Ronsenshi

Really? To me it seems that quite the opposite is true - people who were never very good at writing code are excited about LLMs because suddenly they can pretend to be architects without understanding what's happening in the codebase.

Same as with AI-art, where people without much drawing skills were excited about being able to make "art".

> Do not fall for the AI agent hype.

Problem is, it's the people in higher positions who should be aware of that, except they don't care. All they would see is how much more profit company can make if it reduces workforce.

Plenty of engineers do realize that AI is not some magical solution to everything - but the money and hype tends to overshadow cooler heads on HN.

How would this affect future generations of ... well anyone, when they have 24/7 access to extremely smart mentor who will find solution to pretty much any problem they might face?

Can't just offload all the hard things to the AI and let your brain waste away. There's a reason brain is equated to a muscle - you have to actively use it to grow it (not physically in size, obviously).

Same here, although hopefully won't be retiring soon.

What's missing from this is that iconic phrase that all the AI fans love to use: "I'm just having fun!"

This AI craze reminds me of a friend. He was always artistic but because of the way life goes he never really had opportunity to actively pursue art and drawing skills. When AI first came out, and specifically MidJourney he was super excited about it, used it a lot to make tons and tons of pictures for everything that his mind could think of. However, after awhile this excitement waned and he realized that he didn't actually learn anything at all. At that point he decided to find some time and spend more time practicing drawing to be able to make things by himself with his own skills, not by some chip on the other side of the world and he greatly improved in the past couple of years.

So, AI can certainly help create all the "fun!!!" projects for people who just want to see the end result, but in the end would they actually learn anything?

AI got to him awhile ago, I'm afraid. Been telling stories about these gastowns, zero code review and thousands of lines of code and thousands of dollars in burned tokens since last year.

I've tried using Codex and ChatGPT while working on a small SwiftUI app. It's not very good when it comes to newer APIs and features - I imagine due to lack of data about these things. Very often it would rather push something AppKit-based instead of SwiftUI.

It works, but feels really janky and messy.

I had one very annoying bug with file export API where extra view on export window would appear with a delay. No matter what I tried it didn't manage to fix it. Instead it would go on to try and completely rewrite whole file export class in various ways... which still didn't work as it claimed it would. Ended up fixing it manually by caching instance view locally.

What's weird about it? I'm not disputing that it might be fun for vibe coders. Just that they seem to really like using that particular word.

I love coding and it is fun for me. Vibe coding on the other hand - not fun at all. It feels to me like playing slots.

But then again, I never liked gambling.

> Fun!!!!!

I noticed that AI evangelists really love to use word "fun" to describe anything they do with AI.

Claw people particularly seem really love to use that word when answering what practical or useful they do with AI agents. It's always something absurdly trivial followed by "and it's just fun!"

Don't really have any conclusion to this - just thought to share this observation.

A bit unrelated to the article, more of a commentary about how many engineers at this point barely write any code or even do code review.

It seems to me like a huge amount of engineers/developers in comments are turning into Tom Smykowski from The Office. Remember that guy?

His job was to be a liaison between customers and engineers because he had "people skills":

"I deal with the god damn customers so the engineers don't have to. I have people skills; I am good at dealing with people. Can't you understand that? What the hell is wrong with you people?"

Except now, based on comments here it, some engineers are passing instructions from customers to AI because they have "AI skills". While AI is doing coding, helps with spec clarification, reviewing code and writing tests.

That's scary and depressing. This field in a few years will be impossible to recognize.

I don't think it makes sense to consider top % of the talent - relative to the total amount of engineers I imagine it would be minuscule.

It's the rest who will have to deal with shrinking number of positions, higher competition and possibly decrease in compensation due to said competition.

Would have to be quite a few years - last time price bump was in 2022 by 10% due to increase in energy costs because of the war in Ukraine. Naturally prices didn't go down.

I'm in the same boat. Too often for me it feels easier to write code that I want to see by myself instead of opening some AI tool where I would have to describe what I need in plain English. After which I'd still have to review the code to make sure it does do what was requested.

Perhaps you have to be certain type of person or work in a peculiar company where second step (review) can be ignored as long as AI says that it does. Hardcore YOLO life.

I'm very curious to see how this will affect the job market. All the recent CS grads, all the coding bootcamp graduates - where would they end up in? And then there's medium/senior engineers that would have to switch how they work to oversee the hordes of AI agents that all the hype evangelists are pushing on the industry.

Not an employee market, that's for sure.

I've seen a bunch of interactive toys and visualizations generated by AI in the past year. For some reason they really like monotype "techy" fonts.

It's just one of the signals - not the primary one.

Not clearly, but given the world we live in makes me highly suspicious that AI was involved to one degree or another.

Plenty of people out there are happy to let AI do most of the work while claiming it as their own.

The author had all these massive articles all on fairly different topics ready to go... and then decided to pump 4 of them in a span of 4 days.

If it looks like a duck...

You know what triggered me as likely flag for LLM - the fonts, the style, the abundant comments.

Makes me think - what if all of this was written by an LLM agent?

I agree with you. I had done a bit of vibe coding over the weekend. Not once did it feel good. Most of the time it produced things which are close to what I needed, but not quite hitting the mark. Partially probably because I'm not explaining myself in sufficient detail to AI, but the way I work is not working very well with super detailed spec ahead of development. I used to always develop understanding of the project while working on it.

I feel more lost and unsure instead of good - because I didn't write the code, so I don't have its internal structure in my head and since I didn't write it there's nothing to be proud of.

It's true for more guided development approach. But the further you go into vibecode territory, the less you need to know.

Depends on who these humans you're comparing AI code to. I've seen and reviewed enough AI code in the last few months to have formed a solid impression that it's "ok" at best and relies heavily on who guides it - how well spec defined, what kind of rules are set, coding styles, architecture patterns.

I'm not sure comparing artisanal software to woodworking or organic farming is possible.

With woodworking and farming you get as a result some physical goods. Some John Smith that buys furniture can touch nice cherry paneling, appreciate the joinery and grain. With farming you he can taste delicious organic tomatoes and cucumbers, make food with it.

Would this John Smith care at all about how some software is written as long as it does what he wants and it works reliably? I'm not sure.

Because such people are not sincere either to themselves about who they are or to others. It's really hard for me to take seriously phrases like "I joined this industry to make things, not to write code".

Do painters paint because they just like to see the final picture? Or do they like the process? Yes, painting is an artistic process, not exactly crafting one. But the point stand.

Woodworkers making nice custom furniture generally enjoy the process.

I don't think 5 years is necessary. I think after two years of this agentic orchestration if you rarely touch code yourself skill will degrade to the point they won't be able to write anything non-trivial without assistance.

Yeah, seems like too many went into this field for money or status not because they like the process. Which is not an issue by itself, but now these people talk about how their AI assistant of choice made them some custom tool in two hours that would have taken them three weeks. And it's getting exhausting.

Agree with the author. I like the process of writing code, typing method names and class definitions while at the same time thinking ahead about overall architecture, structure, how much time given function would run for, what kind of tests are necessary.

I find it unsettling how many people in the comments say that they don't like writing code. Feels aliens to me. We went into this field for seemingly very different reasons.

I do use LLMs and even these past two days I was doing vibe coding project which was noticeably faster to setup and get to its current state than if I wrote in myself. However I feel almost dirty by how little I understand the project. Sure, I know the overall structure, decisions and plan. But I didn't write any of it and I don't have deep understanding of the codebase which I usually have when working on codebase myself.

Pretty much completely disagree with the OP. Software Engineering never left, maybe the author moved away from it instead.

> Stop wrapping broken legs in silk. Start building things that are yours.

This however is deeply wrong for me. Anyone who writes and reviews code regularly knows very well that reading code doesn't lead to the same deep intuitive understanding of the codebase as writing same code.

So, no, with AI you are not building things which are yours. You might call them yours, but you lose deeper understanding of what you built.

Would have been awesome if there was step by step visualization where simple color transforms slowly upgraded until you get final result for easier understanding of what each thing is doing.

Otherwise quite hard to visualize changes in you head.

This is really questionable outcome. So you'll have your own custom OS riddled with holes that AI won't be capable of fixing because the context and complexity became so high that running any small bug fix would cost thousands of dollars in tokens.

Is this how tech field ends? Overengineered brittle black-box monstrosities that nobody understands because important thing for business was "it does A, B, and C" and it doesn't matter how.

Not an OP, but seems like you might be talking about different things.

Security could be about not adding certain things/making certain mistakes. Like not adding direct SQL queries with data inserted as part of the query string and instead using bindings or ORM.

If you have insecure raw query that you feed into ORM that you added on top - that's not going to make query more secure.

But on the other hand when you're securing some endpoints in APIs you do add things like authorization, input validation and parsing.

So I think a lot depends on what you mean when you're talking about security.

Security is security - making sure bad things don't happen and in some cases it's different approach in the code, in some cases additions to the code and in some cases removing things from the code.

I've had a pleasure of using GIMP recently on Mac. One of the worst UX/UI experiences I've had in quite a while. If that's where vibe coding leads to, then Photoshop is very safe from disruption.