I'm a huge admirer of Jonathan Blow but I'm not sure his perspective is very reflective of reality here. He's a notoriously picky engineer and also tends to work on very hard problems and working at a very low level. e.g. writing his own language (Jai) and compiler because he thinks existing languages (C++ and Rust) are not good enough for game development.

So sure, I am not surprised that no current AI/LLM is good enough for his standard, but I'm sure 99.99% of engineers on Hackernews are not good enough for his standard either. Again, huge admirer of his work and talks, he's clearly very gifted but he seems like one of those engineers who probably thinks his co-workers are all morons.

I've worked at a variety of startups, enterprise companies, game companies, some you've heard of and some you haven't, and I've seen the whole gamut of code and engineers. I've seen basic shitty CRUD apps which power customer service teams of 1000s and I've seen physics and low-level audio programming which only a handful of dudes in the company could understand.

There is a massive variety of systems and code out there in the wild and I think Jonathan Blow would be surprised at the amount of revenue generated by extremely shitty code written by humans.

From my perspective, the current batch of LLMs and tools are MASSIVELY capable of writing production code, in fact, far, far better than so many real production systems I've seen. This can be true while it's also true that I wouldn't have any current LLM write me a low level game engine in C or work on the Linux kernel, or work on low level database code etc.

People generalizing about how bad LLMs are at coding are often doing it out of a very unusual perspective (like J Blow) or doing it out of bad faith. Or perhaps haven't really seen the reality that there's a LOT of code out there which is terrible and still does the job and still keeps people employed.