have it implemented for me as I'm going. I see no reason it couldn't scale infinitely to massive LOC with good coding practices. The real killer feature is header files. Being able to have your entire projects headers in context at all time, along with a proper compiler for debugging, changes the game for how agents can reason on the whole codebase.
> You're not wrong here, but there's a big difference in programming one-off tooling or prototype MVPs and programming things that need to be maintained for years and years.
Humans also worry about their jobs, especially in PIP-happy companies; they are very well known for writing intentionally over-complicated code that only they understand so that they are irreplaceable
I'm not convinced this actually happens. Seems more like somthing people assume happens because they don't like whatever codebase is at the new job.
If your TC is 500k-1M and you don’t feel like job hopping anymore, you’d certainly not want to get hit by a random layoff due to insufficient organizational masculinity or whatever. Maintaining a complex blob of mission critical code is one way of increasing your survival chances, though of course nothing is guaranteed.
People doing layoffs have no idea of who works and who's warming the chair.
Depending on the layoff they may look into yearly reviews... or not.
Ah yes, those work /s
The challenge is that sufficiently bad code could be intentional or it could be from a lack of skill.
For example, I've seen a C# application where every function takes in and outputs an array of objects, supposedly built that way so the internal code can be modified without ever having to worry about the contract breaking. It was just as bad as you are imagining, probably worse. Was that incompetence or building things to be so complicated that others would struggle to work on it?
Oh, I'm convinced, I've seen it first hand.
what are you going to do when something suddenly doesn't work and cursor endlessly spins without progress no matter how many "please don't make mistakes" you add? delete the whole thing and try to one-shot it again?
Why do you HAVE TO one-shot? No one says you have to code like those influencers. You are a software engineer, use AI like one, iteratively.
The point is because it generally produces crap code you have to one shot or else iteration becomes hard. Similar to how a junior would try to refactor their mess and just make a bigger mess
I find it hard to believe that when the AI generates crap code, there is absolutely nothing you can do (change the prompt, modify context, add examples) to make it do what you want. It has not been my experience either. I only use AI to make small modules and refactor instead of one-shoting.
Also I find "AI makes crap code so we should give it a bigger task" illogical.
>No one says you have to code like those influencers. You are a software engineer, use AI like one, iteratively.
This is my issue with all the AI naysayers at this point. It seems to all boil down to "haha, stupid noob can't code so he uses AI" in their minds. It's like they are incapable of understanding that there could simultaneously be a bunch of junior devs pushing greenfield YouTube demos of vibe coding, while at the same time expert software engineers are legitimately seeing their productivity increase 10x on serious codebases through judicious use.
Go ahead and keep swinging that hammer, John Henry.
> expert software engineers are legitimately seeing their productivity increase 10x
It's funny you would say this, because we are really commenting on an article where a self-proclaimed "expert" has done that and the "10x" output is terrible.
I have just checked my article — the word "expert" isn't in it, so not quite sure where you got this from.
I'm working in the field professionally since June 1998, and among other things, I was the tech lead on MyHammer.de, Germany's largest craftsman platform, and have built several other mid-scale online platforms over the decades.
How well I have done this, now that's for others to decide.
Quite objectively though, I do have some amount of experience — even a bad developer probably cannot help but pick up some learnings over so many years in relevant real-world projects.
However, and I think I stated this quite clearly, I am expressively not an expert in Python.
And yet, I could realize an actually working solution that solves an actual problem I had in a very real sense (and is nicely humming away for several weeks now).
And this is precisely where yes, I did experience a 10x productivity increase; it would have certainly taken me at least a week or two to realize the same solution myself.
Apologies for implying you are claiming to be an expert software engineer: I took the "senior" in the title and "25 years of experience" in the post to mean similar things as "expert".
I don't doubt this is doing something useful for you. It might even be mostly correct.
But it is not a positive advertisement for what AI can do: just like the code is objectively crap, you can't easily trust the output without a comprehensive review. And without doubting your expertise, I don't think you reviewed it, or you would have caught the same smells I did.
What this article tells me is that when the task is sufficiently non-critical that you can ignore being perfectly correct, you can steer AI coding assistants into producing some garbage code that very well might work or appear to work (when you are making stats, those are tricky even with utmost manual care).
Which is amazing, in my opinion!
But not what the premise seems to be (how a senior will make it do something very nice with decent quality code).
Out of curiosity why did you not build this tool in a language you generally use?
Because I wanted exactly this experience: can I get to the desired result — functionality-wise, if not code-wise! — even if I choose the stack that makes sense in terms of technology, not the one that I happen to be proficient in?
And if I cannot bring language-proficiency to the table — which of my capabilities as a seasoned software&systems guy can I put to use?
In the brown-field projects where my team and I have the AI implement whole features, the resulting code quality — under our sharp and experienced eyes — tends to end up just fine.
I think I need to make the differences between both examples more clear…
Ok, I guess you shouldn't complain that you really got exactly what you wanted.
However, your writing style implied that the result was somehow better because you were otherwise an experienced engineer.
Even your clarification in the post sits right below your statement how your experience made this very smooth, with no explanation that you were going to be happy with bad code as long as it works.
I guess we are slowly but steadily approaching splitting-hairs-territory, so not sure if this is still worth it…
However. I‘m not quite sure where I complained. Certainly not in the post.
And yes, I’m very convinced that the result turned out a lot better than it would have turned out if an unexperienced „vibe coder“ had tried to achieve the same end result.
Actually pretty sure without my extensive and structured requirements and the guard rails, the AI coding session would have ended in a hot mess in the best case, and a non-functioning result in the worst case.
I‘m 100% convinced that these two statements are true and relevant to the topic:
That a) someone lacking my level of experience and expertise is simply not capable of producing a document like https://github.com/dx-tooling/platform-problem-monitoring-co...
And that b) using said document as the basis for the agent-powered AI coding session had a significant impact on the process as well as the end result of the session.
I think some of the suspicion is that it's really not 10x in practice.
Like AI could write code perfectly as soon as I thought of it, and that would not improve my productivity 10x. Coding was never the slow part. Everything that goes around coding (like determining that the extra load here is not going to overload things, getting PMs to actually make their mind up what the feature is going to do, etc.), means that there's simply not that much time to be saved on coding activities.
Same argument can be said for not using any tooling really. "Tech is the easy part". No difference typing code on notepad and having zero process/engineering infrastructure I guess. Because stakeholder management is the main engineering skill apparently.
Btw, AI doesn't just code, there are AIs for debugging, monitoring etc too.
There are two levels to this.
1. Tooling obviously does improve performance, but not so huge a margin. Yes, if AI could automate more elements of tooling, that would very much help. If I could tell an AI "bisect this bug, across all projects in our system, starting with this known-bad point", that would be very helpful -- sometimes. And I'm sure we'll get there soon enough. But there is fractal complexity here: what if isolating the bug requires stepping into LLDB, or dumping some object code, or running with certain stressors on certain hardware? So it's not clear that "LLM can produce code from specs, given tight oversight" will map (soon) to "LLM can independently assemble tools together and agentically do what I need done".
2. Even if all tooling were automated, there's still going to be stuff left over. Can the LLM draft architectural specs, reach out to other teams (or their LLMs), sit in meetings and piece together the big picture, sus out what the execs really want us to be working on, etc.? I do spend a significant (double-digit) percentage of my time working on that, so if you eliminate everything else -- then you could get 10x improvement, but going beyond that would start to run up against Amdahl's Law.
If you were to really measure speed improvement of notepad vs a tricked out IDE, it's probably not much. The problem would be the annoyance caused to an engineer who has to manually type out everything.
No, coding speed is really not the bottleneck to software engineer productivity.
> coding speed > the annoyance caused to an engineer
No one said productivity is this one thing and not that one thing, only you say that because it's convenient for your argument. Productivity is a combination of many things, and again it's not just typing out code that's the only area AI can help.
The argument of "coding speed not a bottleneck to productivity" is not in contradiction to "productivity is a combination": it even implies it.
Again, the context here was that somebody discussed speed of coding and you raised the point of not using any tooling with Notepad.
Weren't you the guy who only writes HTML? Maybe let domain experts comment on their domain of expertise.
My grievances are simple: an expert programming utilizing AI will be a truly dangerous force.
But that's not what we get in this early stage of grifting. We get 10% marketing buzz on how cool this is with stuff that cannot be recreated in the tool alone, and 89% of lazy or inexperienced developers who just turn in slop with little or no iteration. The latter don't even understand the code they generated.
That 1% will be amazing, it's too bad the barrel is full of rotten apples hiding that potential. The experts also tend to keep to themselves, in my experience. the 89% includes a lot of dunning-kruger as well which makes those outspoken experts questionable (maybe a part of why real experts aren't commenting on their experience).
“Maybe you didn’t hear me, I said ‘good morning steam driver, how are you?’”
Good insight, and indeed quite exactly my state of mind while creating this particular solution.
Iin this case, I did put in the guard rails to ensure that I reach my goal in hopefully a straight line and a quickly as possible, but to be honest, I did not give much thought to long-term maintainability or ease of extending it with more and more features, because I needed a very specific solution for a use case that doesn't change much.
I'm definitely working differently in my brown-field projects where I'm intimately familiar with the tech stack and architecture — I do very thorough code reviews afterwards.
I think this code is at least twice the size than it needs to be compared to nicer, manually produced Python code: a lot of it is really superfluous.
People have different definitions of "reasonably maintainable", but if code has extra stuff that provides no value, it always perplexes the reader (what is the point of this? what am I missing?), and increases cognitive load significantly.
But if AI coding tools were advertised as "get 10x the output of your least capable teammate", would they really go anywhere?
I love doing code reviews as an opportunity to teach people. Doing this one would suck.
Right, and the reason why professional developers are writing worse code out there is most likely because they simply don't have the time/aren't paid to care more about it. The LLM is then mildly improving the output in this brand of common real world scenario
> The scary thing is: I have seen professional human developers write worse code.
That's not the scary part. It's the honest part. Yes, we all have (vague) ideas of what good code looks like, and we might know it when we see it but we know what reality looks like.
I find the standard to which we hold AI in that regard slightly puzzling. If I can get the same meh-ish code for way less money and way less time, that's a stark improvement. If the premise is now "no, it also has to be something that I recognize as really good / excellent" then at least let us recognize that we have past the question if it can produce useful code.
I do believe it's amazing what we can build with AI tools today.
But whenever someone advertises how an expert will benefit from it yet they end up with crap, it's a different discussion.
As an expert, I want AI to help me produce code of similar quality faster. Anyone can find a cheaper engineer (maybe five of them?) that can produce 5-10x the code I need at much worse quality.
I will sometimes produce crappy code when I lack the time to produce higher quality code: can AI step in and make me always produce high quality code?
That's a marked improvement I would sign up for, and some seem to tout, yet I have never seen it play out.
In a sense, the world is already full of crappy code used to build crappy products: I never felt we were lacking in that department.
And I can't really rejoice if we end up with even more of it :)
I think there’s a difference in that this is about as good as LLM code is going to get in terms of code quality (as opposed to capability a la agentic functionality). LLM output can only be as good as its training data, and the proliferation of public LLM-generated code will only serve as a further anchor in future training. Humans on the other hand ideally will learn and improve with each code review and if they don’t want to you can replace them (to put it harshly).
At the very least, if a professional human developer writes garbage code you can confidently blame them and either try to get them to improve or reduce the impact they have on the project.
With AI they can simply blame whatever model they used and continually shovel trash out there instantly.
I don't see the difference there. Whether I've written all the code myself or an AI wrote all of it, my name will be on the commit. I'll be the person people turn to when they question why code is the way it is. In a pull request for my commit, I'll be the one discussing it with my colleagues. I can't say "oh, the AI wrote it". I'm responsible for the code. Full stop.
If you're in a team where somebody can continuously commit trash without any repercussions, this isn't a problem caused by AI.
I can say it isn't any better for JS/Node/Deno/Bun projects that I've seen or tried. About the only case it's been helpful (GitHub CoPilot) is in creating boilerplate .sql files for schema creation, and in that it became kind of auto-complete on overdrive. It still made basic missteps though.
Ok - not wrong at all. Now take that feedback and put it in a prompt back to the LLM.
They’re very good at honing bad code into good code with good feedback. And when you can describe good code faster than you can write it - for instance it uses a library you’re not intimately familiar with - this kind of coding can be enormously productive.
> They’re very good at honing bad code into good code with good feedback.
And they're very bad at keeping other code good across iterations. So you might find that while they might've fixed the specific thing you asked for—in the best case scenario, assuming no hallucinations and such—they inadvertently broke something else. So this quickly becomes a game of whack-a-mole, at which point it's safer, quicker, and easier to fix it yourself. IME the chance of this happening is directly proportional to the length of the context.
This typically happens when you run the chat too long. When it gives you a new codebase, fire up a new chat so the old stuff doesn't poison the context window.
But it rarely gives me a totally-new codebase unless I'm working on a very small project -- so I have to choose between ditching its understanding of some parts (e.g. "don't introduce this bug here, please") and avoiding confusion with others.
Why isn’t it smart enough to recognize new contexts that aren’t related to old ones?
I don't know, I didn't invent transformers. I do however know how to work with them.
Nah. This isn’t true. Every time you hit enter you’re not just getting a jr dev, you’re getting a randomly selected jr dev.
So, how did I end up with a logging.py, config.py, config in __init__.py and main.py? Well I prompted for it to fix the logging setup to use a specific format.
I use cursor, it can spit out code at an amazing rate and reduced the amount of docs I need to read to get something done. But after its second attempt at something you need to jump in and do it yourself and most likely debug what was written.
Are you reading a whole encyclopedia each time you assigned to a task? The one thing about learning is that it compounds. You get faster the longer you use a specific technology. So unless you use a different platform for each task, I don't think you have to read that much documentation (understanding them is another matter).
This is an important distinction though. LLMs don't have any persistent 'state': they have their activations, their context, and that's it. They only know what's pre-trained, and what's in their context. Now, their ability to do in-context learning is impressive, but you're fundamentally still stuck with the deviations and, eventually, forgetting that characterizes these guys -- while a human, while less quick on the uptake, will nevertheless 'bake in' the lessons in a way that LLMs currently cannot.
In some ways this is even more impressive -- every prompt you make, your LLM is in effect re-reading (and re-comprehending) your whole codebase, from scratch!
I do plan on experimenting with the latest versions of coding assistants, but last I tried them (6 months ago), none could satisfy all of the requirements at the same time.
Perhaps there is simply too much crappy Python code around that they were trained on as Python is frequently used for "scripting".
Perhaps the field has moved on and I need to try again.
But looking at this, it would still be faster for me to type this out myself than go through multiple rounds of reviews and prompts.
Really, a senior has not reviewed this, no matter their language (raciness throughout, not just this file).
I would not say it is “very good” at that. Maybe it’s “capable,” but my (ample) experience has been the opposite. I have found the more exact I describe a solution, the less likely it is to succeed. And the more of a solution it has come up with, the less likely it is to change its mind about things.
Every since ~4o models, there seems to be a pretty decent chance that you ask it to change something specific and it says it will and it spits out line for line identical code to what you just asked it to change.
I have had some really cool success with AI finding optimizations in my code, but only when specifically asked, and even then I just read the response as theory and go write it myself, often in 1-15% the LoC as the LLM
I’ve found AI tools extremely helpful in getting me up to speed with a library or defining an internal override not exposed by the help. However, if I’m not explicit in how to solve a problem the result looks like the bad code it’s been ingesting.
My current favourite LLM wankery example is this beauty: https://blog.fahadusman.com/proxmox-replacing-failed-drive-i...
Note how it has invented the faster parameter for the zpool command. It is possible that the blog writer hallucinated a faster parameter themselves without needing a LLM - who knows.
I think all developers should add a faster parameter to all commands to make them run faster. Perhaps a LLM could create the faster code.
I predict an increase of man page reading, and better quality documentation at authoritative sources. We will also improve our skills at finding auth sources of docs. My uBlacklist is getting quite long.
How can this article be written by LLM? Its date is November 2021. Not judging the article as a whole but the command you pointed out seems to be correct. Faster is the name of the pool.
>Its date is November 2021
The date can be spoofed. It first showed up on archive.org in December 2022, and there's no captures for the site before then, so I'm liable to believe the dates are spoofed.
There was alot going on in the years before ChatGPT. Text generation was going strong with interactive fiction before anyone were talking about OpenAI.
GPT-2 was released in 2019. ChatGPT wasn't the first publicly available LLM.
I used LLM:s for content generation in july 2021. Of course that was when LLM:s were pretty bad.
What makes you think this was created by an LLM?
I suspect they might actually have a pool named faster -- I know I've named pools similarly in the past. This is why I now name my pools after characters from the Matrix, as is tradition.
This really gets to an acceleration of enshittification. If you can't tell its an LLM, and there's nobody to verify the information, humanity is architecting errors and mindfucks into everything. All of the markers of what is trustworthy has been coopted by untrustworthy machines, so all of the way's we'd previously differentiated actors have stopped working. It feels like we're just losing truth as rapidly as LLMs can generate mistakes. We've built a scoundrels paradise.
How useful is a library of knowledge when n% of the information is suspect? We're all about to find out.
You know, things looked off to me, but thinking it was the output of an LLM just didn't seem obvious -- even though that was the claim! I feel ill-equipped to deal with this, and as the enshittification has progressed I've found myself using "the web" less and less. At this point, I'm not sure there's much left I value on the web. I wish the enshittification wasn't seemingly pervasive in life.
I believe in people, but I start to think that scrolling is the Fox News or AM radio of a new generation, it just happens to be the backbone of the economy because automation is so much cheaper than people.
The pool is named backups according to zpool status and the paragraph right after.
But then again the old id doesn't match between the two commands.
Yep that’s the stuff I noticed that was off too
I "love" this part:
An extremely useful and insightful comment. Then you look where it's actually used, ... so like, the entire function and its call (and its needlessly verbose comment) could be removed because the existence of the directory is being checked anyway by pathlib.This might not matter here because it's a small, trivial example, but if you have 10, 50, 100, 500 developers working on a codebase, and they're all thoughtlessly slinging code like this in, you're going to have a dumpster fire soon enough.
I honestly think "vibe coding" is the best use case for AI coding, because at least then you're fully aware the code is throwaway shit and don't pretend otherwise.
edit: and actually looking deeper, `ensure_dir_exists` actually makes the directory, except it's already been made before the function is called so... sigh. Code reviews are going to be pretty tedious in the coming years, aren't they?
In my opinion this isn't even too relevant. I am no python expert but I believe defining a logger at the top for the average one file python script is perfectly adequate or even very sensible in many scenarios. Depends on what you expect the code to do. Ok, the file is named utils.py...
Worse by far is still the ability of AI to really integrate different problems and combine them into a solution. And it also seems to depend on the language. In my opinion especially Python and JS results are often very mixxed while other languages with presumably a smaller training set might even fare better. JS seems often fine with asynchronous operation like that file check however.
Perhaps really vetting a training set would improve AIs, but it would be quite work intensive to build something like that. That would require a lot of senior devs, which is hard to come by. And then they need to agree on code quality, which might be impossible.
Not all code needs to be written at a high level of quality. A good deal of code just needs to work. Shell scripts, one-offs, linter rules, etc.
It'll be really interesting to see if the tech advances fast enough that future AI can deal with the tech debt of present day AI or if we'll see a generational die off of apps/companies.
I expect some of the big companies that went all in on relying on AI to fall in the coming years.
It will take some time tho, as decision makers will struggle to make up reasons why why noone on the payroll is able to fix production.
You’re objectively correct in a business context, which is what most software is for. For me, seeing AI slop code more and more is just sad from a craft perspective.
Software that’s well designed and architected is a pleasure to read and write, even if a lower quality version would get the job done. I’m watching one of the things I love most in the world become more automated and having the craftsmanship stripped out of it. That’s a bit over dramatic from me, but it’s been sad to watch.
It’s probably the same way monks copying books felt when the printing press came along. “Look at this mechanical, low-quality copy. It lacks all finesse and flourish of the pen!”
I agree with you that it is sad. And what is especially sad is that the result will probably be lower quality overall, but much cheaper. It’s the inevitable result of automation.
I feel exactly the same way, it’s profoundly depressing.
Having seen my fair share of those, they tend to work either until they don't, or you need to somehow change it.
Also somewhat strangely, I've found Python output has remained bad, especially for me with dataframe tasks/data analysis. For remembering matplotlib syntax I still find most of them pretty good, but for handling datagframes, very bad and extremely counter productive.
Saying that, for typed languages like TypeScript and C#, they have gotten very good. I suspect this might be related to the semantic information can be found in typed languages, and hard to follow unstructured blobs like dataframes, and there for, not well repeated by LLMs.
Spark especially is brutal for some reason. Even databrick's AI is bad at spark, which is very funny.
It's probably because spark is so backwards compatible with pandas, but not fully.
>to a raciness in load_json where it's checked for file existence with an if and then carrying on as if the file is certainly there...
Explain the issue with load_json to me more. From my reading it checks if the file exists, then raises an error if it does not. How is that carrying on as if the file is certainly there?
There is a small amount of time between the `if` and the `with` where another process can delete the file, hence causing a race condition. Attempting to open the file and catching any exceptions raised is generally safer.
Won't it throw the same "FileNotFound" exception in that case? The issue being bothering to check if it exists in the first place I suppose.
Yes, but it won't log the error as it is clearly the intention of the first check.
OK, that does make sense. Thanks!
As an actually unseasoned Python developer, would you be so kind as to explain why the problems you see are problems and their alternatives? Particularly the first two you note.
The call to logging.basicConfig happens at import time, which could cause issues in certain scenarios. For a one-off script, it's probably fine, but for a production app, you'd probably want to set up logging during app startup from whatever your main entry point is.
The Python standard library has a configparser module, which should be used instead of custom code. It's safer and easier than manual parsing. The standard library also has a tomllib module, which would be an even better option IMO.
Regarding your first paragraph, we still don't understand what the issue actually is.
100%!
But the alternative would be the tool doesn't get built because the author doesn't know enough Python to even produce crappy code, or doesn't have the money to hire an awesome Python coder to do that for them.
> This is especially noteworthy because I don’t actually know Python.
> However, my broad understanding of software architecture, engineering best practices, system operations, and what makes for excellent software projects made this development process remarkably smooth.
If the seniors are going to write this sort of Python code and then talk about how knowledge and experience made it smooth or whatever, might as well hire a junior and let them learn through trials and tribulations.
Here's a rl example from today:
I asked $random_llm to give me code to recursively scan a directory and give me a list of file names relative to the top directory scanned and their sizes.
It gave me working code. On my test data directory it needed ... 6.8 seconds.
After 5 min of eliminating obvious inefficiencies the new code needed ... 1.4 seconds. And i didn't even read the docs for the used functions yet, just changed what seemed to generate too many filesystem calls for each file.
Nice, sounds like it saved you some time.
You "AI" enthusiasts always try to find a positive spin :)
What if I had trusted the code? It was working after all.
I'm guessing that if i asked for string manipulation code it would have done something worth posting on accidentally quadratic.
Depends on how toxic the culture is in your workplace. This could have been an opportunity to "work" on another JIRA task showing 600% improvement over AI generated code.
I'll write that down for reference in case I do ever join an organization like that in the future, thanks.
600% improvement is worth what, 3 days of billable work if it lasts 5 minutes?
Series of such "improvements" could be fame and fortune in your team/group/vertical. In such places, the guy who toots the loudest wins the most.
So THAT's why large organizations want "AI".
In such a place I should be a very loud advocate of LLMs, use them to generate 100% of my output for new tasks...
... and then "improve performance" by simply fixing all the obvious inefficiencies and brag about the 400% speedups.
Hmm. Next step: instruct the "AI" to use bubblesort.
> What if I had trusted the code? It was working after all.
Then you would have been done five minutes earlier? I mean, this sort of reads like a parody of microoptimization.
No, it reads like "your precious AI generates first year junior code". Like the original article.
There is nothing wrong with first year junior code that does the job.
Does not. Do you know my requirements? This is actually in a time critical path.
Well, that wasn't in your comment. :P
If you hadn't told me that I would also not have bothered optimizing syscalls.
Did you tell the AI the profiler results and ask for ways to make it faster?
> Well, that wasn't in your comment. :P
Acting like a LLM now :P
> Did you tell the AI the profiler results and ask for ways to make it faster?
Looking for ways to turn a 10 minute job into a couple days?
AI actually doesn't really work for the "a couple days" scale yet. As a heavy AI user, this sort of iterative correction would usually be priced in in a 10-minute AI session. That said-
> Acting like a LLM now :P
Hey, if we're going to be like that, it sure sounds like you gave the employee an incomplete spec so you could then blame it for failing. So... at least I'm not acting like a PM :P
Why would you blindly trust any code? Did you tell it to optimize for speed? If not, why are you surprised it didn't?
So, most low level functions that enumerate the files in a directory return a structure that contains the file data from each file. Including size. You already have it in memory.
Your brilliant AI calls another low level function to get the file size on the file name. (also did worse stuff but let's not go into details).
Do you call reading the file size from the in memory structure that you already have a speed optimization? I call it common sense.
Yep exactly, LLMs blunder over the most simple nonsense and just leaves a mess in their wake. This isn't a mistake you could make if you actually understood what the library is doing / is returning.
It's so funny how these AI bros make excuse after excuse for glaring issues rather than just accept AI doesn't actually understand what it's doing (not even considering it's faster to just write good quality code on the first try).
The "AI" are useful for one thing. I had no idea what functions to use to scan a directory in a native C++ Windows application. Nor that they introduced an abstraction in C++ 2017?. They all work the same (needless fs access should be avoided no matter the OS) but it did give me the names*.
Stuff that google search from 10 years ago would have done without pretending it's "AI". But not google search from this year.
* it wasn't able to simply list the fields of the returned structure that contained a directory entry. But since it gave me the name, i was able to look it up via plain search.
Yeah I find myself doing that too, use the AI to generate a bunch of names I can put into google to find a good answer. I also think if google hadn't gotten as sh*t as it has AI wouldn't be nearly as useful to most people.
> It's so funny how these AI bros make excuse after excuse for glaring issues rather than just accept AI doesn't actually understand what it's doing
Its less funny when you realize how few of these people even have experience reading and writing code.
They just see code on screen, trust the machine and proclaim victory.
>Why would you blindly trust any code?
because that is what the market is trying to sell?
Perhaps that partly because 90% of the training data used to teach LLMs to code is made by junior engineers?
Thanks for looking into it.
While I would have hoped for a better result, I'm not surprised. In this particular case, I really didn't care about the code at all; I cared about the end result at runtime, that is, can I create a working, stable solution that solves my problem, in a tech stack I'm not familiar with?
(While still taking care of well-structured requirements and guard rails — not to guarantee a specific level of code quality per se, but to ensure that the AI works towards my goals without the need to intervene as much as possible).
I will spin up another session where I ask it to improve the implementation, and report back.
Makes sense given that so much of the training data for so many of these tools are trained on hello world examples where this kind of configuration is okay. Not like this will matter in a world where there are no juniors to replace aged-out seniors because AI was "good enough"...
> to a raciness in load_json where it's checked for file existence with an if and then carrying on as if the file is certainly there...
It's not a race. It's just redundant. If the file does not exist at the time you actually try to access it you get the same error with slightly better error message.
How do you properly configure a logger in application like that?
Just imagine a callsite that configured a logger in another way, and then imports the utils module for a single function: its configuration getting overridden by the one in utils.
There are plenty of ways to structure code so this does not happen, but simply "do not do anything at the top module level" will ensure you don't hit these issues.
Usually you would do it in your main function, or a code path starting from there. Executing code with non-local side effects during import is generally frowned upon. Maybe it's fine for a project-local module that won't be shared, but it's a bad habit and can make it had to track down.
Doesn’t load_json throw if the file doesn’t exist?
Yes but then why do the check in the first place
I disagree, I think it's absolutely astounding that they've gotten this good in such a short time, and I think we'll get better models in the near future.
By the way, prompting models properly helps a lot for generating good code. They get lazy if you don't explicitly ask for well-written code (or put that in the system prompt).
It also helps immensely to have two contexts, one that generates the code and one that reviews it (and has a different system prompt).
> They get lazy if you don't explicitly ask for well-written code (or put that in the system prompt).
This is insane on so many levels.
Computer, enhance 15 to 23.
Yup this tracks with what I have seen as well. Most devs who use this daily are usually junior devs or javascript devs who both write sloppy questionable code.
wrap_long_lines shares those characteristics:
https://github.com/dx-tooling/platform-problem-monitoring-co...
Where things are placed in the project seems rather ad hoc too. Put everything in the same place kind of architecture. A better strategy might be to separate out the I and the O of IO. Maybe someone wants SMS or group chat notifications later on, instead of shifting the numbers in filenames step11_ onwards one could then add a directory in the O part and hook it into an actual application core.
Thanks for doing the footwork. These TED talk blog posts always stink of phony-baloney nonsense.
As a long time hobby coder, like 25 years and I think I’m pretty good(?), this whole LLM /vibecoding thing has zapped my creativity the past year or so. I like the craft of making things. I used tools I enjoy working with and learn new ones all the time (never got on the JS/react train). Sometimes I have an entrepreneur bug and want to create a marketable solution, but I often just like to build. Im also the kind of guy that has a shop he built, builds his own patio deck, home remodeling, Tinker with robotics, etc. Kind of just like to be a maker following my own creative pursuit.
All said, it’s hard on me knowing it’s possible to use llm to spit out a crappy but functional version of whatever I’ve dreamt up with out satisfaction of building it. Yet, it also seems to now be demotivating to spend the time crafting it when I know I could use llm to do a majority of it. So, I’m in a mental quagmire, this past year has been the first year since at least 2000 that I haven’t built anything significant in scale. It’s indirectly ruining the fun for me for some reason. Kind of just venting but curious if anyone else feels this way too?
I'm the complete opposite. After being burnt out and feeling an almost physical repulsion to starting anything new, using AI has renewed my passion. I've almost finished a side project I started 4 weeks ago and it's been awesome. Used AI from the beginning for a Desktop app with a framework I'd never heard of before and the learning curve is almost non-existent. To be able to get the boring things done in minutes is amazing.
Similar sentiment here. I taught myself python a decade ago after college, and used it in side projects, during my masters degree, in a few work projects. So it's been handy, but also required quite a bit of time and effort to learn.
But I've been using Claude to help with all kinds of side projects. One recently was to help create and refine some python code to take the latest Wikipedia zipped XML file and transform/load it locally into a PostgreSQL DB. The initial iteration of the code took ~16 hours to unzip, process, and load into the database. I wanted it to be faster.
I don't know how to use multiple processes/multi-threading, but after some prompting, iterating, and persistent negotiations with Claude to refine the code (and an SSD upgrade) I can go from the 24gb zip file to all cleaned/transformed data in the DB in about 2.5 hours. Feels good man.
Do I need to know exactly what's happening in the code (or at lowers levels, abstracted from me) to make it faster? not really. Could someone who was more skilled, that knew more about multi-threading, or other faster programming languages, etc..., make it even faster? probably. Is the code dog shit? it may not be production ready, but it works for me, and is clean enough. Someone who better knew what they were doing could work with it to make it even better.
I feel like LLMs are great for brainstorming, idea generation, initial iterations. And in general can get you 80%+ the way to your goal, almost no matter what it is, much faster than any other method.
That's awesome! That's a lot of data and a great speed increase. I think that as long as you test and don't just accept exactly what it outputs without a little thought, it can be really useful.
I take it as an opportunity to learn too. I'm working on a video library app that runs locally and wanted to extract images when the scene changed enough. I had no idea how to do this, and previously would have searched StackOverflow to find a way and then struggled for hours or days to implement it. This time I just asked Aider right in the IDE terminal what options I had, and it came back with 7 different methods. I researched those a little and then asked it to implement 3 of them. It created an interface, 3 implementations and a factory to easily get the different analyzers. I could then play around with each one and see what worked the best. It took like an hour. I wrote a test script to loop over multiple videos and run each analyzer on them. I then visually checked the results to see which worked the best. I ended up jumping into the code it had written to understand what was going on, and after a few tweaks the results are pretty good. This was all done in one afternoon - and a good chunk of that time was just me comparing images visually to see what worked best and tweaking thresholds and re-running to get it just right.
I'm on this boat. I can use LLMs to skip the boring bits like generating API glue classes or simple output functions.
Example:
I'm building a tool to grab my data from different sites like Steam, Imdb, Letterboxd and Goodreads.
I know perfectly well how to write a parser for the Goodreads CSV output, but it doesn't exactly tickle my brain. Cursor or Cline will do it in minutes.
Now I've got some data to work with, which is the fun bit.
Again if I want to format the output to markdown for Obsidian, the LLM can do it in a few minutes and maybe even add stuff I didn't think about at first.
Yeah, I've found it great at XML too. All sorts of boilerplate stuff works so well. As it the project gets bigger Ive had to think for longer about things and step in more, but as you said, that's usually the fun, meaty bit that you want to work on anyway. My app is about 15k lines of code now, and it's a bit more work than at the beginning.
this is the key idea right here. LLMs are not replacing good coders, they're electric yak shavers that we should all learn how to use. The value add is real, and incremental, not revolutionary.
Same for me. The lack of effort to get started is amazing, as well as the ability to farm the parts I don't like out to the AI. (As opposed to me, it's actually passable at graphical design.)
I'm very much in the same camp as you. I'm having the time of my (professional) live right now.
I can echo your sentiment. Art is the manifestation of creativity, and to create any good art you need to train in whatever medium you choose. For the decade I've been a professional programmer, I've always argued that writing code was a creative job.
It's been depressing to listen to people pretend that LLM generated code is "the same thing". To trivialize the thoughtful lessons one has learned honing their craft. It's the same reason the Studio Ghilbi AI image trend gives me the ick.
I agree, but only to an extent. For me, the passion changed over time. I used to love getting an O'Reilly tome and learning something new, but now I don't really want to learn the latest UI framework, library/API or figure out how a client configures their DI container. If the AI can do most of that stuff, and I just leverage my knowledge of all the frameworks I've had to use, it's a huge timesaver and means I can work on more things at once. I want to work on the core solution, not the cruft that surrounds it.
I agree though that the Studio Ghibli trend feels off. To me, art like this feels different to code. I know that's probably heresy around these parts of the internet, and I probably would have said something different 15-20 years ago. I know that coding is creative and fulfilling. I think I've just had the fun of coding beat out of me over 25 years :) AI seems to be helping bring the fun back.
Just think what the 19th century craftsmen were thinking! :D (i.e. they were right, but really good stuff is hard to make at scale)
I've become so much more productive in my hobby programming projects, because it lets me skip over the tedious parts that suck the life out of me (boilerplate, figuring out library dependencies, etc), and I can focus on the parts that are actually interesting like experimenting with different solutions, iterating and learning new things.
It also lets me explore other libraries and languages without having to invest too much time and effort before knowing if it's right for what I want to do. I know that if I want to continue in a different direction, I haven't wasted tons of time/effort and getting started in the new direction will be much less effortful and time consuming.
I know what you mean. It takes the satisfaction out of a certain class of problems knowing that you can just generate the solution.
On the other hand, most tasks aren't fun nor satisfying and frankly they are a waste of time, like realizing you're about to spend the afternoon recredentializing in some aspect of Webpack/Gradle/BouncyCastle/Next.js/Combine/x/y/z just to solve one minor issue. And it's pure bliss when the LLM knows the solution.
I think the best antidote to the upset in your comment is to build bigger and more difficult things. Save your expertise for the stuff that could actually use your expertise rather than getting stuck wasting it on pure time burn like we had to in the past.
I like the antidote and does remind me that I tried to create a game, which gamedev has always been a challenge for me. I’ve attempted a few times and didn’t get very far with this one either. I think I could do the coding even though scale is large, but I’m not artistic and asset generation/iteration is my block. I tried a handful of ai tools specifically for this and found they were all really far behind. I don’t particularly like working with asset store art, maybe for parts but characters and the vibe of the game usually would excite and motivate me early on and I can’t quite get there to sustain the effort
I had this in my comment but deleted it, maybe you were responding to it, but in case you didn't see it: I found multiplayer browser games to be a good example of a hard project that LLMs help a lot with so that you can focus on the rewarding part.
LLMs can one-shot pretty good server-authority + client-prediction + rollback netcode, something I've probably spent weeks of my life trying to build and mostly failing. And they can get a basic frontend 'proof' working. And once you verify that the networked MVP works, you can focus on the game.
But the cool thing about multiplayer games is that they can be really small in scope because all of the fun comes from mechanics + playing with other people. They can be spaceships shooting at each other in a single room or some multiplayer twist on a dumbed down classic game. And that's just so much more feasible than building a whole game that's expected to entertain you as a single player.
Try being a drummer!
I’ve actually been considering it. Although I think I’m probably tone deaf or rhythmically challenged and my rotator cuff is kinda messed up from an old injury, I’ve been trying to convince my 6 year old to take it up so I could justify having a kit around the house
I'm mixed on the "craft" aspect of it. I don't hate coding, but there's definitely times where it feels like it's just some time plumbing. I don't get satisfaction out of that kind of stuff.
I'm pragmatic and simply don't trust current LLM's to do much in my domain. All that tribal knowledge is kept under lock and key at studios, so good luck scraping the net to find more than the very basic samples of how to do something. I've spent well over a decade doing that myself; the advanced (and even a lot of intermediate) information is slim and mostly behind paywalls or books.
Fascinating. it's gone the other way for me. because I can now whip up a serious contender to any SaaS business in a week, it's made everything more fun, not less.
I followed a lot of Twitter people who were vibecoding their way to SaaS platforms because I thought it would be interesting to follow.
So far none of them are having a great time after their initial enthusiasm. A lot of it is people discovering that there’s far more to a business than whipping up a SaaS app that does something. I’m also seeing a big increase in venting about how their progress is slowing to a crawl as the codebase gets larger. It’s interesting to see the complaints about losing days or weeks to bugs that the LLM introduced that they didn’t understand.
I still follow because it’s interesting, but I’m starting to think 90% of the benefit is convincing people that it’s going to be easy and therefore luring them into working on ideas they’d normally not want to start.
absolutely! It turns out that the code is just this one little corner of the whole thing. A critical corner, but still just one piece of many.
> I can now whip up a serious contender to any SaaS business in a week
This reminds me of the famous HN comment when Drew Houston first announced Dropbox here in 2007: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
you don't get to choose why you get Internet famous, it chooses you.
thankfully, I'm not important enough for my comment to amount to the same thing.
Yeah, I see that perspective bu I guess my thought process is “what’s the point, if everyone else can now do the same”
I had long ago culled many of those ideas based on my ability to execute the marketing plan or the “do I really even want to run that kind of business?” test. I already knew I could build whatever I wanted to exist so My days of pumping out side projects ended long ago and I became more selective with my time.
I guess it depends why you're writing the code. I'm writing a local video library desktop app to categorise my home and work videos. I'm implementing only the features I need. No one else will use it, I'll be finished the first version after about 4 weeks of weekend and night coding, and it's got some pretty awesome features I never would have thought possible (for me). Without AI I probably never would have done this. I'm sold, even just for the reduction of friction in getting a project off the ground. The first 80% was 80% AI developed and the last 20% has flipped to 80% coded by me. Which is great, because this part is the meat of the app and where I want most input.
which turns it into passion. the side project that I'm only interested in because it could maybe make some money? eh.
a project in a niche where I live and breath the fumes off the work and I can help the whole ecosystem with their workflow? sign me up!
Agree, I’ve been searching for the latter for a long time
So you can create a serious contender to Salesforce or Zapier in a week?
like an Eventbrite or a shopmonkey. but yeah, you don't think you could? Salesforce is a whole morass. not every customer uses every corner of it, and Salesforce will nickel and dime you with their consultants and add ons and plugins. if you can be more specific as to which bit of Salesforce you want to provide to a client we can go deep.
But you said "I can now whip up a serious contender to any SaaS business in a week".
Any SaaS business. In a week. And to be a "serious contender", you have to have feature parity. Yet now you're shifting the goalposts.
What's stopping you? There are 38 weeks left in 2025. Please build "serious contenders" for each of the top 38 most popular SaaS products before the end of the year. Surely you will be the most successful programmer to have ever lived.
The rest of the business is the issue. I can whitelabel a Spotify clone but licensing rights and all that business stuff is outside my wheelhouse. An app that serves mp3s and has a bunch of other buttons? yeah, done. "shifting goalposts?" no, we're having a conversation, I'm not being deposed under a subpoena.
My claim is that in a week you could build a thing that people want to use, as long as you can sell it, that's competitive with existing options for a given client. Salesforce is a CRM with walled gardens after walled garden. access to each of which costs extra, of course. they happened to be in the right place at the right time, with the right bunch of assholes.
A serious contender doesn’t have to start with everything. It starts by doing the core thing better—cleaner UX, clearer value, easier to extend. That’s enough to matter. That’s enough to grow.
I’m not claiming to replace decades overnight. But momentum, clarity, and intent go a long way. Especially when you’re not trying to be everything to everyone—just the right thing for the right people.
as for Spotify: https://bit.ly/samson_music
> as for Spotify: https://bit.ly/samson_music
I'm not sure what you are trying to say here - that this website is comparable to Spotify? Even if you are talking about just the "core experience", this example supports the opposite argument that you are trying to make.
The way I see it, the core user experience is that the user listens to music. There's playlist management on top of that and some other bits, sure, but I really don't see it as being that difficult to build those pieces. This is a no code widget I had lying around with a track that was produced last night because I kept asking the producer about a new release. I linked it because it was top of mind. It allows the user to listen to music, which I see as the core of what Spotify offers its users.
Spotify has the licensing rights to songs and I don't have the business acumen to go about getting those rights, so I guess I could make Pirate Spotify and get sued by the labels for copyright infringement, but that would just be a bunch of grief for me which would be not very fun and why would I want to screw artists out of getting paid to begin with?
> The way I see it
i think ive detected the root cause of your problem.
and, funnily enough, it goes a long way to explaining the experiences of some other commentators in this thread on “vibe coding competitive SaaS products”.
Sure, yeah, go ahead, do it. Seriously! Build a SaaS business in a week and displace an existing business. Please report back with your findings.
As much as I'd like to pretend otherwise, I'm just a programmer. Say I build, I dunno, an Eventbrite clone. Okay, cool I've got some code running on Vercel. What do I do next? I'm not about to quit my day job to try and pay my mortgage on hopes and dreams, and while I'm working my day job and having a life outside of that. There's just not enough hours left in the day to also work on this hypothetical EventBrite clone. And there are already so many competitors of them out there, what's one more? What's my "in" to the events industry that would have me succeed over any of their numerous existing competitors? Sure, Thants to LLMs I can vibe code some CRUD app, but my point is there's so much I don't know that I don't even know what I don't know about business in order to be successful. So realistically it's just a fun hobby, like how some people sew sweaters.
Salesforce is and pretty much always has been a set of code generation platforms. If you can produce a decent code generation platform, do it. It's one of the most sure ways to making money from software since it allows you to deploy systems and outsource a large portion of design to your customers.
Spotify is not the audio player widget in some user interface. It started off as a Torrent-like P2P system for file distribution on top of a very large search index and file storage. That's the minimum you'd build for a "whitelabel [...] Spotify clone". Since then they've added massive, sophisticated systems for user monitoring and prediction, ad distribution, abuse and fraud detection, and so on.
Use that code generation platform to build a product off any combination of two of the larger subsystems at Spotify and you're set for retirement if you only grab a reasonable salesperson and an accountant off the street. Robust file distribution with robust abuse detection or robust ad distribution or robust user prediction would be that valuable in many business sectors.
If building and maintaining actually is that effortless for you, show some evidence.
> Since then they've added massive, sophisticated systems for user monitoring and prediction, ad distribution, abuse and fraud detection, and so on. Use that code generation platform to build a product off any combination of two of the larger subsystems at Spotify
I'm listening. I fully admit that I was looking at Spotify as a user and thus only as a music playing widget so I'd love to hear more about this side of things. What is user prediction?
They spend a lot of effort trying to get good at predicting user preferences, through modeling of personality, behaviour patterns and more.
You can find out quite a lot in their blogs and publications:
https://research.atspotify.com/2022/02/modeling-users-accord...
https://research.atspotify.com/user-modeling/
I'm not quite 40 but starting to feel the effects of age, AI has been a great tool if not for the fact it saves my hands. I don't have it write the logic for me, mostly just stuff like smart autocomplete etc. I battle really severe tendonitis, I've noticed a definite improvement since I started using code complete.
As far as knowledge/experience, I worry about a day where "vibe coding" takes over the world and it's only the greybeards that have any clue WTF is going on. Probably profitable, but also sounds like a hellscape to me.
I would hate to be a junior right now.
I would love to be a junior right now. I would just hate becoming a senior, after having been a junior right now.
well said
Well, whats the difference between Vibe Coding in 5 - 10 years vs coding in C 5 - 10 years after compilers came out?
The biggest thing I worry about with AI is that its current incarnation is anathema to the directions I think software needs to go next, and I’m at a loss to see what the judo-throw will look like that achieves that.
Rob Pike has the right idea but the wrong execution. As the amount of second and third party code we use increases, the search time goes up, and we need better facilities to reduce the amount of time you need to spend looking at the internals of one package because you need that time to look at three others. So clarity and discoverability both need to matter, and AI has no answers here, only more problems.
IMO, a lot of the success of Java comes from having provided 80% of the source code with the JDK. You could spend so much time single stepping into code that was not yours to figure out why your inputs didn’t cause the outputs you expected. But those are table stakes now.
> The very experience and accumulated know-how in software engineering and project management — which might seem obsolete in the age of AI — are precisely what enable the most effective use of these tools.
I agree with the author here, but my worry is that by leaning on the LLMs, the very experience that allows me to uniquely leverage the LLMs now will start to atrophy and in a few years time I'll be relying on them just to keep up.
Increasingly I’m realizing that in most cases there is a SIGNIFICANT difference between how useful AI is on greenfield projects vs how useful it is on brownfield projects. For the former: pretty good! For the brownfield, it’s often worse than useless.
It’s also interesting to see how quickly the greenfield progress rate slows down as the projects grow.
I skimmed the vibecoding subreddits for a while. It was common to see frustrations about how coding tools (Cursor, Copilot, etc) were great last month but terrible now. The pattern repeats every month, though. When you look closer it’s usually people who were thrilled when their projects were small but are now frustrated when they’re bigger.
The real issue is context size. You kinda need to know what you are doing in order to construct the project in pieces, and know what to tell the LLM when you spin up a new instance with fresh context to work on a single subsection. It's unwieldy and inefficient, and the model inevitably gets confused when it can effectively look at the whole code base.
Gemini 2.5 is much better in this regard, it can make decent output up to around 100k tokens compared to claude 3.7 starting to choke around 32k. Long term it remains to see if this will remain an issue. If models can get to 5M context and perform like current model with 5k context, it would be a total game changer.
Oh, I find almost the exact opposite.
On Greenfield projects there's simply too many options for it to pursue. It will take one approach in one place then switch to another.
On a brownfield project, you can give it some reference code and tell it about places to look for patterns and it will understand them.
And greenfield turns into brownfield pretty quickly.
I find that feeding in a bunch of context can help you refactor, add tests to a low coverage application pretty quickly, etc in brownfield apps.
My experience on brownfield projects is the opposite.
Right, but AI could change the ratio of greenfield vs brownfield then (« I’ll be faster if I rewrite this part from scratch »)
I struggle to wrap my head around how this would work (and how AI can be used to maintain and refine software in general). Brownfield code got brown by being useful and solving a real problem, and doing it well enough to be maintained. So the AI approach is to throwaway the code that's proved its usefulness? I just don't get it.
I think there's a similar analogy here for products in the AI era.
Bolting AI onto existing products probably doesn't make sense. AI is going to produce an entirely new set of products with AI-first creation modalities.
You don't need AI in Photoshop / Gimp / Krita to manipulate images. You need a brand new AI-first creation tool that uses your mouse inputs like magic to create images. Image creation looks nothing like it did in the past.
You don't need Figma to design a webpage. You need an AI-first tool that creates the output - Lovable, V0, etc. are becoming that.
You don't need AI in your IDE. Your IDE needs to be built around AI. And perhaps eventually even programming languages and libraries themselves need AI annotations or ASTs.
You don't need AI in Docs / Gmail / Sheets. You're going to be creating documents from scratch (maybe pasting things in). "My presentation has these ideas, figures, and facts" is much different than creating and editing the structure from scratch.
There is so much new stuff to build, and the old tools are all going to die.
I'd be shocked if anyone is using Gimp, Blender, Photoshop, Premiere, PowerPoint, etc. in ten years. These are all going to be reinvented. The only way these products themselves survive is if they undergo tectonic shifts in development and an eventual complete rewrite.
Just for the record, Photoshop's first generative 'AI' feature, Content Aware Fill, is 15 years old.
That's a long time for Adobe not to have figured out what your are saying.
Photoshop is unapproachable to the 99%.
A faster GPT 4o will kill Photoshop for good.
Photoshop is a tool designed for the 1% of people who want that level of control for their vision. Adobe has several other tools for other markets.
Even the latest model from this week, which is undeniably impressive, can’t get close to the level of control that photoshop gives me. It often edits parts of the image I haven’t asked it to touch among other issues. I use photoshop as a former photojournalist, and AI manipulated images are of no use to me. My photos are documentary. They represent a slice of reality. I know that AI can create a realistic simulacrum of that, but I’m not interested.
This is like saying we won’t need text editors in the future. That’s silly, there are some things that we won’t need text editors for, but the ability of ai to generate and edit text files doesn’t mean that we won’t ever need to edit them manually.
This rhymes with still developing your own film.
I'm really eager to see how this pans out in a decade.
> This rhymes with still developing your own film.
Well, guilty, I actually do occasionally develop my own film.
Film photography is actually expanding as an industry right now. We are well past the point where digital photography can do everything a film camera can do, and in most cases it can do it far better (very minor exceptions like large format photography still exist, where you can argue that film still has the edge).
I think that whether you embrace AI photo editing or not has more to do with the purpose of your photos. If you are trying to create marketing collateral for a valentines day ad campaign, AI is probably going to be the best tool. If you are trying to document reality, even for aesthetic purposes, AI isn't great. When I make a portrait of my wife, I don't need AI to reinterpret her face for me.
Not a chance. Photoshop is about having maximum control and power. AI requires relinquishing a degree of control in exchange for speed. Totally different audiences.
Lol photoshop has been integrating AI features since at least "content aware" stuff was released. Photoshop has a massive audience of people who want to be able to edit images quickly and easily.
I've been thinking about this a lot and agree. I think the UI will change drastically, maybe making voice central and you just describe what you want done. When language, image and voice models can be run locally things will get crazy.
That prompt looks horrifying.
I am not going to spend half an hour coming up with that prompt, tweaking it, and then spend many hours (on the optimistic side) to track down all the hallucinated code and hidden bugs. Have been there once, never going to do that again.
I'd rather do it myself to have a piece of mind.
I wonder how much time it would take with some samples from GitHub, and various documentation about python laying around (languages, cheatsheet, libraries)...
10 minutes tops, once you have the idea and you've thought it through a bit just spamming out the code isn't that hard nor does it take that long. If there's anything surprising (e.g. function call returns something a bit different than expected) it's fast enough to just read the docs and change your mental model slightly.
Aah.. I have been repeating this to my team for several days now. Thanks for putting this together.
I start every piece of work, green or brown, with a markdown file that often contains my plan, task breakdown, data models (including key fields), API / function details, and sample responses.
For the tool part, though, I took a slightly different approach. I decided to use Rust primarily for all my projects, as the compile-time checks are a great way to ensure the correctness of the generated code. I have noticed many more errors are detected in AI-generated Rust code than in any other language. I am happy about it because these are errors that I would have missed in other languages.
> I have noticed many more errors are detected in AI-generated Rust code than in any other language.
Is that because the Rust compiler is just a very strong guardrail? Sounds like it could work well for Swift too. If only xcodebuild were less of a pain for big projects.
Yes, exactly. AI isn’t gonna check things like memory management, data type overflows and such, during generation. It would be great if we catch them at compile time.
Regarding swift, totally hear you :) Also I haven’t tried generating swift code - wondering how well that would be trained as there are fewer open source codebases for that.
I agree, and I really like the concrete examples here. I tried relating it to the concept of “surprise” from information theory — if what the LLM is producing is low surprise to you, you have a high chance of success as you can compare to the version you wrote in your experienced head.
If it’s high surprise then there’s a greater chance that you can’t tell right code from wrong code. I try to reframe this in a more positive light by calling it “exploration”, where you can ask follow up questions and hopefully learn about a subject you started knowing little about. But it’s important for you to realize which mode you are in, whether you are in familiar or unfamiliar waters.
https://royalicing.com/2025/infinite-bicycles-for-the-mind
The other benefit an experienced developer can bring is using test-driven development to guide and constrain the generated code. It’s like a contract that must be fulfilled, and TDD lets you switch between using an LLM or hand crafting code depending on how you feel or the AI’s competency at the task. If you have a workflow of writing a test beforehand it helps with either path.
https://royalicing.com/2025/test-driven-vibes
I find myself spending so much time correcting bad -- or perhaps, more appropriately, misguided -- code that I constantly wonder if I'm saving time. I think I am, but a much higher percentage of my time is doing hard work of evaluating and thinking about things rather than mentally easy things the AI is good at, but what used to give me a little bit of a break.
Sometimes I liken the promise of AI to my experience with stereoscopic images (I have never been able to perceive them) -- I know there's something there but I frequently don't get it.
Very good concrete examples. AI is moving very fast so it can become overwhelming, but what has held true is focusing on writing thorough prompts to get the results you want.
Senior developers have the experience to think through and plan out a new application for an AI to write. Unfortunately a lot of us are bogged down by working our day jobs, but we need to dedicate time to create our own apps with AI.
Building a personal brand is never more important, so I envision a future where dev's have a personal website with thumbnail links (like a fancy youtube thumbnail) to all the small apps they have built. Dozens of them, maybe hundreds, all with beautiful or modern UIs. The prompt they used can be the new form of blog articles. At least that's what I plan to do.
> Building a personal brand is never more important
the low-hanging fruit is to create content/apps to help developers create their personal brands through content/apps.
The main questions I have with using LLMs for this purpose in a business setting are:
1. Is the company providing the model willing to indemnify _your_ company when using code generation? I know GitHub Copilot will do this with the models they provide on their hardware, but if you’re using Claude Code or Cursor with random models do they provide equal guarantees? If not I wonder if it’s only a matter of time before that landmine explodes.
2. In the US, AFAICT, software that is mostly generated by non-humans is not copyrightable. This is not an issue if you’re creating code snippets from an LLM, but if you’re generating an entire project this way then none or only small parts of the code base you generate would then be copyrightable. Do you still own the IP if it’s not copyrightable? What if someone exfiltrates your software? Do you have no or little remedy?
The bit about being able to get something workable going in an unfamiliar tech stack hits home. In a similar vein I was able to configure a VyOS router, a nushell based api client and some MSOffice automation in Powershell with AI assistance. Not a big deal in and of itself but still very useful.
I’ve been pretty moderate on AI but I’ve been using Claude cli lately and it’s been pretty great.
First, I can still use neovim which is a massive plus for me. Second it’s been pretty awesome to offload tasks. I can say something like “write some unit tests for this file, here are some edge cases I’m particularly concerned about” then I just let it run and continue with something else. Come back a few mins later to see what it came up with. It’s a fun way to work.
This post is pretty much my exact experience with the coding tools.
Basically the state of the art right now can turn me into an an architect/CTO that spends a lot of time complaining about poor architectural choices. Crucially Claude does not quite understand how to greenfield implement good architectures. 3.7 is also JUST . SO. CHATTY. It’s better than 3.5, but more annoying.
Gemini 2.5 needs one more round of coding tuning; it’s excellent, has longer context and is much better at arch, but still occasionally misformats or forgets things.
Upshot — my hobby coding can now be ‘hobby startup making’ if I’m willing to complain a lot, or write out the scaffolding and requirements docs. It provides nearly no serotonin boost from getting into flow and delivering something awesome, but it does let me watch YouTube on the side while it codes.
Decisions..
This is extremely fascinating and finally something that feels extremely tangible as opposed to vibes based ideas around how AI will "take everyone's jobs" while failing to fill in the gaps between. This feels extremely gap filling.
I find it quite interesting how we can do a very large chunk of the work up front in design, in order to automate the rest of the work. Its almost as if waterfall was the better pattern all along, but we just lacked the tools at that time to make it work out.
Waterfall has always been the best model as long as specs are frozen, which is never the case.
When I first started in dev, on a Unix OS, we did 'waterfall' (though we just called it releasing software, thirty years ago). We did a a major release every year, minor releases every three months, and patches as and when. All this software was sent to customers on mag tapes, by courier. Minor releases were generally new features.
Definitely times were different back then. But we did release software often, and it tended to be better quality than now (because we couldn't just fix-forward). I've been in plenty of Agile companies whose software moves slower than the old days. Too much haste, not enough speed.
Specs were never frozen with waterfall.
The difference between agile and waterfall only really matters at the start of a project. Once it is deployed/released/in-use, the two approaches converge, more or less.
Only if you don't learn anything while developing. Which is also never the case.
sure, but if you're generating the code in a very small amount of time from the specs then suddenly its no longer the code that is the source, its the specs.
That's what waterfall always wanted to be and it failed because writing the code usually took a lot longer than writing the specs, but now perhaps, that is no longer the case.
Specs aren't done until the product is retired, thus, code ain't done either.
Many companies now engage in serial waterfalling.
Great observations.
As a frontend designer, not a developer, I'm intrigued by the techniques presented by the author, though most devs commenting here seem to be objecting to the code quality. (Way above my pay grade, but hopefully a solvable problem.)
As someone who loves to nerd out on creative processes, it's interesting indeed to contemplate whether AI assisted dev would favor waterfall vs incremental project structure.
If indeed what works is waterfall dev similar to the method described in TFA, we'll want to figure out how to use iterative process elsewhere, for the sake of the many benefits when it comes to usability and utility.
To me that suggests the main area of iteration would be A) on the human factors side: UX and UI design, and B) in the initial phases of the project.
If we're using an AI-assisted "neo waterfall" approach to implementation, we'll want to be highly confident in the specifications we're basing it all on. On regular waterfall projects it's critical to reduce the need for post-launch changes due to their impact on project cost and timeline.[1] So for now it's best to assume we need to do the same for an AI-assisted implementation.
To have confidence in our specs document we'll need a fully fledged design. A "fully humane", user approved, feature complete UX and UI. It will need to be aligned with users' mental models, goals, and preferences as much as possible. It will need to work within whatever the technical constraints are and meet the business goals of the project.
Now all that is what designers should be doing anyway, but to me the stakes seem higher on a waterfall style build, even if it's AI-assisted.
So to shoulder that greater responsibility, I think design teams are going to need a slightly different playbook and a more rigorous process than what's typical nowadays. The makeup of the design team may need to change as well.
Just thinking about it now, here's a first take on what that process might be. It's an adaptation of the design tecniques I currently use on non-waterfall projects.
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::Hypothesis for a UX and UI Design Method for AI-assisted, "Neo-Waterfall" Projects::
Main premise: Designers will need to lead a structured, iterative, comprehensive rapid prototyping phase at the beginning of a project.
| Overview: |
• In my experience, the DESIGN->BUILD->USE/LEARN model is an excellent guide for wrangling the iterative cycles of a rapid prototyping phase. With each "DBU/L" cycle we define problems to be solved, create solutions, then test them with users, etc.
• We document every segment of the DBU/L cycle, including inputs and outputs, for future reference.
• The USE/LEARN phase of the DBU/L cycle gives us feedback and insight that informs what we explore in the next iteration.
• Through multiple such iterations we gain confidence in the tradeoffs and assumptions baked into our prototypes.
• We incrementally evolve the scope of the prototypes and further organize the UX object model with every iteration. (Object Oriented UX, aka OOUX, is the key to finding our way to both beautiful data models and user experiences).
• Eventually our prototyping yields an iteration that fulfills user needs, business goals, and heeds technical constraints. That's when we can "freeze" the UX and UI models, firm up the data model and start writing the specifications for the neo-waterfall implementation.
• An additional point of technique: Extrapolating from the techniques described in TFA, it seems designers will need to do their prototyping in a medium that can later function as a keyframe constraint for the AI. (We don't want our AI agent changing the UI in the implementation phase of the waterfall project, so UI files are a necessary reference to bound its actions.)
• Therefore, we'll need to determine which mediums of UI design the AI agents can perceive and work with. Will we need a full frontend design structured in directories containing shippable markup and CSS? Or can the AI agent work with Figma files? Or is the solution somewhere in between, say with a combination of drawings, design tokens, and a generic component library?
• Finally, we'll need a method for testing the implemented UX and UI against the USE criteria we arrived at during prototyping. We should be able to synthesize these criteria from the prototyping documentation, data modeling and specification documents. We need a reasonable set of tests for both human and technical factors.
• Post launch, we should continue gathering feedback. No matter how good our original 1.0 is, software learns, wants to evolve. (Metaphorically, that is. But maybe some day soon--actually?) Designing and making changes to brownfield software originally built with AI-assistance might be a topic worthy of consideration on its own.
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So as a designer, that's how I would approach the general problem. Preliminary thoughts anyway. These techniques aren't novel; I use variations of them in my consulting work. But so far I've only built alongside devs made from meat :-)
I'll probably expand/refine this topic in a blog post. If anyone is interested in reading and discussing more, I can send you the link.
Email me at: scott [AT] designerwho [DOT] codes
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[1] For those who are new to waterfall project structure, know that unmaking and remaking the "final sausage" can be extremely complex and costly. It's easy to find huge projects that have failed completely due to the insurmountable complexity. One question for the future will be whether AI agents can be useful in such cases (no sausage pun intended).
One of the possibly obsolete things I enjoy about working with a human junior dev is that they learn and improve. It's nice to feel all this interaction is building something.
It’s common practice to put your preferences and tips/advice into a readme solely for the LLM to consume to learn about what you want it to do.
So you’d set things like code standards (and hopefully enforce them via feedback tools), guides for writing certain architectures, etc. Then when you have the LLM start working it will first read that readme to “learn” how you want it to generally behave.
I’ve found that I typically edit this file as time goes on as a way to add semi-permanent feedback into the system. Even if your context window gets too large when you restart the LLM will start at that readme to prime itself.
That’s the closest analogy I can think of.
Interesting post, but this perspective seems to be the main focus, like all the time. I find this statement to be completely wrong usage of AI:
“This is especially noteworthy because I don’t actually know Python. Yes, with 25+ years of software development experience, I could probably write a few lines of working Python code if pressed — but I don’t truly know the language. I lack the muscle memory and intimate knowledge of its conventions and best practices.”
You should not use AI to just “do” the hard job, since as many have mentioned, it does it poorly and sloppy. Use AI to quickly learn the advantages and disadvantages of the language, then you do not have to navigate through documentation to learn everything, just validate what the AI outputs. All is contextual, and since you know what you want in high level, use AI to help you understand the language.
This costs speed yes, but I have more control and gain knowledge about the language I chose.
I agree 100%, but in this very specific case, I really just wanted a working one-off solution that I'm not going to spend much time on going forward, AND I wanted to use it as an excuse to see how far I can go with AI tooling in a tech stack I don't know.
That being said, using AI as a teacher can be a wonderful experience. For us seniors, but also and probably more importantly, for eager and non-lazy juniors.
I have one such junior on my team who currently speed-runs through the craft because he uses AI to explain EVERYTHING to him: What is this pattern? Why should I use it? What are the downsides? And so on.
Of course I also still tutor him, as this is a main part of my job, but the availability of an AI that knows so much and always has time for him and never gets tired etc is just fantastic.
This is interesting, thanks for posting. I've been searching for some sort of 'real' usage of AI-coding. I'm a skeptic of the current state of things, so it's useful to see real code.
I know Python, but have been coding in Go for the last few years. So I'm thinking how I'd implement this in Go.
There's a lot of code there. Do you think it's a lot, or it doesn't matter? It seems reasonably clear though, easy to understand.
I'd have expected better documentation/in-line comments. Is that something that you did/didn't specify?
With this project, I was really only interested in the resulting application, and intentionally not in the resulting code.
I really wanted to see how far I can get with that approach.
I will ask it to clean up the code and its comments and report back.
As much as I am still sceptical about AI tools, the past month has been a revolution as a senior dev myself.
I'm blasting through tickets, leaving more time to tutor and help junior colleagues and do refactoring. Guiding them has then been a multiplier, and also a bit of an eye opener about how little real guidance they've been getting up until now. I didn't realise how resource constrained we'd been as a team leading to not enough time guiding and helping them.
I don't trust the tools with writing code very often but they are very good at architecture questions, outputting sample code etc. Supercharged google
As a generalist, I feel less overwhelmed
It's probably been the most enjoyable month at this job.
Senior developer skills haven't changed. Wrangling paragraphs of business slop into real technical requirements, communicating these to various stakeholders, understanding how all the discrete parts of whatever system you're building fit together, being responsible for timelines, getting the rest of the team coordinated/aligned and on-track, etc.
Actually coding is a relatively small part of my job. I could use an LLM for the others parts but my employer does not appreciate being given word salad.
with the ai age, i think its also making sure team members use ai in similar was to get repeatable results
I yesterday set chatgpt to a coding task. It utterly failed. Its error handling was extensive, but wrong. It didn't know file formats. It couldn't write the code when i told it the format. The structure of the code sucked. The style was worse. I've never had to work so hard for such garbage. I could have knocked it out from scratch faster with higher quality.
> Once again, the AI agent implemented this entire feature without requiring me to write any code manually.
> For controllers, I might include a small amount of essential details like the route name: [code]
Commit history: https://github.com/dx-tooling/platform-problem-monitoring-co...
Look, I honestly think this is a fair article and some good examples, but what is with this inane “I didn’t write any of it myself” claim that is clearly false that every one of these articles keeps bringing up?
What’s wrong with the fact you did write some code as part of it? You clearly did.
So weird.
True, this needs to be fixed.
What I wanted to express was that I didn’t do any of the implementation, that is, any logic.
I need to phrase this better.
Wait, I just saw what you meant: so no, for the Python tool my message stands. I did not write any code for it myself.
Not OP but did you edit the code via prompts, or was the whole thing a one-shot? That particular aspect is very confusing to me, I think you should clarify it.
Absolutely not a one-shot, many iterations.
Skimming through the article, it lacks clear structure and I am not sure what is the author attempting to show? Some new skills he had to use? Formulating requirements? That he can write extremely long prompts? The Conclusion section looks just like something a GenAI tool would produce. Or a first-year student in an essay.
I've taken this feedback to heart and tried to improve the structure a bit.
The main message I want to bring across is two-fold:
1. Senior developers are in a great position to make productive use of AI coding tools
2. I have (so far) identified three measures that make AI coding sessions much more successful
I hope the reworked version makes these more central and clear. I'm not a native English speaker, thus it's probably not possible for me to end up with an optimal version.
Still, I hope the new approach works a bit better for you — would love to receive another round of feedback.
Hey, thanks for not being offended about an honest comment, not a lot folks could take it as maturely, as you did :) May I suggest to add a short summary, half page max, of the important results that you consider to have achieved at the beginning of the article? Kind of like how scientific articles prepend the content with an abstract. I think it would help a lot in building the expectations for reading the rest of it.
In my travels I find writing code to be natural and relaxing--a time to reflect on what I'm doing and why. LLMs haven't helped me out too much yet.
Coding by prompt is the next lowering of the bar and vibe coding even more so. Totally great in some scenarios and adds noise in others.
I didn’t see anything of substance in the article. For example if they benefited from AI just how beneficial was it? Did it shrink their code by any amount or reduce execution time?
No, the article was just something about enjoying AI. This is hardly anything related to senior software developer skills.
I'm skeptical that
1. Clearly define requirements
2. Clearly sketch architecture
3. Setup code tool suite
4. Let AI agent write the remaining code
Is better price-performance than going lighter on 1-3 and instead of 4, spending that time writing the code yourself with heavy input from LLM autocomplete, which is what LLMs are elite at.
The agent will definitely(?) write the code faster, but quality and understanding (tech debt) can suffer.
IOW the real takeaway is that knowing the requirements, architecture, and tooling is where the value is. LLM Agent value is dubious.
We're just in a transitional moment. It's not realistic to expect LLM capabilities to leapfrog from marginally better autocomplete to self-guided autocoder without passing through a phase where it shows tantalizing hints of being able to go solo yet lacks the ability to follow through. Over the next couple years, the reliability, versatility, and robustness of LLMs as coders will steadily increase.
You know what’s more fun than having a bad junior write crap code while you point out their mistakes? Writing good code yourself.
I completely agree, as a fellow senior coder. It allows me to move significantly faster through my tasks and makes me much more productive.
It also makes coding a lot less painful because I'm not making typos or weird errors (since so much code autocompletes) that I spend less time debugging too.
I dunno, I just had Copilot sneak in a typo today that took about ten minutes of debugging to find. I certainly could have made a similar typo myself if copilot hadn't done it for me, but, all the same copilot probably saved me a minute worth of typing today but cost me 10 minutes of debugging.
Even if you made a similar typo you'd have a better understanding of the code having written it yourself. So it likely wouldn't have take 10 minutes to debug.
Conceptually it was a really simple bug (I was returning a bounding box and it returned (min, min) instead of (min, max)). So, I mean, the amount that AI broke it was pretty minor and it was mostly my fault for not seeing it when I generated it. But you know, if it's messing stuff up when it's generating 4 lines of code I'm not really going to trust it with an entire file, or even an entire function.
The vibe bros would have you believe your prompt is at fault and that you need add "don't make typos".
True, I didn't have five paragraphs on the proper way to handle bounding boxes and the conceptual use of bounding boxes and "please don't confuse lower for upper". All my fault!
This is excellent, and matches my experience.
Those lamenting the loss of manual programming: we are free to hone our skills on personal projects, but for corporate/consulting work, you cannot ignore 5x speed advantage. It's over. AI-assisted coding won.
Is it really 5x? I'm more surprised about 25+ years of experience, and being hard pressed to learn enough python to code the project. It's not like he's learning programming again, or being recently exposed to OOP. Especially when you can find working code samples about the subproblems in the project.
It is 5x if you are already a senior SE knowing your programming language really well, constantly suggesting good architecture yourself ("seed files" is a brilliant idea), and not accepting any slop / asking to rewrite things if something is not up to your standards (of course, every piece of code should be reviewed).
Otherwise, it can be 0.2x in some cases. And you should not use LLMs for anything security-related unless you are a security expert, otherwise you are screwed.
(this is SOTA as of April 2025, I expect things to become better in the near future)
> It is 5x if you are already a senior SE knowing your programming language really well, constantly suggesting good architecture yourself ("seed files" is a brilliant idea), and not accepting any slop / asking to rewrite things if something is not up to your standards (of course, every piece of code should be reviewed).
If you know the programming language really well, that usually means you know what libraries are useful, memorized common patterns, and have some project samples laying out. The actual speed improvement would be on typing the code, but it's usually the activity that requires the least time on any successful project. And unless you're a slow typist, I can't see 5x there.
If you're lacking in fundamental, then it's just a skill issue, and I'd be suspicious of the result.
"Given this code, extract all entities and create the database schema from these", "write documentation for these methods", "write test examples", "write README.md explaining how to use scripts in this directory", "refactor everything in this directory just like this example", etc etc
Everything boring can be automated and it takes five seconds compared to half an hour.
It can only be automated if the only thing you care about is having the code/text, and not making sure they are correct.
> Given this code, extract all entities and create the database schema from these
Sometimes, the best representation for storing and loading data is not the best for manipulating it and vice-versa. Directly mapping code entities to database relations (assuming it's SQL) is a sure way to land yourself in trouble later.
> write documentation for these methods
The intent of documentation is to explain how to use something and the multiple why's behind an implementation. What is there can be done using a symbol explorer. Repeating what is obvious from the name of the function is not helpful. And hallucinating something that is not there is harmful.
> write test examples
Again the type of tests matters more than the amount. So unless you're sure that the test is correct and the test suite really ensure that the code is viable, it's all for naught.
...
Your use cases assume that the output is correct. And as the hallucination risk from LLM models is non-zero, such assumption is harmful.
This is actually a pretty compelling reason for me to suggest that my company not hire consultants/contractors to write code for us. A ton of our dev budget is already spent on untangling edge-case bugs from poorly written/understood code.
What a high quality article, packed with gems. What a treat.
As of 2025, it's no longer the case that older developers (like me at 57) are at a disadvantage just due to potentially lessened sheer brain power, as we had in our 20s. The reason is simple: We know what all the terminologies are, how to ask for things with proper and sufficient levels of detail and context, we know what the pitfalls and common error patterns are, and on and on, from decades of experience. Working with AI has similarities to management positions. You need to be a generalist. You need to know a little about everything, more so than a lot about one thing. All this can ONLY come with age, just like wisdom can only come thru experience.
I just hope that most hiring managers now realize this. With AI the productivity of younger developers has gone up by a factor of 10x, but the productivity of us "Seasoned" developers has gone up 100x. This now evens the playing field, I hope, where us experienced guys will be given a fair shake in the hiring process rather than what's been happening for decades where the 20-somethings pretend to be interviewing the older guys, because some boss told them to, but they never had any actual intentions of hiring anyone over 40, just on the bases of age alone, even if some older guy aces the interview.
This is a great observation and a beautiful perspective.
Would it be okay for you if I quote this on a revised version of the article (with proper attribution, of course)?
Sure, you have my permission. However, in my own case, I'm not currently looking for a job, and never in my life did it take more than 2 weeks to FIND a job, when looking. Been coding 24x7x365 since 1981. :)
...however I'm absolutely certain there are many interviews I've aced and not gotten the job, primarily for being in an several undesirable categories that Silicon Valley progressive wokesters despise with a passion: 1) Over 40. 2) White 3) Male 4) Straight 5) Handsome 6) Rich 7) American, speaking perfect English.
All 7 of those demographic stats about me are absolutely despicable to Silicon Valley hiring managers, and any one alone is enough for them to pass by a candidate over a different one lacking the trait.
You can also quote, this post about Silicon Valley too, and there was even a time when such rants like this would've been CENSORED immediately by HackerNews. Thankfully they've lightened up a bit.
I think with AI my productivity had increased 1% at most. If I measure time saved per week.
If your productivity is up 1% due to AI, that only means one of two things 1) You're not a developer, or 2) Your prompts are 99% poorly written, so that's a you problem not an AI problem.
When working with AI for software engineering assistance, I use it mainly to do three things -
1. Do piddly algorithm type stuff that I've done 1000x times and isn't complicated. (Could take or leave this, often more work than just doing it from scratch)
2. Pasting in gigantic error messages or log files to help diagnose what's going wrong. (HIGHLY recommend.)
3. Give it high level general requirements for a problem, and discuss POTENTIAL strategies instead of actually asking it to solve the problem. This usually allows me to dig down and come up with a good plan for whatever I'm doing quickly. (This is where real value is for me, personally.)
This allows me to quickly zero in on a solution, but more importantly, it helps me zero in strategically too with less trial and error. It let's me have an in-person whiteboard meeting (as I can paste images/text to discuss too) where I've got someone else to bounce ideas off of.
I love it.
Same 3 is the only use case I've found that works well enough. But I'll still usually take a look on google / reddit / stackoverflow / books first just because the information is more reliable.
But it's usually an iterative process, I find pattern A and B on google, I'll ask the LLM and it gives A, B and C. I'll google a bit more about C. Find out C isn't real. Go back and try other people commenting on it on reddit, go back to the LLM to sniff out BS, so on and so on.
> Context on Code Quality (via HackerNews): The HackerNews discussion included valid critiques regarding the code quality in this specific Python project example (e.g., logger configuration, custom config parsing, potential race conditions). It’s a fair point, especially given I’m not a Python expert. For this particular green-field project, my primary goal was rapid prototyping and achieving a working solution in an unfamiliar stack, prioritizing the functional outcome over idiomatic code perfection or optimizing for long-term maintainability in this specific instance. It served as an experiment to see how far AI could bridge a knowledge gap. In brown-field projects within my areas of expertise, or projects demanding higher long-term maintainability, the human review, refinement, and testing process (using the guardrails discussed later) is necessarily much more rigorous. The critiques highlight the crucial role of experienced oversight in evaluating and refining AI-generated code to meet specific quality standards.
We all know how big companies handle software, if it works ship it. Basically once this shit starts becoming very mainstream companies will want to shift into their 5x modes (for their oh so holy investors that need to see stock go up, obviously.)
So once this sloppy prototype is seen as working they will just ship the shit sandwhich prototype. And the developers won’t know what the hell it means so when something breaks in the future, and that is when not if. They will need AI to fix it for them, cause once again they do not understand what is going on.
What I’m seeing here is you proposing replacing one of your legs with AI and letting it do all the heavy lifting, just so you can lift heavier things for the moment.
Once this bubble crumbles the technical debt will be big enough to sink companies, I won’t feel sorry for any of the AI boosties but do for their families that will go into poverty
Hot take: I don't see a problem with this and in fact we will see in a few years that senior engineers will be needed less in the future.
I have a business which is turning in millions in ARR at the moment (made in the pandemic) it's a pest control business and we have got a small team with only 1 experienced senior engineer, we used to have 5 but with AI we reduced it to one which we are still paying well.
Even with maintenance, we plan ahead for this with an LLM and make changes accordingly.
I think we will see more organizations opting for smaller teams and reducing engineer count since now the code generated is to the point that it works, it speeds up development and that it is "good enough".
This is interesting. Do you run a custom app in house? What are some of the main functions of the app? Internal or customer facing?
That free GitHub Copilot though. Microsoft is a relentless drug dealer. If you haven't tried Copilot Edits yet, hold on to your hat. I started using it in a clean Express project and a Vue3 project in VS Code. Basically flawless edits from prompt over multiple files, new files...the works. Easy.
But can it center a div?
This maps pretty well to my experience.
Other devs will say things like "AI is just a stupid glorified autocomplete, it will never be able to handle my Very Special Unique Codebase. I even spent 20 minutes one time trying out Cursor, and it just failed"
Nope, you're just not that good obviously. I am literally 10x more productive at this point. Sprint goals have become single afternoons. If you are not tuned in to what's going on here and embracing it, you are going to be completely obsolete in the next 6 months unless you are some extremely niche high level expert. It wont be a dramatic moment where anyone gets "fired for AI". Orgs will just simply not replace people through attrition when they see productivity staying the same (or even increasing) as headcount goes down.
At all the jobs I had, the valuable stuff was shipped features. The baseline was for them to work well and to be released on time. The struggle was never writing the code, it was to clarify specifications. By comparison, learning libraries and languages was fun.
I don't really need AI to write code for me, because that's the easy part. The aspect that it needs to be good at is helping me ship features that works. And to this date, there's never been a compelling showcase for that one.
Have you considered that the opposite explanation might be true instead?
It could be that other developers are not benefitting from AI as much as you because they don't understand it.
It could also be that you are benefitting more than them because you're less skilled than them, and AI can fill in your gaps but not theirs.
That's the problem. The new norm will be 10x of pre-AI productivity, nobody will be able justify hand-writing code. And until the quality bar of LLM's/their successors get much better (see e.g. comments above looking at the details in the examples given), you'll get accumulation of errors that are higher than what decent programmers get. With higher LOC and more uninspected complexity, you'll get significantly lower quality overall. The coming wave of AI-coded bugs will be fun for all. GOTO FAIL;
After spending a week coding exclusively with AI assistants, I got functional results but was alarmed by the code quality. I discovered that I didn't actually save much time, and the generated code was so complex and unfamiliar that I was scared to modify it. I still use Copilot and Claude and would say I'm able to work through problems 2-3x faster than I would be without AI but I wouldn't say I get a 10x improvement.
My projects are much more complex than standard CRUD applications. If you're building simple back-office CRUD apps, you might see a 10x productivity improvement with AI, but that hasn't been my experience with more complex work.
Giving your anecdotal experience is only useful if you include anecdotal context: seniority, years of experience, technology, project size, sprint goal complexity…
You are not wrong! I will add those infos.
Can you talk through specifically what sprint goals you’ve completed in an afternoon? Hopefully multiple examples.
Grounding these conversations in an actual reality affords more context for people to evaluate your claims. Otherwise it’s just “trust me bro”.
And I say this as a Senior SWE who’s successfully worked with ChatGPT to code up some prototype stuff, but haven’t been able to dedicate 100+ hours to work through all the minutia of learning how to drive daily with it.
If you do want to get more into it, I'd suggest something that plugs into your IDE instead of Copy/Paste with ChatGPT. Try Aider or Roo code. I've only used Aider, and run it in the VS terminal. It's much nicer to be able to leave comments to the AI and have it make the changes to discrete parts of the app.
I'm not the OP, but on your other point about completing sprint goals fast - I'm building a video library app for myself, and wanted to add tagging of videos. I was out dropping the kids at classes and waiting for them. Had 20 minutes and said to Aider/Claude - "Give me an implementation for tagging videos." It came back with the changes it would make across multiple files: Creating a new model, a service, configuring the DI container, updating the DB context, updating the UI to add tags to videos and created a basic search form to click on tags and filter the videos. I hit build before the kids had finished and it all worked. Later, I found a small bug - but it saved me a fair bit of time. I've never been a fast coder - I stare at the screen and think way too much (function and variable names are my doom ... and the hardest problem in programming, and AI fixes this for me).
Some developers may be able to do all this in 20 minutes, but I know that I never could have. I've programmed for 25 years across many languages and frameworks, and know my limitations. A terrible memory is one of them. I would normally spend a good chunk of time on StackOverflow and the documentation sites for whatever frameworks/libraries I'm using. The AI has reduced that reliance and keeps me in the zone for longer.
I think experiences vary. AI can work well with greenfield projects, small features, and helping solve annoying problems. I've tried using it on a large Python Django codebase and it works really well if I ask for help with a particular function AND I give it an example to model after for code consistency.
But I have also spent hours asking Claude and ChatGPT with help trying to solve several annoying Django problems and I have reached the point multiple times where they circle back and give me answers that did not previously work in the same context window. Eventually when I figure out the issue, I have fun and ask it "well does it not work as expected because the existing code chained multiple filter calls in django?" and all of a sudden the AI knows what is wrong! To be fair, there was only one sentence in the django documentation that mentions not chaining filter calls on many to many relationships.
The gap between Sr and Jr skills with close as AI gets better. AI is coming for the SR developer, be assured.
Also, Keyframing can be done in a more autonomous fashion. Sr Engineers can truly vibe code if they setup a proper framework for themselves. Key framing as described in the article is too manual.
> The gap between Sr and Jr skills with close as AI gets better.
Sorry, but as the wind blows, we only have indications of the opposite so far and it's wildly reported as a generating losing their ability for deep thought, relying too much on automated code generation. This is especially damaging for juniors, who never get the chance to learn the tricks of the trade in the first place, and they're the ones having a hard time explaining what the code the LLM generated even does.
Seniors will be few and far between, and we will charge premium for fixing up the crap LLM created, which will fit us great before retirement.
Good luck when we are retired.