Jokes aside it should be noted that the author is a founder and ceo of an AI company, not to mention an active investor in the sector. (All disclosed in his "about" page)
Every once in a while, I try LLMs just to see how improvement is going.
Yesterday I had to explain to Opus what the color white is and what "bottom right" means after it declared problems fixed, repeatedly, that a literal preschooler would have been able to tell were absolutely unchanged from the original problem description.
I am still waiting for this world of redundant programmers I've been hearing about for years.
I am not having the exact same experience as the author--Opus 4.6 and Codex 5.3 seem more incremental to me than what he is describing--but if we're on an exponential curve, the difference is a rounding error.
4 months ago, I tried to build an application mostly vibe-coded. I got impressively far for what I thought was possible, but it bogged down. This past weekend, my friend had OpenClaw build an application of similar complexity in a weekend. The difference is vast.
At work, I wouldn't say I'm one-shotting tasks, but the first shot is doing what used to be a week's work in about an hour, and then the next few hours are polish. Most of the delay in the polish phase is due to the speed of the tooling (e.g. feature branch environment spin up and CI) and the human review at the end of the process.
The side effects people report of lower quality code hitting review are real, but I think that is a matter of training, process and work harness. I see no reason that won't significantly improve.
As I said in another thread a couple days ago, AI is the first technology where everyone is literally having a different experience. Even within my company, there are divergent experiences. But I think we're in world where very soon, companies will be demanding their engineering departments converge to the lived experience of the people who are seeing something like the author. And if they can find people who can actuate that reality, the folks who can't are going to see their options contract precipitously.
> But I think we're in world where very soon, companies will be demanding their engineering departments converge to the lived experience of the people who are seeing something like the author.
I think this part is very real.
If you’re in this thread saying “I don’t get it” you are in danger much faster than your coworker who is using it every day and succeeding at getting around AI’s quirks to be productive.
> Be careful here. I have more coworkers contributing slop and causing production issues than 10x’ing themselves.
Sure, many such cases. We'll all have work for a while, if only so that management has someone to yell at when things break in prod. And break they will -- the technology is not perfected and many are now moving faster than they can actually vet the results. There is obvious risk here.
But the curve we're on is also obvious now. I'm seeing massive improvements in reliability with every model drop. And the model drops are happening faster now. There is less of an excuse than ever for not using the tools to improve your productivity.
I think the near future is going to be something like a high-speed drag race. Going slow isn't an option. Everyone will have to go fast. Many will crash. Some won't and they will win.
> The real danger is if management sees this as acceptable. If so best of luck to everyone.
Already happening. It's just an extension of the "move fast and break stuff" mantra, only faster. I think the jury is still out on if more or less things will break, but it's starting to look like not enough to pump the brakes.
If a company lets faulty code get to production, that's an issue no matter how it is produced. Agentic coding can produce code at much higher volumes, but I think we're still in the early days of figuring out how to scale quality and the other nonfunctional requirements. (I do believe that we're literally talking about days, though, when it comes to some facets of some of these problems.)
But there's nothing inherent about agentic coding to lead to slop outcomes. If you're steering it as a human, you can tweak the output, by hand or agentically, until it matches your expectations. It's not currently a silver bullet.
That said, my experience is that the compressing of the research, initial draft process, and revision--all which used to be the bulk of my job--is radical.
Yes, for me --moved past AI coding accelerating you to 80-90% then living in the valley of infinite tweaks. This past month with with right thinking working with say Opus 4.6 has moved past that blocker.
> But I think we're in world where very soon, companies will be demanding their engineering departments converge to the lived experience of the people who are seeing something like the author.
We already live in that world. It's called "Hey Siri", "Hey Google", and "Alexa". It seems that no amount of executive tantrum has caused any of these tools to give a convergent experience.
I find these water-against-a-rock literary tones so tedious. Even the writer always seems to have to go back and put some of it in BOLD TEXT, supposedly highlighting the main ideas, but really optical affordances.
The truth of this seems much more banal. Computing has become a major drag. There have been tens of thousands of libraries that reinvent the wheel. Every operating system has become a toy. All major language systems have an absurd learning curve. Each important application is fortified by a giant corporation. Social media is self-important pop babble.
LLMs are surprisingly good at dealing with complex systems. I can fire one up and ask, for example, why this Swift code is not compiling. But why doesn’t my Swift editor explain that problem? Why is it a confusing question at all? The entire system was built from the ground up at enormous expense. Why do I seek outside help?
Our computing is full of whizzy animations and pointless Victorian ironmongery. All meaningless. AI is medicine, not the cure.
Management is going to quickly start bisecting human engineers along lines of maximalists and minimalists. The minimalists will all be let go. A few bad things will happen. A few systems will strain under the pressure but itll be “worth it” in the same way that its cheaper to pay lawsuits than do a recall of a plane.
We arent innovating in other areas that might soften the blow. We dont have good support systems, social security, healthcare, or even demands in other areas. How many engineers are going to be plumbers and construction workers?
What a retarded article. And I choose that word very carefully - it is retarded. AI models are as shitty as they were in 2023. The author here is high on his own little AI hype supply and is clearly tweaking hard because he's been snorting it non-stop since Nov 2022. The disillusionment leaping from his almost meaningless words is blinding, leaving me to wade through reams of childish mush. AI isn't smarter than a PhD. AI isn't "smarter" than a horse who's had a lobotomy. It's a fucking shitty search engine with limited practical uses - get over yourself.
What’s the point in using these tools if they’re gonna replace us in a few years? It’s weird the author says that but then his conclusion is basically “go spend money on stuff I’m invested in”.
Covid comparison is apt. I remember being insanely scared in Jan 2020 when those videos of Chinese people dropping dead were coming out (and being shamed by most of my peers etc). Few months later it was starting to become obvious it was really only a major risk if you were old or infirm, but the rest of the world had took awhile to catch up.
AI’s big and gonna change stuff - and like COVID probably for the worse - but we’re in a poorly understood hype cycle right now.
> Few months later it was starting to become obvious it was really only a major risk if you were old or infirm, but the rest of the world had took awhile to catch up.
Only a risk in terms of dying sure, but plenty of people lost taste and smell for long periods before the vaccine (I wouldn't be surprised if some of them have yet to get it back). I'd rather be dead, to be honest. The food around my part of the world is too delicious.
> You can describe an app to AI and have a working version in an hour. I'm not exaggerating. I do this regularly. If you've always wanted to write a book but couldn't find the time or struggled with the writing, you can work with AI to get it done.
Interesting. So you regularly make new apps in 1 hour each.
How is that the same as...writing a book? Did you mean write several short stories? Or are we talking non-fiction?
This is a solid assessment of whats here and what is in front of us. Broad brush stroke dismissals aside, we are here. Evolve or Perish. AI is like unchecked fire, but make no mistake fire is very powerful once it was harnessed. AI leans more supplemental vs incremental than prior major tech shifts and that's worth noting. It will be the same for other sectors and verticals over time. The markets view software eats the world is being eaten by new software.
I asked ai to summarise this blog post.
Jokes aside it should be noted that the author is a founder and ceo of an AI company, not to mention an active investor in the sector. (All disclosed in his "about" page)
How convenient that the AI apocalypse is happening RIGHT NOW, as the investors are more and more worried about an AI bubble. Good timing, I suppose.
Every once in a while, I try LLMs just to see how improvement is going.
Yesterday I had to explain to Opus what the color white is and what "bottom right" means after it declared problems fixed, repeatedly, that a literal preschooler would have been able to tell were absolutely unchanged from the original problem description.
I am still waiting for this world of redundant programmers I've been hearing about for years.
I am not having the exact same experience as the author--Opus 4.6 and Codex 5.3 seem more incremental to me than what he is describing--but if we're on an exponential curve, the difference is a rounding error.
4 months ago, I tried to build an application mostly vibe-coded. I got impressively far for what I thought was possible, but it bogged down. This past weekend, my friend had OpenClaw build an application of similar complexity in a weekend. The difference is vast.
At work, I wouldn't say I'm one-shotting tasks, but the first shot is doing what used to be a week's work in about an hour, and then the next few hours are polish. Most of the delay in the polish phase is due to the speed of the tooling (e.g. feature branch environment spin up and CI) and the human review at the end of the process.
The side effects people report of lower quality code hitting review are real, but I think that is a matter of training, process and work harness. I see no reason that won't significantly improve.
As I said in another thread a couple days ago, AI is the first technology where everyone is literally having a different experience. Even within my company, there are divergent experiences. But I think we're in world where very soon, companies will be demanding their engineering departments converge to the lived experience of the people who are seeing something like the author. And if they can find people who can actuate that reality, the folks who can't are going to see their options contract precipitously.
> But I think we're in world where very soon, companies will be demanding their engineering departments converge to the lived experience of the people who are seeing something like the author.
I think this part is very real.
If you’re in this thread saying “I don’t get it” you are in danger much faster than your coworker who is using it every day and succeeding at getting around AI’s quirks to be productive.
Be careful here. I have more coworkers contributing slop and causing production issues than 10x’ing themselves.
The real danger is if management sees this as acceptable. If so best of luck to everyone.
> Be careful here. I have more coworkers contributing slop and causing production issues than 10x’ing themselves.
Sure, many such cases. We'll all have work for a while, if only so that management has someone to yell at when things break in prod. And break they will -- the technology is not perfected and many are now moving faster than they can actually vet the results. There is obvious risk here.
But the curve we're on is also obvious now. I'm seeing massive improvements in reliability with every model drop. And the model drops are happening faster now. There is less of an excuse than ever for not using the tools to improve your productivity.
I think the near future is going to be something like a high-speed drag race. Going slow isn't an option. Everyone will have to go fast. Many will crash. Some won't and they will win.
> The real danger is if management sees this as acceptable. If so best of luck to everyone.
Already happening. It's just an extension of the "move fast and break stuff" mantra, only faster. I think the jury is still out on if more or less things will break, but it's starting to look like not enough to pump the brakes.
If a company lets faulty code get to production, that's an issue no matter how it is produced. Agentic coding can produce code at much higher volumes, but I think we're still in the early days of figuring out how to scale quality and the other nonfunctional requirements. (I do believe that we're literally talking about days, though, when it comes to some facets of some of these problems.)
But there's nothing inherent about agentic coding to lead to slop outcomes. If you're steering it as a human, you can tweak the output, by hand or agentically, until it matches your expectations. It's not currently a silver bullet.
That said, my experience is that the compressing of the research, initial draft process, and revision--all which used to be the bulk of my job--is radical.
Yes, for me --moved past AI coding accelerating you to 80-90% then living in the valley of infinite tweaks. This past month with with right thinking working with say Opus 4.6 has moved past that blocker.
> But I think we're in world where very soon, companies will be demanding their engineering departments converge to the lived experience of the people who are seeing something like the author.
We already live in that world. It's called "Hey Siri", "Hey Google", and "Alexa". It seems that no amount of executive tantrum has caused any of these tools to give a convergent experience.
Voice assistants, which I've used less than 10 times in my life, are hardly related to what I'm talking about.
I find these water-against-a-rock literary tones so tedious. Even the writer always seems to have to go back and put some of it in BOLD TEXT, supposedly highlighting the main ideas, but really optical affordances.
The truth of this seems much more banal. Computing has become a major drag. There have been tens of thousands of libraries that reinvent the wheel. Every operating system has become a toy. All major language systems have an absurd learning curve. Each important application is fortified by a giant corporation. Social media is self-important pop babble.
LLMs are surprisingly good at dealing with complex systems. I can fire one up and ask, for example, why this Swift code is not compiling. But why doesn’t my Swift editor explain that problem? Why is it a confusing question at all? The entire system was built from the ground up at enormous expense. Why do I seek outside help?
Our computing is full of whizzy animations and pointless Victorian ironmongery. All meaningless. AI is medicine, not the cure.
> They focused on making AI great at writing code first... because building AI requires a lot of code.
I'm not convinced this person knows what they're talking about.
Management is going to quickly start bisecting human engineers along lines of maximalists and minimalists. The minimalists will all be let go. A few bad things will happen. A few systems will strain under the pressure but itll be “worth it” in the same way that its cheaper to pay lawsuits than do a recall of a plane.
We arent innovating in other areas that might soften the blow. We dont have good support systems, social security, healthcare, or even demands in other areas. How many engineers are going to be plumbers and construction workers?
If what the author says is true, there’s no point in management either.
What a retarded article. And I choose that word very carefully - it is retarded. AI models are as shitty as they were in 2023. The author here is high on his own little AI hype supply and is clearly tweaking hard because he's been snorting it non-stop since Nov 2022. The disillusionment leaping from his almost meaningless words is blinding, leaving me to wade through reams of childish mush. AI isn't smarter than a PhD. AI isn't "smarter" than a horse who's had a lobotomy. It's a fucking shitty search engine with limited practical uses - get over yourself.
Here's a real-world example of extremely simple logic that OpenAI's flagship model couldn't grasp. https://chatgpt.com/share/698c784f-bb4c-800e-8cf1-f62b4f2904...
In fact, I would say that in nearly every single response it gives there is at least one line that literally makes no sense.
It's 2026, not 2023 - the time for hyping AI is long over.
What’s the point in using these tools if they’re gonna replace us in a few years? It’s weird the author says that but then his conclusion is basically “go spend money on stuff I’m invested in”.
Covid comparison is apt. I remember being insanely scared in Jan 2020 when those videos of Chinese people dropping dead were coming out (and being shamed by most of my peers etc). Few months later it was starting to become obvious it was really only a major risk if you were old or infirm, but the rest of the world had took awhile to catch up.
AI’s big and gonna change stuff - and like COVID probably for the worse - but we’re in a poorly understood hype cycle right now.
> What’s the point in using these tools if they’re gonna replace us in a few years?
Increase shareholder value in the short term.
> Few months later it was starting to become obvious it was really only a major risk if you were old or infirm, but the rest of the world had took awhile to catch up.
Only a risk in terms of dying sure, but plenty of people lost taste and smell for long periods before the vaccine (I wouldn't be surprised if some of them have yet to get it back). I'd rather be dead, to be honest. The food around my part of the world is too delicious.
> You can describe an app to AI and have a working version in an hour. I'm not exaggerating. I do this regularly. If you've always wanted to write a book but couldn't find the time or struggled with the writing, you can work with AI to get it done.
Interesting. So you regularly make new apps in 1 hour each.
How is that the same as...writing a book? Did you mean write several short stories? Or are we talking non-fiction?
> Making AI great at coding was the strategy that unlocks everything else. That's why they did it first.
They did it first because doing it first was easier. There are tons of examples around and code can be verified to work.
On their heads be it
This is a solid assessment of whats here and what is in front of us. Broad brush stroke dismissals aside, we are here. Evolve or Perish. AI is like unchecked fire, but make no mistake fire is very powerful once it was harnessed. AI leans more supplemental vs incremental than prior major tech shifts and that's worth noting. It will be the same for other sectors and verticals over time. The markets view software eats the world is being eaten by new software.
All about AI taking over the world.
If we cover our eyes, it definitely won't happen
[dead]