AI for coding itself is a fad
There’s slop out there, yes, but in the hands of an engineer who cares to use tools well, LLMs allow you to move much more quickly and increase the quality of your output dramatically.
AI cannot produce better quality code than someone who is actually qualified in the problem domain.
What I've seen AI be very good at is creating a lot of legacy code very quickly, which itself needs extensive use of AI just to maintain it.
A decent approach to move quickly for PoC or prototypes, or to enable product managers to build things without a team. But obviously not something you can build a real company on.
I say that, but then it's true I have seen businesses be successful despite low quality of software. It turned out that for those businesses, the value wasn't that much driven by tech after all.
Because whem AI gets good enough there is no longer going to be code at all.
Which makes me sad, as a luddite.
Also most people who I see succeed from the start are technical managers. That is people who can code, who are used to delegate (good at phrasing) and are more likely to accept something that works even though is not character by character what they expected.
There is no responsibility with AI. It doesn't care about getting it right or making sure the code delivers on what the company needs. It has nothing to prove, no incentive to supporting anything.
Nah, I'll skip.
vibe-coding the GTK-rs app with Codex, delegating ready Figma designs to Junie to implement in Jetpack Compose, improving a11y and perf on my personal website built in Svelte with Claude. (a friend threw $100 into that slot machine and shared access to Claude Code with me.)
all in December 2025. all failed *horrendously*. Claude Sonnet 4.5 actually worsened the Lighthouse performance score on mobile from 95 down to 40!! though, it did a decent job on a11y.
Codex CLI constantly used older versions of all sorts of crates, spat out deprecated code, outright refused to use Blueprints and Context7, but some time after, I could get a mockup of Superhuman-style email client.
and Junie... well, it did best. it had Gemini 3 Flash picked as a model. despite Material 3 Expressive being beyond Gemini's knowledge cutoff, it actually used Context7 to fill the gap. though, it fumbled the bag with details, performance, and overabstractioning.
> I recommend giving their top plan a fair chance for a month.
as I said, my friend already did. we both find it the worst spend of the decade. seriously, in yesteryear's Call of Duty we would at least have fun. being a purchase worse than Call of Duty is a floor so low, you have to break it deliberately.
before you say "try again," do your research around food prices and salaries in Ukraine. (or delegate it to Claude Deep Research feature, you may love it.) to feed yourself well here, you have to spend measly by Western standards $300-600/mo. (that's without housing and utilities, presuming you live alone.) though, salaries outside dev jobs are just as measly, and then you have the overall job crisis in Ukraine overlaid on top of the worldwide IT job crisis.
4-8 months of Claude Max amount to the rumored price of Steam Machine. I would rather spend $800 to see the joy on my younger sister's face and familiarize her with true games, beyond what's on Google Play.
> That is people who can code, who are used to delegate (good at phrasing) and are more likely to accept something that works even though is not character by character what they expected.
I would rather spend that time nursing a real open-source contributor or a junior colleague. I would have a real person with real willpower and real ideas in my network, and that would spread the joy of code.