Using layers like the loops described here to abdicate your work is you decoupling from the joint market/engineering value you originally provided.
I am so over this. I cannot take anyone seriously that claims inevitability of their ideas, and how you must adopt them without "being left behind". If these tools are so good and so capable the result should be able to speak for themselves rather than this FOMO inducing, emotional language.
> and in recent weeks it has started to dominate the Twitter discourse.
As a general rule, I don't waste my time with the advice of people who still think Twitter is a source of wisdom.
EDIT: there's a version of this that could be positive--everything could get a hell of a lot more secure. But that doesn't seem to be what's happening.
It is true that the author is incorrect: you can certainly opt out, but you won't be opting out of AI, you'll be opting out of the industry.
The game is to find ways to automate that. Not fully but yes to reduce what's required from humans. Seems like you're questioning the entire premise rather than pondering how far it can be taken and how.
That said the idea of loop has always been there (iteration, V cycle etc) but I'd be glad to find people with more theory and less agents swinging blindly so to speak.
> Present-day models tend to produce code that is too defensive, too complex, too local in its reasoning. They avoid strong invariants. They add fallbacks instead of making bad states impossible. They duplicate code, invent bad abstractions, and paper over unclear design with more machinery. Worse though: I so far see very little progress of this improving.
Context-smithing can help to a degree and cyclomatic-like complexity rules tend to make matters worse. So, you either roll up your sleeves or close your eyes and hope for the best. I've had limited success with the latter.
I've run into the issue a lot; I know it happens. I handled it manually for a while by just having a fresh instance inspect the code - "review this for DRY violations" and "how would you re-write this into a global architecture instead of a bunch of local code".
Eventually the list ended up long enough that I've got an agent that handles it. You've just got to treat "write code that works" and "write elegant code" as two separate tasks - either a fresh instance or an Agent will work
Being an iOS engineer, much of my engineering cycle these days is going from Figma/PRD → spec → code. After being handed off to QA, we handle the bugs and product slips as they come through, while we simultaneously build/spec the upcoming addition. This is basically the same agile style that's been popular for 20y, just super-powered with agents.
How might someone accomplish the same goals using loops instead?
- An automation that periodically checks for PRD's at a given location that have not yet been implemented.
- If it sees one not implemented, it puts a lock on it (so other agents later don't pick it up while its still working) and implements the PRD in code, assuming it has the figma link and all specs required.
- When its done it makes a PR, waits for if it passes and even in some cases automatically merges into your staging/preview enironments and just pings you with a build/URL. You can then leave feedback or something and it can also also poll for pending feedback. Or you just mark it looks good, the agent then merges the PR, moves the PRD to implemented status, maybe even writes/updates docs and cleans up any temporary work.
- Repeat checking for new PRD's every T unit time. (10 minutes, 1 hour, etc)
This is how people say you should be looping - you never even cared or looked at the code, and also never prompted the agent yourself.
But I find most agents are often pretty bad still at replicating UI vs making something from scratch and most design specs are still not as detailed around how things look at all sizes, in all scenarios etc. Design seems to be one of those things that still requires a human to validate. And then all the things the post author mentions about it not being willing to apply hard constraints, minimize impossible states, validate at edges and prevent horrendous overchecking of things. etc.
The loop is basically then a while loop:
While (tests fail) { trigger agent: spec, failures list }
for bugs, write failing tests.
Its basically TDD.
Loops do nothing useful beyond making the “spec -> code” step more “hands off” and let you be confident that the code you write does what is intended.
Obviously you see the issue: writing the loop harness is > effort than not having it…
…but the idea is that you run “spec first” and are totally hands off on the code, just updating the validation step and then waiting while the agent iterates over and over to solve for some solution that passes the loop harness.
People suggest that it is possible to go, eg. directly figma/jira to harness via (random tool here), saving even more time and invoking even fewer humans, but thats currently, as far as I can tell, actually just hype.
No one is actually doing that effectively.
Loops are currently carefully hand crafted, which makes them tedious and of questionable value imo.
The lack of taste can be mitigated to some degree by improved training, though taste is not a stationary distribution in humans (see trends/fads/etc), we can at least better track the cutting edge. I think this area still has low hanging fruit but frontier labs are more concerned with being able to solve problems than the style of the solution right now (for evidence of this just look at the Opus 4.5 -> 4.8 arc).
The problem of incomplete context is partly a human problem and partly a harness/interconnectivity problem.
LLM Myopia is a harder problem to solve just by virtue training models on question/answer pairs. Countering this requires emphasizing RL on solution paths rather than just prompt/response, which is doable but harder.
The point of "taste" is not to copy from others, even if you can somehow filter out the trends and fads. And really, that filtering comes from personal experience anyway.
> opting out of this fully machine-driven future may not be an option.
I am contemplating whether I want to stay inside this rat race.
I completely agree with the conclusion of this blog post, by the way. I feel uneasy, and I do not enjoy the work I deliver using LLMs. I think OP did a really good job on capturing at least my current state.
I'm at the point where I think it's dumb to not do it but also dumb to do it. I have no real answer.
I have settled on using LLMs for everything but to spend more time honing the quality and cleanliness with LLM passes afterwards than I generally would have taken to write it well myself in the first place. This is in some ways the worst of both worlds, but it somehow lets me bypass akrasia while still getting pretty good code out, so I consider it superior to how I worked before. I get more done in three months even if I get less done in a day.
I think this is going to be a big deal for many programmers in the long run. "Flow" comes from feeling faster as much as it does from actually being faster in the moment. Perhaps more. And yesterday's good experience leads to today's motivation.
CC has made some pretty dumb stuff in my projects but I don't resent those occurrences. They taught me (more accurately: reminded me, because I already knew but was not applying that knowledge too often) very valuable lessons on code quality -- that's still a dark area to this day and every ray of light on it is valuable for the future programming.
To me programming with LLMs made me a better programmer. But yes, I don't just rubber-stamp PRs.
It also finally allowed me to be less of a code monkey and more of an architect and a backend lead than before. Which I was really missing.
> I am contemplating whether I want to stay inside this rat race.
I'm not enthusiastic about the field anymore, which sucks, because I used to love working in programming.
Based on word from my friends who work in the field, a lot of it is people who have a lot of respect for the field, and a lot of professional respect for eachother. It's also a field I feel is unlikely to suffer from the same kind of scams that are taking over software while still offering an engaging environment.
It's also work with real-world impact, which is nice, though obviously comes with its challenges.
I have basically stopped writing code in my spare time since the advent of AI. Before I felt like I was working on a classic car. Was it a practical use of my time? No. I could go out and download software that did what I wanted. Did I have fun doing it? Yes, the act of working on it was important, I felt I was still learning and improving as I did.
Nowadays I see people doing far more in a month than I could in a year and I feel like its all a waste, like I just spent the past few years transcribing a phonebook while standing next to a photocopier.
I don't know if that'll ever change. I can't even pretend I was doing something prestigious and artisan like watchmaking because I wasn't a good programmer beforehand.
Before I would just throw prompts at the LLM and it'd end up building a pile of crap (but semi-working crap, and 100x faster than I ever could) - it was pretty depressing. Using tools like `grill-me` (or `grill-with-docs`) I feel like I'm actually building my understanding of the system and helping shape it, and the results are much better.
Here is the similar perspective: https://isene.org/2026/05/Audience-of-One-Numbers.html
I was misunderstood you if you intend to write code by hand, I still did, I use AI to learn by example, but I write the real code myself, AI can help me improve the code. I learned a lot.
Nearly all of that passion vanished this year, and I've been struggling to replace it. I know I'm much better than the machine now, but the lines are starting to blur, and some of the small puzzles of day-to-day have been completely automated away.
We've birthed a lot of puzzle solvers that enjoyed programming, and I'm sure many of them will move on to something else that scratches the same itch. I'm keen on learning what that will turn out to be.
Now with LLMs I find myself doing small projects that interest me or have some utility for me outside of work, and doing a lot more development in the codebases at work outside of just review/docs/arch than I was before. Also making small tools that I find pleasant/useful but were not important enough to spend time on before.
This is not a serious suggestion.
Same. I'm currently trying to find _my next thing_ and all anyone wants to talk about is how I'm using AI and it's absolutely maddening. It's become a lazy, lossy proxy for productivity. I've had a few intros for the types of orchestration engineering roles which are described in this post and they're just completely unappealing -- especially the prescriptive aspects. Like, the sort of JDs I'm seeing are variants of, "we want a back-end developer who has experience with XYZ but they must use agentic harnesses to do their work." Why does any serious person give a flying fuck how the end result is reached? The flip side of all this is that rates are also being driven through the floor by loop cowboys who are generating steaming piles of shit which are _good enough_ ... until they aren't. I'm being completely serious when I say that stocking shelves at Tractor Supply is becoming more appealing by the day and I also just thought to myself, "Maybe I should just join the Army while they'll still take me?"
> yet I have no doubts that this looping future is going to be our future despite the fact that I presently resent it
Why would anyone concluded this? LLMs are just one kind of application of MLs to software production. There is a vast solution space for automating parts of software production. The idea that slop loops are the inevitable future because they happen to be accelerating output at the moment just seems profoundly short-sighted and lacking in vision.
I am torn. I have fallen in love with vibe coding but I still am in love with the software I’ve used for decades that works reliably.
Vibe coding gives me what I need and want right now. Its fast. Fun. Always makes me feel validated.
My older software never changes. It’s constantly telling me no. When it gets mad, it throws errors at me sometimes! But I can’t leave it. It runs my life and I know it will take care of me for years to come.
And the vibe code it’s so flaky… and expensive. It sucks up endless amount of my time, compute, and money and never gives anything back.
But it’s so fun. I tell all my friends about it and they’ve become so jealous they sought out their own vibe coder.
We’ve all found our vibe coders are a bit kinky. It’s become a social thing amongst my friends to talk about building cooler harnesses to control our vibe coders.
I don’t know what to do. My old software pays the bills but she keeps threatening to dump my ass on the curb and replace me with her own vibe coder.
I know she can’t really do it. She needs me too. And I need her.
Can we ever patch up our diffs?
— just some git with uncommitted changes