Comment by maccard
21 hours ago
Disagree - we’re being told on one hand that we are 6 months away from AI writing all Code, and 3 months into that the tools are unusable for complex engineering [1]. Every time I mention this I’m told “but have you tried the latest model and this particular tool” - yes I have, but if I need to be on the hottest new model for it to be functional that means the last time you claimed it was solved, it wasn’t solved.
> Every time I mention this
I feel like there’s a bunch of factors for why it will never be the same for many folks, from the models and harnesses, to the domains and existing tests/tooling.
I feel bad for the people for whom it doesn’t work, but Claude Opus has written most of my code in 2026 so far. I had to build some tools around linting entire projects and most of my tokens are probably referencing existing stuff and parallel review iterations and tests, but it’s pretty nice and even seeing legacy code doesn’t make me want move to a farm and grow potatoes.
It might be counter productive to be like: "Oh, just do X!" which works for the person suggesting it, and then have to do "But have you tried Y?" when it doesn't for the other person, if it just keeps being a never ending string of what works for one person not working for another.
> I feel like there’s a bunch of factors for why it will never be the same for many folks
Yeah, and the problem arises simply because some people are unable to accept the fact. They insist that if LLM-assisted coding doesn't work for one, it's because “you're holding it wrong”.
> I feel like there’s a bunch of factors for why it will never be the same for many folks, from the models and harnesses, to the domains and existing tests/tooling.
If the argument is “you have to use the right model, harness, test and tooling for it to work” then it’s not replacing software engineers any time soon.
The other thing is - where are all the web apps, mobile apps, games, desktop apps, from these 100x productivity multipliers. we’re 1-2 years into these tools being widely mainstream and available and I’m not seeing applications that took years to ship before appear at 100x the rate, or games being shipped by tiny teams, or new ideas of mobile apps coming out at 100x the rate. What we do see is vibe coded slop, stability issues with massive companies (windows, AWS for example), and mass layoffs back to pre-covid levels blamed on AI but everyone knows it’s a regression to the mean after a massive over hiring when money was cheap.
It’s like the emperor has no clothes on this topic to me.
I’m an indie developer and I see the explosion in apps in my niche (creative tools for photography/videography).
They wouldn’t have taken years to ship before, but easily a couple months.
Now the moment any app with any value gets popular, the App Store gets flooded with quick vibe coded copycat clones (very recognizable AI generated icon included).
The quality is low, but the impact this flood has on the market is real.
Where are all the apps? It's mostly visible in AI tooling itself. Harnesses, vibe coding tools and stuff with "claw" in the name saw a cambrian explosion.
And maybe using AI to use AI better is just masturbatory. But coders want interesting problems to solve. Pros also need software ideas they can monetize. And what problem is attracting more investment in money, time and neurons than the problem of making AI productive? (I am referring only to problems that can be solved in software....)
So the thing with AI is that right now it is both a tool AND a potentially very valuable problem to solve, that's why most of the AI "productivity" gains go into AI itself. At one point this self-refetential phase will have to end and people are going to see if these new AI tools, harnesses.claw-things are actually applicable to things people are willing to pay the real prices for (not the subsidized ones).
wasn’t there a news story about the app store reviews being delayed because of an increase in app influx?
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I wouldn't paint the image in such black terms. LLMs can be good in finding bugs and potential issues. And if you like, they can be like IntelliSense on steroids. Even agentic workflows can be good, e.g. for an initial assessment of a new large codebase. And potentially millions of other small tasks like writing one-off helper scripts etc.
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I absolutely feel like there has been an explosion of software since the release of AI tools. This is a subjective assessment anyway…
My company for example has gotten 500% better at creating productivity tools.
Even co-pilot writes most of my code in april 2026.
Further, i don't trust code anymore that hasn't been reviewed 3x or more by co-pilot.
If you have asked me 6 months ago I wouldn't have expected this change so soon.
It’s because the models response is conditioned on the prompt. They are as intelligent as the person using them
In some sense it’s a lot like a google search. There’s this big box of knowledge and you are choosing tokens to pluck out of it. The quality of the tokens depends on how intelligent you are.
Don’t forget, it also depends on the complexity of the work and the experiences of the operator.
The less complex the work and the less experienced the operator means more perceived “wow” factor :)
There’s definitely an aspect of how you use it though. In my work it’s mostly been chaining to reduce non-determinism.
The irony here is that even if one is extracting legitimate value from LLMs because they are that much smarter than their peers, the process of using LLMs to perform all of their skilled labor makes them less intelligent.
> I had to build some tools around linting entire projects
OK, everybody is doing that. And everybody is doing their best at making LLMs more reliable when working on non-trivial tasks. Yet, it looks like nobody came up with a universal solution yet. This is particularly true for non-trivial projects.
Check out from this onwards and the following point. You get a nice summary on top right. Mind that Anthropic alone is doing 30B/y annualized already.
Take a snapshot and check again in a few months. It's not perfect but it's much more falsifiable than a lot of the noise.
https://ai-2027.com/#narrative-2026-04-30
> Mind that Anthropic alone is doing 30B/Y annualised already
How many crypto exchanges were pulling in hundreds of millions in funding and doing billions in trades in 2021/2022?
That blog post is… really something, I’ll give you that. Im not entirely sure what else to say about it other than that.
Trade volume and buying API credits are very dissimilar ways of measuring value. One can be wash traded into oblivion, the other is burning a hole in corporate accounts.
> “I think… I don’t know… we might be six to twelve months away from when the model is doing most, maybe all of what SWEs (software engineers) do end to end.”
I think it's disingenuous (as disingenuous as you're accusing these marketing teams of being) to paraphrase that as "being told on one hand that we are 6 months away from AI writing all Code". It's merely stating that it's a real possibility. (It's also disingenuous to use a post complaining about a behavioral regression bug as evidence that it's not progressing)
Dismissing it as impossible is silly, considering how close it already is to a junior dev. Keep in mind that 14 months prior to that statement was before we even had any public reasoning models. Things really are moving that fast, it's just, at the moment, unclear how fast.
We’ve been suggesting that programmers are going to be replaced by simpler programming languages, gui programming tools, no code tools, low code tools, and now AI. The real big step was when Claude code came out and introduced the agentic loop where it could self validate against tests/linters/tooling, but everything after that had been penned as miraculous when IME it’s a new iteration of the same thing - wild hallucinations, getting stuck in deep loops, ignoring explicit instructions and guard rails, wild tangents and just generating stuff that doesn’t work or solve the problem.
> I think it's disingenuous (as disingenuous as you're accusing these marketing teams of being) to paraphrase that as "being told on one hand that we are 6 months away from AI writing all Code". It's merely stating that it's a real possibility
No - you don’t get to make wild predictions and say “oh I didn’t actually mean that, look how succesful we are though”. These teams aren’t saying “hey we think we’re going to majorly influence programming in 6-12 months”, they’re saying “we’re going to replace programmers”. If you can’t stand over your claims, don’t make them. _That’s_ disingenuous.
> We’ve been suggesting that programmers are going to be replaced by simpler programming languages, gui programming tools, no code tools, low code tools, and now AI.
The difference is that it's actually working this time. Non-programmers are writing full apps. Sure, they're simple ones, often just CRUD and UI, but it actually is changing things in a way it never has before. You can't assert something is the same as everything previous when there's already evidence that it's different.
> No - you don’t get to make wild predictions and say “oh I didn’t actually mean that, look how succesful we are though”.
Except that's not what's happening here. I'm criticizing you for misrepresenting what claim was made in the first place. No where in your evidence have you shown anyone "walking the claim back". If anything, TFA is claiming evidence of an LLM doing "most" of what SWEs do "end to end" three months ahead of schedule.
If you want to present evidence Dario (or another CEO -- I'm sure Sama has made much more fantastic claims that you could falsify) made claims that didn't pan out, be my guess, but don't tell falsehoods about the evidence you are presenting.
(And no, I'm not counting breathless tech reporters -- everyone knows how much to trust them when they report a cure for cancer -- they'll say everything is a miracle cure. But the fact that hundreds of "miracle weight loss cures" that never panned out made the new in the past several centuries didn't make GLP1s fake just because they had the same type of hype.)
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