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Comment by stocksinsmocks

1 day ago

Is that not also true of human written software that costs more per hour than the monthly cost of a coding agent? Developers are expected to ship enterprise software with defects that would land you in court if you made equivalent mistakes designing a water treatment plant or bridge.

I get the “AI sucks” argument from a programmers point of view. It’s weird looking and doesn’t care about “code smells” or about rearranging the code base’s deck chairs just the way you like. From an owner’s or client’s perspective, human programmers suck. You want big standard CRUD app? Like a baby’s first Django app? That’s going to take at least 6 months for some reason. They don’t understand your problem domain and don’t care enough to learn it. They work 15 minutes on the hour, spend 45 on social media or games, and bill you $200/hr. They “pair program” for “quality” to double their billed rate for the same product. They bill you for interns learning how to do their job on your dime. On top of that there is still a very good chance the whole project will just be a failure. Or I can pay Anthropic $20/month and text an AI requirements on my phone when I’ve got 5 minutes of down time. If it doesn’t work I just make a new one and try again. Even if progress on AI stopped today, the world is now so much better for consumers of programs. Maybe not for developers unless you’re writing the AI and getting paid in the millions. Good for them. I’m glad to see the $200/hr Stack Overflow copy and pasters go do something else.

> Is that not also true of human written software that costs more per hour than the monthly cost of a coding agent?

The difference is that a human can learn and grow.

From your examples, it sounds like we're talking about completely different applications of code. I'm a software engineer who is responding to the original topic of reviewing PRs full of LLM slop. It sounds like you are a hobbyist who uses LLMs to vibe code personal apps. Your use case is, frankly, exactly what LLMs should be used for. It's analogous to how using a consumer grade 3d printer to make toys for your kids is fine, but nobody would want to be on the hook for maintaining full scale structural systems that were printed the same way.

  • In this analogy though, a different someone designed a device or several devices and is printing them on a 3d printer and selling them online and making an alright living through that.