Reasons to Dislike AI Coding
sicpers.info
sicpers.info
Is it a way to develop critical bits of code, depths of your business logic? Absolutely not. Can it solve a lot of boilerplate and support logic? Absolutely yes.
Seeing "AI Companies as Bad Actors"... can't fully disagree there. There's far too many far too dodgy things about these businesses, and I trust them as far as I can audit them (not very far). And the missing argument's the cognitive decline of using these things to think for us. I try to keep myself sharp by still manually doing a fair amount of things in my life. I refuse to automate _everything_ - especially the stuff I do for fun. Having an LLM manage hobby-adjacent stuff is a quick trip to burnout land, especially once fixing the thing becomes "the hobby"... and it does.
This is an absolute larp. No doubt you use a washing machine and not a washboard. Hand coding in a few years will be like using the washboard when there's a washing machine.
And even so, the energy efficiency of modern dishwashers with turbidity sensors is very good, and actually can be more efficient than hand-washing, especially if that requires multiple bowls full of water.
Obviously there are limits, but if you stack during the day and stick it on overnight, then it's pretty efficient, even for a single person.
The skill of using LLMs for code generation is in recognising these scenarios; knowing when to use it and when to not.
I get what you're going for, but it's not a good comparison.
Like using a calculator. I use one, but I still use paper math too, and calculate manageable sums/multiplications in my head. I'd feel dull otherwise.
GPS. I use one, but I still pay attention to the route and keep a sense of direction. “Why bother knowing where you are when the machine can tell you?” isn't really an argument for outsourcing your own brain.
If it didn't, if the neural computer interface was real and seamless, I would use that for sure. Come to think of it, I probably wouldn't even notice.
There is so many things that AIs can do just as well and much faster. Not just coding but all other kinds of things in art and craft. Like why sculpt anything by hand when you can just get AI do model and then 3d print it.
Stop with these terrible comparisons. Code is (mostly) expected to keep working and be maintainable for lots of time following its inception. If your clothes are clean and not destroyed, the task is complete.
Code is code.
Code can be art, code can also be simply a tool to reach a goal.
If you want to create art, do it with your own two hands and your brain.
If you want to just Do The Thing, codegen it. No one cares. In before "Except your users having to use your vibeslop" FYI your Hand-Crafted Artisanal Code will still have bugs, so it's a moot point.
Heck, the very first thing the author does is links to another one of his own blog post where the above points are explicitly stated and explained, then restates at the end of the paragraph that there are no valid arguments for this one. So why keep beating this dead horse? Especially as the opener of the article.
This kind of mindset baffles me.
[1]https://www.makonea.com/en-US/casual/the-hardest-part-of-usi...
> being able to understand code by reading it is different from being able to do that same modeling yourself starting from a blank screen
That is simply Domain Knowledge. In a specific context, be it a Framework or an App or a Platform or Infrastructure or whatever else, you have to understand it. Of course, if you start from zero and you build it from scratch yourself, you have pretty much the best DK you can have.
That is usually not the case though. If you have external collaborators of any kind, your DK is always challenged. I find myself often dumped into Domains from which I have to gather Knowledge to understand. And, for me personally, having to read code written by an AI, especially now that they've gotten smart enough to not make glaringly stupid errors, is MUCH better than having to read Hand Crafted Code that has been handslopped (yes, I'm going to coin that term now) to meet Deadlines. Shortcuts, hacks, you name it. Terrible codebase sins, accumulated as years, even DECADES of "we'll fix it later".
Of course it's a pain. It always has been. Back in the GPT 4 / Claude 4 days, AI generated code was atrocious, but that is not the case anymore.
The rest of the article, especially these bolded points:
> The weight shifts from the ability to produce directly to the ability to evaluate output and set direction.
> So in the AI era, productivity is increasingly limited by the speed of judgment rather than the speed of writing.
> A manager who steps away from the front line may, over time, lose the ability to perform the work they are managing.
> does being able to evaluate code mean the same thing as owning the mental model of that program?
Are SPOT ON. You can vibeslop anything at the speed of light. But if you don't have the knowledge, taste, and expertise to not lose track of your DK so that it doesn't become an unmanageable mess, it's going to bite you in the proverbial ass.
But, again, that has always been true!
How is the code that was vibeslopped by ChatGPT in 1 minute different from the Junior Dev who spent a week handslopping a new type of wheel? The only difference is quality and speed.
And you need expertise to be able to recognize when something is wrong, and keep your DK updated at scale.
I also think ‘domain knowledge’ is incredibly important. Whether you write code or not matters, and coding as a hobby is good, but now every company forces you to write code with AI, so you can’t avoid using it, and I find myself thinking about how to maintain my own instincts.
I feel good seeing thoughts similar to mine. I upvoted you, and have a great day.
I can safely say, especially with how close to actual perfection Claude Opus 5.5 is, that it's no longer the case.
Also people generally hate change. The ethical concerns around AI are also understandable and I agree with the vast majority of them, but the vast majority of the "AI BAD" crowd are simply irrationally angry at it and completely unwilling to engage with it in any kind of good faith.
They'll come around. I'm starting to see some change in the gaming community, which was 200% against any form of AI just a little while ago, and now that they're using it to reverse engineer, decompile, mod and mesh together old games there is a lot of people starting to say "Yeah AI is bad, but...".
There is some CRAZY stuff being being worked on which are objectively good for society as a whole which would have you sound insane just last year, and it's only going to get crazier with each new model.
do what you will. CNCs did not remove need for artisans.
Art? While me and my colleagues had their own little style differences, I wouldn't call it art.
Like, I get the idea, I really do, but is there a need to announce it to the winds so often? Is this a pride thing?
Like, I'd be tempted to write something like this just to crystallise the stance in my own head (i.e. writing is thinking) but if it got voted to the top of the front page, that doesn't mean I suddenly meant it as a world-bending thesis.
1. I think most of us know the same thing is occurred when first compile came into the market (Most of them hated it saying 'High Quality ASM code would be only generated by humans' . Moving forward asm hasn't dead but we are only using it only at critically. I think we will do same with LLMs we use what useful and Move forward.
2. Life's isn't just always staying in front of a box and writing some code. If AI does the job of creating useful code with quality i would be more than happy since i could get start to work on more abstract things like Arts and Humanity. which for our growth is essential as you can see the current society is currently disdain.
Finally to conclude don't try to interrupt the flow just accept it and move forward.
Life is SHORT
2. Good for you and i wont criticize this take. My life is A LOT about sitting in front of a computer writing useful and/or fun code though and i love it!
We invented compilers, word processors, templated document generation, code generators, DSLs and things like that which were all labour reduction technologies for describing systems and information. These were net positives for society but wiped out full administrative and technical professions.
The issue is the impact that technology has on society. It should used to free up more time for enriching humanity with art, music, sciences, mathematics etc. But what really happens is they are used entirely for concentrating wealth by taking revenue and reducing employment, leaving functional people unemployed, destitute and in debt to the people who have the wealth concentration.
At this point it's morally objectionable on all grounds.
A second point, which should be considered an addition to the article is that AI coding shapes thinking based on its capabilities, not the user's intent. I see this a lot. If the objective is to do thing X because it aligns with a well-researched strategic analysis, it may not align with that. People are happy to be pushed to do thing Y which is a totally different thing because they are being slowly gaslit into accepting the mediocrity that the model promotes. This leads to poor business outcomes. And all this is hidden and written off because everyone needs to be seen as AI thought leaders at a high level because that's what keeps the stock going up and engineers are being rated on delivery, not on ROI.
Everthing is fucking broken.
Asking seriously and not in a provocative way: are you then implying that without those inventions we would have much more people employed as white collars? Employed people that would live a better life in economical and life/work balance terms.
If we didnt have word processors or templated document generation, we would have people who write things properly, typeset documents etc. If we didnt have compilers etc, we would have people who translated higher level languages into machine code
My mother is a good example. She was a corporate typist for years, on typewriters. Eventually word processing took over. Good fortune for her that she invested in this privately, but many people didn't because they didn't have the capital to buy a computer to learn on and the corporation didn't provide training. They saw it as a way to reduce that department cost by the 10:1 improvement. She got kept on, 10 people didn't. And most of them ended up as unemployed housewives or moving back in with their parents under serious financial consequences.
False, Karl Marx himself says that technology improves wealth for all the masses and doesn't leave people destitute.
Edit: I was wrong. Marx makes both claims because his theory is just not that great.
He also wrote literally the opposite to what you put in his mouth, so not only is this an appeal to authority, it's a completely incorrect one. Wonderful.
> It is an undoubted fact that machinery, as such, is not responsible for “setting free” the workman from the means of subsistence [...] in itself it increases the wealth of the producers, but in the hands of capital, makes them paupers
[1]https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch15.htm
Do you know the phrase: fully automated luxury communism?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fully_Automated_Luxury_Communi...
which is precisely why this tech has become so invasive in the software industry, the majority's thinking capabilities were mediocre to begin with. Good code was held in place by a few good men and women working as tech leads.
I am also tired of the "We now have bigger picture problems to solve instead". If your code looked like spaghetti, so are your big picture solutions. As a matter of fact, big picture problems are much harder than writing a stupid function.
I don't agree with this article but equally I respect their opinion. My primary reason I use AI is that a lot of coding is boring and has often made me wonder what I am doing with my life. At least now I am able to focus more on the parts of software development that interest me, shifting more of my time to the left of the development lifecycle: innovation and design
The original URL has been dead for over five years, so I don't know why a blog post from yesterday linked to it.
But more importantly, sure, we were always paid for results. And yes, sometimes professions transform or die. The buggy whip manufacturers aren't doing that great these days. But people are also allowed to have feelings about losing their professions.
My real concern is that the stated goal of the AI companies is to do this to every human job. They want to replace programmers and artists and movie-makers and—as soon as they get robotics figured out—physical laborers. They measure the ability of their models to run entire retail businesses with Vending Bench, so management isn't safe, either. They sell their AIs to the military for use in weapons. No job is safe, anywhere: They want everything, if they can figure out how to take it.
If the current rate of AI advance stops really soon, then eventually we'll figure out some kind of liveable future. Probably one with fewer programmers. But the labs have zero intention of stopping. Anthropic is a cult, and they hope to build a machine god that will have power over humanity forever. So I'm not going to them for answers. OpenAI used to have non-profit oversight that encouraged them to serve society, and Sam Altman gutted it like a fish. So I don't think I trust them to design a machine that replaces all human jobs, either.
Personally, I don't mind current coding models, at least not the local-sized ones that exist now. They make nice sounding-boards and can be trusted with the grunt work. We could adapt to these, given time.
But so far, AI technology shows no sign of stopping. And the labs are focused heavily on coding and math, because the next step in their plan is to let their models do AI research so that they can advance their technology even faster into new fields.
We could, like, decide that we don't need to do this. There is no need to try to replace every single human job with a superhuman machine. Because if you thought the enshittification of the Internet was bad, wait until you see the enshittification of a machine that can do almost every human job. No thanks.
But if AI can do everything we can do and better, its strange to argue that we still deserve to do that job. Who will pay you and why would they pay you if they can get it done cheaper? Why do you deserve to be paid higher wages when it can be done easily and better by something else?
Sam Altman says a lot of things, most of which seem to benefit Sam Altman. And Google used to tell me that they wouldn't be evil. Facebook probably said some noble-sounding nonsense at some point, too.
> Why do you deserve to be paid higher wages when it can be done easily and better by something else?
I mean, this is exactly what happened to the Neanderthals: We could do every job better than they could, and now there are no more Neanderthals. So I wouldn't like a future where two companies make machines that outcompete humans at every job.
Which is why I say we can adapt to this, but only if it stops advancing soon.
“ My real concern is that the stated goal of the AI companies is to do this to every human job. ”
I just showed how it’s not true.
In your Neanderthals example: would you have chosen to negotiate with Neanderthals to stop making tools and coordinate and stay technologically backward? Thats what you seem to suggest here.
Of all the things that rile me up in this current landscape, the pervasive tone of "why aren't you happy? I'm happy! You should be happy about this" is the most infuriating.
"In this situation it isn’t the technology that takes the job, it’s the mode of production. And given that programming is intellectual work, the means of production is literally our heads, we ought to be able to seize those."
The word 'ought' is doing so much heavy lifting here...
I believe that AI companies (much like any other company) are primarily driven by financial motivations (note that this might not extend to the individual people working there). Now often this manifests in ways that serve humans or even humanity, but other times it doesn't. This isn't unique to AI companies, and if you tried to only support companies that put humanity over finances, you'd be hard pressed to find many.
> Motivated by Bertrand Meyer’s AI for Smarties, if you believe that software engineering is the careful application of the mysterious knowledge of software engineers, encapsulated in rules like the SOLID principles, “prefer composition over inheritance”, “use you’re type’s good“, the Law of Demeter and so on, then AI can’t possibly write software because it doesn’t apply those rules, it just generates text that happens to compile.
... is this the "LLMs don't truly understand what they are saying" of software engineering? I'd also say there is a case for re-evaluating some of the established engineering principles, considering that they were built on assumptions that are no longer true.
Demand food, shelter, leisure, purpose. Jobs are one (honestly pretty bad) implementation of that
OpenAI's
> If somebody doesn't want to give you the food they've grown what are you going to do about it?
Well, die probably. That's why people are upset.
Me - an avid vibe coder (with 20 years of software development experience). Opinion - this is next evolution. It will not go away. It bumped productivity 6x. Engineering does not go anywhere. SDLC is still a thing. Its just that C-suite can actively participate in development. Everything happens faster. We deliver more features.
Art is gone. Passion is gone. Its all just "work". I used to sit in a friday evening with a bottle(s) of beer and "develop for fun". write code, read new stuff.
Now it feels more like steering a ship. there are some guys throwing coal in the engine. I dont know them in face, but the ship goes forward, thats the main thing.
M.Twain "The report of my death was an exaggeration."
It's still the case that fewer people are required so I'm not sure this argument holds up. In the UK at least, entry-level software engineer roles down roughly 27% year-on-year after gpt was launched according to one article I saw.
It all boils down to this really. How you get there is kind of irrelevant, unless it isn't because of privacy and copyright concerns and such.
If you oppose AI, you basically stop future such progressive ideas from permeating.
Why would you, as a progressive, reject AI if you are interested in progress?