Posted by bigwheels 1/26/2026
Empowering people to do 10 times as much as they could before means they hit 100 times the roadblocks. Again, in a lot of ways we've already lived in that reality for the past many years. On a task-by-task basis programming today is already a lot easier than it was 20 years ago, and we just grew our desires and the amount of controls and process we apply. Problems arise faster than solutions. Growing our velocity means we're going to hit a lot more problems.
I'm not saying you're wrong, so much as saying, it's not the whole story and the only possibility. A lot of people today are kept out of programming just because they don't want to do that much on a computer all day, for instance. That isn't going to change. There's still going to be skills involved in being better than other people at getting the computers to do what you want.
Also on a long term basis we may find that while we can produce entry-level coders that are basically just proxies to the AI by the bucketful that it may become very difficult to advance in skills beyond that, and those who are already over the hurdle of having been forced to learn the hard way may end up with a very difficult to overcome moat around their skills, especially if the AIs plateau for any period of time. I am concerned that we are pulling up the ladder in a way the ladder has never been pulled up before.
The juniors though will radically have to upskill. The standard junior dev portfolio can be replicated by claude code in like three prompts
The game has changed and I don't think all the players are ready to handle it
its opposite, now in addition to all other skills, you need skill how to handle giant codebases of viobe-coded mess using AI.
I personally think the barrier is going to get higher, not lower. And we will be back expected to do more.
Day after day the global quality of software and learning resources will degrade as LLM grey goo consumes every single nook and cranny of the Internet. We will soon see the first signs of pure cargo cult design patterns, conventions and schemes that LLMs made up and then regurgitated. Only people who learned before LLMs became popular will know that they are not to be followed.
People who aren't learning to program without LLMs today are getting left behind.
That is assuming that LLMs plateau in capability, if they haven't already, which I think is highly likely.
Who doesn't like building? Building without any thought is literally a toy, like Lego or paint by numbers. That's the entire reason those things are popular. But a game is not a job. Sometimes I feel like half the people in this career are children. Never had any real responsibility. "Oh, everyone writes bugs, who tf cares". "Move fast, break stuff" was literally and unironically the tag line for a company that should have been taking far more responsibility.
This trend isn't limited to programmers either. Wherever I look I see people not taking responsibility. Lots of children in adult bodies. I do hope there are some adults who are really pulling the strings somewhere...
I'm honestly considering throwing away my JetBrains subscription and this is year 9 or 10 of me having one. I only open Zed and start yappin' at Claude Code. My employer doesn't even want me using ReSharper because some contractor ruined it for everyone else by auto running all code suggestions and checking them in blindly, making for really obnoxious code diffs and probably introducing countless bugs and issues.
Meanwhile tasks that I know would take any developers months, I can hand-craft with Claude in a few hours, with the same level of detail, but no endless weeks of working on things that'll be done SoonTM.
It’s hard to let go of being the keyboard jockey, but in so many cases it is better to describe plans and acceptance criteria and just review the diffs.
A part of me really want to say yes and wear it as a badge to have been coding before LLMs were a thing, but at the same time, it's not unprecedented.
That’s not really true in this case
I think a person with zero coding knowledge would have a lot tougher time using these tools successfully
I've seen the exact opposite with Claude. It literally ditched my request mid-analysis when doing a root cause analysis. It decided I was tired of the service failing and then gave me some restart commands to 'just get it working'
Slopacolypse. I am bracing for 2026 as the year of the slopacolypse across all of github, substack, arxiv, X/instagram, and generally all digital media.
“slopacolypse” does not make any sense both in writing and pronunciation.
I think not much. The real society bottleneck is that a growing number of peeps try to convince each other that life and society are a zero sum game.
They are so much more if we don't do that.
For as fast as this is all moving, it's good to remember that most of us are actually a lot closer to the tip of the spear than we think.
Vibe coding and other tools, such as Google Vision, helped me download images published online, compile a PDF, perform OCR (Tesseract and Google Vision), and save everything in text format.
The OCR process was satisfactory for a first draft, but the text file has a lot of errors, as you'd expect when the dictionary has about 30,000 entries: Diacritical marks disappear, along with typographical marks and dashes, lines are moved up and down, and parts of speech (POS) are written in so many different ways due to errors that it is necessary to identify the wrong POS's one by one.
If the reasoning abilities of LLM-derived coding agents were as advanced as some claim, it would be possible for the LLM to derive the rules that must be applied to the entire dictionary from a sufficiently large set of “gold standard” examples.
If only that were the case. Every general rule applied creates other errors that propagate throughout the text, so that for every problem partially solved, two more emerge. What is evident to me is not clear to the LLM, in the sense that it is simple for me, albeit long and tedious, to do the editing work manually.
To give an example, if trans.v. (for example) indicates a transitive verb, it is clear to me that .trans.v. is a typographical error. I can tell the coding tool (I used Gemini, Claude, and Codex, with Codex being the best) that, given a standard POS, if there is a “.” before it, it must be deleted because it is a typo. The generalization that comes easily to me but not to the coding agent is that if not one but two periods precede the POS, it means there are two typos, not to delete just one of the two dots.
This means that almost all rules have to be specified, whereas I expected the coding agent to generalize from the gigantic corpus on which it was trained (it should “understand” what the POS are, typical typos, the language in which the dictionary is written, etc.).
The transition from text to json to webapp is almost miraculous, but what is still missing from the mix is human-level reasoning and common sense (in part, I still believe that coding agents are fantastic, to be clear).