Comment by dasil003
19 days ago
I agree with both you and the GP. Yes, coding is being totally revolutionized by AI, and we don't really know where the ceiling will be (though I'm skeptical we'll reach true AGI any time soon), but I believe there still an essential element of understanding how computer systems work that is required to leverage AI in a sustainable way.
There is some combination of curiosity of inner workings and precision of thought that has always been essential in becoming a successful engineer. In my very first CS 101 class I remember the professor alluding to two hurdles (pointers and recursion) which a significant portion of the class would not be able to surpass and they would change majors. Throughout the subsequent decades I saw this pattern again and again with junior engineers, bootcamp grads, etc. There are some people no matter how hard they work, they can't grok abstraction and unlock a general understanding of computing possibility.
With AI you don't need to know syntax anymore, but to write the write prompts to maintain a system and (crucially) the integrity of its data over time, you still need this understanding. I'm not sure how the AI-native generation of software engineers will develop this without writing code hands-on, but I am confident they will figure it out because I believe it to be an innate, often pedantic, thirst for understanding that some people have and some don't. This is the essential quality to succeed in software both in the past and in the future. Although vibe coding lowers the barrier to entry dramatically, there is a brick wall looming just beyond the toy app/prototype phase for anyone without a technical mindset.
I can see why people are skeptical devs can be 10x as productive.
But something I'd bet money on is that devs are 10x more productive at using these tools.
I get its necessary for investment, but I'd be a lot happier with these tools if we didn't keep making these wild claims, because I'm certainly not seeing 10x the output. When I ask for examples, 90% its claude code (not a beacon of good software anyway but if nearly everyone is pointing to one example it tells you thats the best you can probably expect) and 10% weekend projects, which are cool, but not 10x cool. Opus 4.5 was released in Dec 2025, by this point people should be churning out year long projects in a month, and I certainly haven't seen that.
I've used them a few times, and they're pretty cool. If it was just sold as that (again, couldn't be, see: trillion dollar investments) I wouldn't have nearly as much of a leg to stand on
Have you seen moltbook? One dude coded reddit clone for bots in less the a week. How is it not at least 10x of what was achievable in pre-ai world?
Granted he left the db open to public, but some meat powered startups did exactly the same few years ago.
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Id wager my life savings that devs aren’t even 1.5x more productive using these tools.
Even if I am only slightly more productive, it feels like I am flying. The mental toll is severely reduced and the feel good factor of getting stuff done easily (rather than as a slog) is immense. That's got to be worth something in terms of the mental wellbeing of our profession.
FWIW I generally treat the AI as a pair programmer. It does most of the typing and I ask it why it did this? Is that the most idiomatic way of doing it? That seems hacky. Did you consider edge case foo? Oh wait let's call it a BarWidget not a FooWidget - rename everything in all other code/tests/make/doc files Etc etc.
I save a lot of time typing boilerplate, and I find myself more willing (and a lot less grumpy!!!) to bin a load of things I've been working on but then realise is the wrong approach or if the requirements change (in the past I might try to modify something I'd been working on for a week rather than start from scratch again, with AI there is zero activation energy to start again the right way). Thats super valuable in my mind.
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Dead wrong.
Because the world is still filled with problems that would once have been on the wrong side of the is it worth your time matrix ( https://xkcd.com/1205/ )
There are all sorts of things that I, personally, should have automated long ago that I threw at claud to do for me. What was the cost to me? Prompt and a code review.
Meanwhile, on larger tasks an LLM deeply integrated into my IDE has been a boon. Having an internal debate on how to solve a problem, try both, write a test, prove out what is going to be better. Pair program, function by function with your LLM, treat it like a jr dev who can type faster than you if you give it clear instructions. I think you will be shocked at how quickly you can massively scale up your productivity.
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It probably depends on the developer, and how much slop/bugs is willing to be tolerated.
Like others are saying, AI will accelerate the gap between competent devs and mediocre devs. It is a multiplier. AI cannot replace fundamentals, at least not a good helmsman with a good rational, detail-oriented mind. Having fundamentals (skill & knowledge) + using AI will be the cheat code in the next 10 years.
The only historical analogue of this is perhaps differentiating a good project manager from an excellent one. No matter how advanced, technology will not substitute for competence.
At the company I work for, despite pushing widespread adoption, I have seen exactly a zero percent increase in the rate at which major projects get shipped.
This is what keeps getting me. People here keep posting benchmarks, bragging about 5x, 10x, 20x. None of the companies we work with are putting anything faster.
The evangelist response is to call it a skill issue, but looking around it seems like no one anywhere is actually pushing out new products meaningfully faster.
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I view the current tools as more of a multiplier of base skill.
A 1x engineer may become a 5x engineer, but a -1x will also produce 5x more bad code.
Several experiments have shown quality of output at every skill level drops.
In many cases the quantity of output is good enough to compensate, but quality is extremely difficult to improve at scale. Beefing up QA to handle significantly more code of noticeably lower quality only goes so far.
> But something I'd bet money on is that devs are 10x more productive at using these tools.
If this were true, we should be seeing evidence of it by now, either in vastly increased output by companies (and open source projects, and indie game devs, etc), or in really _dramatic_ job losses.
This is assuming a sensible definition of 'productive'; if you mean 'lines of code' or 'self-assessment', then, eh, maybe, but those aren't useful metrics of productivity.
It is tempting to think that we can delegate describing the mental model to AI, but it seems like all of this boils down to humans making bets, and it also seems like the fundamental bets engineers are making are about the formalisms that encode the product and make it valuable.
What an awful professor! When I first tried to learn pointers, I didn't get it. I tried again 6 months later and suddenly it clicked. The same thing happened for another guy I was learning with.
So the professor just gaslit years of students into thinking they were too dumb to get programming, and also left them with the developmental disability of "if you can't figure something out in a few days, you'll never get it".
Indeed. Never let any idiot like this put you off. Back yourself and persist, persist, persist.
I don’t think there will be an “AI native” generation of developers. AI will be the entity that “groks pointers” and no one else will know it or care what goes on under the hood.