Who said anything about trusting the llm, producing un-maintainable code, or not understanding the processes?
You can guard the the variance, test for quality, and still maintain design requirements.
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David Cornelson here. Tons of dev, architecture, strategy, and advisory experience looking work. I'm well aware of the reset in pay at the moment and happily willing to adjust accordingly.
Location: Chicago/IL/USA
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Technologies: AWS, Azure, C#, .NET Core, Domain-Driven Design Modeling and Development, Event Storming Facilitation, all data storage types. GenAI dev/arch integration expert.
Email: Connect via LinkedInYou can guard the the variance, test for quality, and still maintain design requirements.
I was just at the Explore DDD conference in Denver and a portion of Friday was sitting at the cafe tables informally discussing the impact of GenAI on software engineering with notable people. Most of these people were deeply concerned that if we lean into using GenAI for “everything” that our collective knowledge will dissipate. I was the vocal contrarian. There are many historical examples of humans obfuscating knowledge to simplify progress. Does anyone solder their own microchips at scale anymore? No. We have highly sophisticated robots and machinery to do that work with extraordinary outcomes. In software engineering, if you remove “coding” as a discipline you’re left with all the other aspects of designing software which I contend can be retargeted in college CS curriculum. The leap isn’t about code reviews. It’s about design reviews and that’s where better outcomes are served regardless of whether GenAI is involved or not. I have a roughly year old codebase at https://github.com/ChicagoDave/sharpee/ that is designed by me, but generated by Claude Code with my own skills and agents as guardrails. I’m fairly certain the code I extract from Claude doesn’t require human review, but the design of the system and its changes are continually reviewed by me. My contention is that we “collectively” are still trying to discern where the AI/human line is and most are still “holding” that line to human interactions. Let it go. Define what part you do need human decisions on and focus on those things.
Most of these people were deeply concerned that if we lean into using GenAI for “everything” that our collective knowledge will dissipate.
I was the vocal contrarian. There are many historical examples of humans obfuscating knowledge to simplify progress.
Does anyone solder their own microchips at scale anymore? No. We have highly sophisticated robots and machinery to do that work with extraordinary outcomes.
In software engineering, if you remove “coding” as a discipline you’re left with all the other aspects of designing software which I contend can be retargeted in college CS curriculum.
The leap isn’t about code reviews. It’s about design reviews and that’s where better outcomes are served regardless of whether GenAI is involved or not.
I have a roughly year old codebase at https://github.com/ChicagoDave/sharpee/ that is designed by me, but generated by Claude Code with my own skills and agents as guardrails. I’m fairly certain the code I extract from Claude doesn’t require human review, but the design of the system and its changes are continually reviewed by me.
My contention is that we “collectively” are still trying to discern where the AI/human line is and most are still “holding” that line to human interactions.
Let it go. Define what part you do need human decisions on and focus on those things.
It was not a good movie.
If I can’t install an ad/malware blocker, I’m not using your browser.
It’s the business modeling skill that most developers lack, so they skip it and believe an ERD will magically cover all invariants.
By picking the tools before understanding the model and building bespoke architecture.
You pick the tools that the business model requires. It might be a relational data store. It might not be. You might want an event store. You might want to reduce costs with lambdas and DynamoDB. You may need a pub/sub event broker.
The OP clearly loves Postgres. Cool. They also have limited experience with complex systems architectures because if they had that experience, they would have never written this article.
I had it working and then realized that no matter how hard I put walls up between my artistic abilities and the llm was impossible.
The llm’s interference would eventually corrupt my own thinking process.
I tossed it and know anything I write will stand apart from GenAI.
Asimov’s positronic brain was the conceptual framework with the wrong formula.
The bots and trolls and agents on X are always on your front porch.
I’ll take Bluesky over that every day.
In order to reduce the complexity of eventually coding something, you use modeling and code probes to validate the business model and then write the code.
This has been around since the days of batch programming and evolved through domain driven design principles.
The reality is the business can’t see that so they don’t invest in it and have no patience for it.
Agile wasn’t embraced because it was better. It was embraced because it was cheaper and faster.
Planning and modeling are the levers of complexity.
I’ve selected a path where I think building tools with AI is fine. But I want people to play my games knowing I created all of it.
And those same architects are quietly extracting real productivity from GenAI.
And even this write up skips that info by waving, “Some people…”
I save the container for well-planned units of work that can easily be repeated and validated on a branch.
I use direct sessions when I expect and the plan dictates that Claude might go off target and I need to hold the steering wheel.
Fable has increased my use of the container option.
Data first is fine for simple systems, but lead to chaos for complex systems.
Absent those skills, the agile movement is flailing with GenAI.
Opus and similar models completely invalidated that skepticism, especially when context windows increased.
In the last two weeks I designed and deployed a new programming language that compiles in a browser. Impossible in the before times.
That kills all arguments from the article instantly.
December 2025 through today GenAI has become massively better. I’ve built things with Claude in contracted spans of time that would have been man-years in the before times.