At the same time, it also brings very low level "vibecoder" to the pool

I have a theory that Claude regresses to complexity. It’s trained to mimic existing patterns - so the smallest grain of over-engineering or spaghetti-code is like a mind-virus, gradually infecting all future output and self-amplifying until all is spaghetti.

Probably a good thing, we need more people building major mega projects like the Line. Potentially we need AI to mass produce architecture and scale up and out city/county building departments to open the gates to massive buildings in the United States.

"You can't afford bad engineers anymore"

You never could.

Great idea to include a link to Hacker News on your blog!

This is really well written. I deal with the exact same issues almost daily. Senior engineers who want to guard quality are becoming a bottleneck.

More like AI is exposing bad engineers faster than it would've been possible earlier. Previously they would simply outsource all their thinking to someone else, now they see massive progress with AI and delude themselves into wishful competence.

As an open source maintainer, I can chime in on this.

With TxtAI, I've seen a large uptick in PRs (https://github.com/neuml/txtai/pulls?q=is%3Apr+is%3Aclosed+s...). While the extreme verbosity of Claude messages and commits is very annoying (plus the constant defending itself on why it's a bug), I do think it's a positive that more people are enabled.

It does require reviewing the PRs. Some can be tricky just like a human. For example I did merge this PR (https://github.com/neuml/txtai/pull/1136) and it would have completely broke search. But a human could also do that.

From an open source standpoint, I say the more the better. You just have to be willing to do the work to review and no not just having AI agents to review what the AI agents are submitting. There still needs to be a human in the loop, if you care about quality.

While there are bad engineers, I imagine that teams that have evolved alongside AI and have maintained their size and consistency without adjustment may have structural issues. I would argue that team size counts ought to be smaller now than before Claude. Unfortunately this idea could feed an AI-induced layoff trend, but it could instead lead to product diversification instead.

"There are also people who essentially make it harder for everyone else. And now anyone can produce more code in a day than they used to in a year."

That is the "democratization" that AI shills speak of:

https://xcancel.com/dhh/status/2087538364580835804#m

Once a CEO with a snowboard-optimized brain gave you a board seat, there is no way back.