The author seems to be confusing "I didn't write any code" with "I don't care about software design and maintainability". There exist maintainable and thoughtfully designed software systems for which the designer did not write any code and didn't read most of it. It's not the median, but the median software project has always been unmaintainable before agents.

Just to give a hot take, it's funny to look at his builtwith.com. As a developer you have a static site that depends on Cloudflare, Mailchimp, Postmark, Isso ...

Twenty years ago any self-respecting dev would have run the equivalent of all that themselves on their own metal. In 2026 elite neckbeard practice is write the "never reach mastery, because they no longer make choices, they no longer take responsibility" post, hit "publish" and it's magically deployed around the global internet for you. Like a child.

In the future we will see more and more companies proudly boasting their “NO-AI” policy as a competitive advantage. And they will be right.

Yes, a "NO-CLOUD" policy was already so popular, surely this will happen too.

https://builtwith.com/alexn.org

The argument I'd make in support of the title would be that wisdom is embodied knowledge - knowledge earned from direct experience. Known first-hand. An AI can already have linguistic/technical ability that exceeds a human (at various levels of skill, even) - in coding, copy-editing, what have you. But wisdom? That is the scar tissue we carry from wrong choices. Until an agent has persistent sense of self and a "body" (or pseudo-body) whose existence it is predicated on (thus creating incentivization/outcome alignment), it will not be able to approach "wisdom" in the sense that humans do.

That may seem to have no bearing on the specific subset of tasks related to coding and so on - but it actually does. Humans have a hard limit of attention span, hours in a day, years in a life. An AI does not. So if it fucks things up royally by half-assing an architectural decision, it won't care. And if it doesn't have a persistent memory, it won't even know that it made that mistake before. So it has neither the prerequisite abilities nor the incentives to gain what would be hard-earned wisdom from its mistakes.

In fact, as long as the business model of its creators depends on more usage = more profit, they are actively discouraged from implementing any kind of wisdom-like ability.

For them to be able to offer that without undercutting their profit, they'd need to be able to execute "outcome based billing".

>>"The AI learns rules from rulebooks meant for beginners. The AI notices patterns from code in the wild and let’s be honest, most code in the wild is pretty bad."

Similarly, for self-driving, the AI for driving learns from rulebooks meant for beginners and observes patterns of driving from ordinary drivers in the wild and let’s be honest, most ordinary drivers in the wild are pretty bad. The best the AI self drivers trained in this way can hope to get is the average slop driver minus the catastrophic errors.

Similarly, in legal specialties, there are a few highly expert and wise practitioners, and hordes of average practitioners, and quite a few near-malpractice practitioners, and it is the latter group who write the most stuff on the web because that is how they do marketing, trying to make their ignorance look better — and mostly louder — than what the average lay-person knows. The AIs can NOT tell the difference and 'learns', and dispenses both the good and the actively harmful advice. Acdg to relative who is a top expert in their specialty, AIs can both find key relationships between laws in complicated situations but also readily dispense the actively harmful advice, and you MUST already be a top expert to recognize which is which.

They are great averaging machines, but when average is not good enough, you must be on top of your game.

No. Most rules are there before and will stay after the expert enter the field within its career path, unless the field is bright new territory no one fooled before, which is rare.

Not only experts have to know the rules, otherwise they wouldn’t be expert, but good experts also ideally know why the rules were set, and at least have a fairly well aligned representation of what it would likely lead to to follow or not each rule in this or that situation, which rules are in conflicts and what the tradeoffs are when favoring one on the other.

Everything is context dependant, yes. And LLMs can help to leverage on far wider contexts that a single individual would be able to do on its own. It’s require interest to reach some goal in some social context, and not everyone will use LLMs with the same creativity.

This week-end I was discussing with a friend about our respective use of LLMs. At some point they told me they no longer read the MR, as LLMs can also do great job on that matter now, which is in sharp contrast with what I do. Not that I don’t auto-review with LLMs, but I use that as a first step, be it mine or some other colleague. And then I ask an LLM to prepare me a reading plan to check the MR, taking into account the activity scope and the implementation architecture. To me it was an obvious way to go, but for them it was something they never considered. That’s random sample, of course they would certainly be cases we would switch the "I wouldn’t have thought about it" role.

So yes, LLMs can be used to produce faster giant piles of unmaintainable codebases. Or they can be used to strengthen processes that lead to code quality. The nail won’t prevent us to knock our thumb, to use a nail in reverse side, or to smash our coworker.

I get the paperclip plant issue, but that’s some extreme scenario (which is of course the point of the allegory), and most bad uses will be far more mundane in how they look and what the consequences are. And most good uses will look more and more transparent to users to the point they won’t even wonder about it at each use. Like, most people open the tap, see water fall and they don’t get a sense of wonder, not giving a thought to this masterpiece of engineering and gratitude for all people that works daily in the shadow for this miracle to happen. They don’t leave the toilets thinking "how freaking amazing such a complex system of wastewater is something I can benefit from everyday, unlike so many other of the 100G humans that walked this earth."

Next time you go to WC or tap some water, think about it.

At this point AI is a better developer than most mid-level SMEs I've worked with. I hate this fact, but I don't have a shred of evidence to dispute it anymore. I work on a 20 year old codebase that thousands of developers use and it finds bugs in pre-AI code daily.

Counter prediction: using AI attractive even for employees. Do you really think you’d wanna join such a company? No way.