Posted by bigwheels 1 day ago
Writing code in many cases is faster to me than writing English (that is how PLs are designed, btw!) LLM/agentic is very “neat” but still a toy to the professional, I would say. I doubt reports like this one. For those of us building real world products with shelf-lives (Is Andrej representative of this archetype?), I just don’t see the value-add touted out there. I’d love to be proven wrong. But writing code (in code, not English), to me and many others, is still faster than reading/proving it.
I think there’s a combination of fetishizing and Stockholm syndroming going on in these enthusiastic self-reports. PMW.
Anyone wondering what exactly is he actually building? What? Where?
> The mistakes have changed a lot - they are not simple syntax errors anymore, they are subtle conceptual errors that a slightly sloppy, hasty junior dev might do.
I would LOVE to have jsut syntax errors produced by LLMs, "subtle conceptual errors that a slightly sloppy, hasty junior dev might do." are neither subtle nor slightly sloppy, they actually are serious and harmful, and no junior devs have no experience to fix those.
> They will implement an inefficient, bloated, brittle construction over 1000 lines of code and it's up to you to be like "umm couldn't you just do this instead?"
Why just not hand write 100 loc with the help of an LLM for tests, documentation and some autocomplete instead of making it write 1000 loc and then clean it up? Also very difficult to do, 1000 lines is a lot.
> Tenacity. It's so interesting to watch an agent relentlessly work at something. They never get tired, they never get demoralized, they just keep going and trying things where a person would have given up long ago to fight another day.
It's a computer program running in the cloud, what exactly did he expected?
> Speedups. It's not clear how to measure the "speedup" of LLM assistance.
See above
> 2) I can approach code that I couldn't work on before because of knowledge/skill issue. So certainly it's speedup, but it's possibly a lot more an expansion.
mmm not sure, if you don't have domain knowledge you could have an initial stubb at the problem, what when you need to iterate over it? You don't if you don't have domain knowledge on your own
> Fun. I didn't anticipate that with agents programming feels more fun because a lot of the fill in the blanks drudgery is removed and what remains is the creative part.
No it's not fun, eg LLMs produce uninteresting uis, mostly bloated with react/html
> Atrophy. I've already noticed that I am slowly starting to atrophy my ability to write code manually.
My bet is that sooner or later he will get back to coding by hand for periods of time to avoid that, like many others, the damage overreliance on these tools bring is serious.
> Largely due to all the little mostly syntactic details involved in programming, you can review code just fine even if you struggle to write it.
No programming it's not "syntactic details" the practice of programming it's everything but "syntactic details", one should learn how to program not the language X or Y
> What happens to the "10X engineer" - the ratio of productivity between the mean and the max engineer? It's quite possible that this grows a lot.
Yet no measurable econimic effects so far
> Armed with LLMs, do generalists increasingly outperform specialists? LLMs are a lot better at fill in the blanks (the micro) than grand strategy (the macro).
Did people with a smartphone outperformed photographers?
All of the real world code I have had to review created by AI is buggy slop (often with subtle, but weird bugs that don't show up for a while). But on HN I'm told "this is because your co-workers don't know how to AI right!!!!" Then when someone who supposedly must be an expert in getting things done with AI posts, it's always big claims with hand-wavy explanations/evidence.
Then the comments section is littered with no effort comments like this.
Yet oddly whenever anyone asks "show me the thing you built?" Either it looks like every other half-working vibe coded CRUD app... or it doesn't exist/can't be shown.
If you tell me you have discovered a miracle tool, just some me the results. Not taking increasingly ridiculous claims at face value is not "fear". What I don't understand is where comments like yours come from? What makes you need this to be more than it is?
I've worked extensively in the AI space, and believe that it is extremely useful, but these weird claims (even from people I respect a lot) that "something big and mysterious is happening, I just can't show you yet!" set of my alarms.
When sensible questions are met with ad hominems by supporters it further sets of alarm bells.
They have to maintain the hype until a somewhat credible exit appears and therefore lash out with boomer memes, FOMO, and the usual insane talking points like "there are builders and coders".
>Anyone wondering what exactly is he actually building? What? Where?
this is trivially answerable. it seems like they did not do even the slightest bit of research before asking question after question to seem smart and detailed.
On the contrary if it was for a job in a public sector I would just let the LLM spit out some output and play stupid, since salary is very low.
> "IDEs/agent swarms/fallability. Both the "no need for IDE anymore" hype and the "agent swarm" hype is imo too much for right now. The models definitely still make mistakes and if you have any code you actually care about I would watch them like a hawk, in a nice large IDE on the side. The mistakes have changed a lot - they are not simple syntax errors anymore, they are subtle conceptual errors that a slightly sloppy, hasty junior dev might do. The most common category is that the models make wrong assumptions on your behalf and just run along with them without checking. They also don't manage their confusion, they don't seek clarifications, they don't surface inconsistencies, they don't present tradeoffs, they don't push back when they should, and they are still a little too sycophantic. Things get better in plan mode, but there is some need for a lightweight inline plan mode. They also really like to overcomplicate code and APIs, they bloat abstractions, they don't clean up dead code after themselves, etc. They will implement an inefficient, bloated, brittle construction over 1000 lines of code and it's up to you to be like "umm couldn't you just do this instead?" and they will be like "of course!" and immediately cut it down to 100 lines. They still sometimes change/remove comments and code they don't like or don't sufficiently understand as side effects, even if it is orthogonal to the task at hand. All of this happens despite a few simple attempts to fix it via instructions in CLAUDE . md. Despite all these issues, it is still a net huge improvement and it's very difficult to imagine going back to manual coding. TLDR everyone has their developing flow, my current is a small few CC sessions on the left in ghostty windows/tabs and an IDE on the right for viewing the code + manual edits."
I started by copy pasting more and more stuff in chatgpt. Then using more and more in-IDE prompting, then more and more agent tools (Claude etc). And suddenly I realise I barely hand code anymore
For sure there's still a place for manual coding, especially schemas/queries or other fiddly things where a tiny mistake gets amplified, but the vast majority of "basic work" is now just prompting, and honestly the code quality is _better_ that it was before, all kinds of refactors I didn't think about or couldn't be bothered with have almost automatically
And people still call them stochastic parrots
ChatGPT 3.5/4 (2023-2024): The chat interface was verbose and clunky and it was just... wrong... like 70+% of the time. Not worth using.
CoPilot autocomplete and Gitlab Duo and Junie (late 2024-early 2025): Wayyy too aggressive at guessing exactly what I wasn't doing and hijacked my tab complete when pre-LLM type-tetris autocomplete was just more reliable.
Copilot Edit/early Cursor (early 2025): Ok, I can sort of see uses here but god is picking the right files all the time such a pain as it really means I need to have figured out what I wanted to do in such detail already that what was even the point? Also the models at that time just quickly descended into incoherency after like three prompts, if it went off track good luck ever correcting it.
Copilot Agent mode / Cursor (late 2025): Ok, great, if the scope is narrowly scoped, and I'm either going to write the tests for it or it's refactoring existing code it could do something. Like something mechanical like the library has a migration where we need to replace the use of methods A/B/C and replace them with a different combination of X/Y/Z. great, it can do that. Or like CRUD controller #341. I mean, sure, if my boss is going to pay for it, but not life changing.
Zed Agent mode / Cursor agent mode / Claude code (early 2026): Finally something where I can like describe the architecture and requirements of a feature, let it code, review that code, give it written instructions on how to clean it up / refactor / missing tests, and iterate.
But that was like 2 years of "really it's better and revolutionary now" before it actually got there. Now maybe in some languages or problem domains, it was useful for people earlier but I can understand people who don't care about "but it works now" when they're hearing it for the sixth time.
And I mean, what one hand gives the other takes away. I have a decent amount of new work dealing with MRs from my coworkers where they just grabbed the requirements from a stakeholder, shoved it into Claude or Cursor and it passed the existing tests and it's shipped without much understanding. When they wrote them themselves, they tested it more and were more prepared to support it in production...
Both can be true. You're tapping into every line of code publicly available, and your day-to-day really isn't that unique. They're really good at this kind of work.
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
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.
its opposite, now in addition to all other skills, you need skill how to handle giant codebases of viobe-coded mess using AI.
Quite insightful.
Nevermind the fact he became successful _because_ of his skills and his brain.