Comment by EliRivers
18 days ago
"They can write code better than you or I can"
They can not. They can make some average code. On Friday one suggested an NSI installer script that would never bundle some needed files in the actual installer. I can only imagine that a lot of people have made the same mistake (used CopyFiles instead of File) and posted that mistake on the internet. The true disaster of that being that then testing out that installer on the developer's PC, where that CopyFiles may well work fine since the needed files happen to be sitting on that PC, would then lead on to think it was some weird bug that only failed on the end user's PC. I bet a lot of people posted it with comments like "this worked fine when I tried it," and here we are a decade later feeding that to an LLM.
These tools can write average code. That's what they've mostly been fed; that's what they're aiming for when they do their number crunching. The more specifically one prompts, I expect, then the more acceptable that average code will be. In some cases, average appears to be shockingly bad (actually, based on a couple of decades' experience in the game, average is generally pretty bad - I surely must have been churning out some average, bad code twenty years ago). If I want better than average, I'm going to have to do it myself.
So it can write better code than your below average software engineer.
It still cuts out 40-50% of workforce out.
For above average engineers its very good.
For bottom half not so much.
Translate for Mgrs - it replaces offshore completely.
And it will run rings around me in all the languages I don't know; every case in which my standard would be shockingly bad (I speak no APL whatsoever, for example) it would do better (in some cases, though, it would confidently produce an outcome that was actually worse than my null outcome).
The "below average" engineers are largely the juniors and the programming non-programmers.
The juniors can't be replaced because all senior engineer were once junior.
The non-programmers won't be replaced because they are not really programmers to begin with, so there is nothing to replace.
Translation for Mgrs - it supercharges offshore immensely. ftfy
You left out the key line “and you don’t believe me, wait six months”. These models are getting better all the time. The term “vibe coding” was only coined a year ago, around the same time as the release of Claude Code.
It doesn’t matter if you don’t think it’s good yet, because it’s brand new tech and it keeps improving.
We've been "waiting six months" for over three years now. Still waiting for the quality to improve.
If you don’t think the quality has improved then you haven’t actually been trying it. Any programmer who knows what they’re doing can immediately tell models like Opus 4.6 and Codex 5.3 are much better than models from a year ago. All the objective metrics (benchmarks etc) agree as well.