Comment by benreesman

As with many things the secret sauce of AI-assisted software engineering is mathematics, skepticism, and hard work.

The first thing anyone should do is immediately understand that they are in a finite-sum adversarial relationship with all of their vendors. If you're getting repeatably and unambiguously food outcomes with Claude Code you're either in the bandit arm where high twitter follower count people go or you're counting cards in a twelve deck shoe and it'll be 24 soon. Switch to opencode today, the little thing in the corner is a clock, and a prominent clock is more or less proof you're not in a casino.

There is another key observation that took me a long time to internalize, which is that the loss surface of formalism is not convex: most of us have tried to lift the droids of of the untyped lambda calculus and into System F, and this does not as a general thing go well. But a droid in the untyped lambda calculus will with 100% likelihood eventually Superfund your codebase, no exceptions.

The droids are wildly "happy" for lack of a better term in CIC but the sweet spot is System F Omega. A web app that's not in Halogen is an unforced error now: pure vibecoders can do lastingly valuable work in PureScript, and they can't in React, which is irretrievably broken under any sane effects algebra.

So AI coding is kind of a mean reversion in a sense. Knuth and Lamport and Hoare and Djikstra had an LLM: it was an army of guys in short-sleeved dress shirts with half a page of fanfold system prompt on every page. That is automatable now, but there's a straightforward algorithm for remaining relevant: crank the ambition up until Opus 4.5 is whiffing.

Computer Scientist is still a high impact job. The cast of Office Space is redundant. But we kinda knew that the first time we saw Office Space.

Personally I'm working harder than ever on harder problems than ever with pretty extreme AI assist hygiene: you spend all your time on hard problems with serious impact. The bueden of understanding the code and being able to quit vim has gone up but down, and mathematics is absorbing computer programming.

The popular narrative about Claude Code 10x ing JavaScript projects is maskirovska