Comment by kvakkefly
6 days ago
I remember this very clearly myself. Before opus 4.5, I was doing a lot of hand holding and was coding a lot myself, but I have not written code since that day more or less.
I did write some stuff myself just to learn how the enigma encryption machine worked, so wrote myself to learn. But professionally, I stopped coding in November.
It is sad. I like programming, if I couldn't do it and had to write text (which I do hate, I'm not a writer) it would be make quite a sad world.
A pattern I've settled into is to write code but leave a TODO for every narrow thing I want the LLM to do for me. Then just tell the agent to fix the todos. It's often faster and easier to give "instructions" this way
I never thought about that, good idea.
Nothing stopping you from doing that in a post-LLM world
Of course you can always program by hand, no one is stopping you.
Not sure this is true for all of us. I bet many/some (unsure here) are told to use ai for their daily programming tasks.
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Plenty of companies are forcing the use of AI to people.
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Exact same experience here. Prior to Opus 4.5 I'd sometimes use AI for some frontend webdev stuff (I am a C/C++/Python programmer; my HTML/CSS/JS knowledge is probably on par with a first-year uni student) and I'd have to manually edit things and retry, tell it not to attempt a paradigm that had failed before or cycle between models in Cursor just to try and get one that could make a simple widget that worked properly.
Now, I'm using Claude or Codex (GPT-5.5) for frontend and backend and it just gets it right first time more often than not. I've been making use of things like LSPs, Context7 and CLAUDE.md (global and per-repo) and it just stops doing the dumb LLM things that I hate.
How do you justify your salary given that you're just using a tool that any of us could use for $20 an hour in your role?
How do you justify your salary given that you're just using OSS compiler/editor any of us could use for free in your role ?
AI just changed how I edit code - I still see coworkers (senior developers) failing with Claude/Codex and get stuck when there are trivial solutions if you understand the full problem space. Right now AI is just a productivity tool.
Can you share how you use it to edit code? I‘ve seen a couple approaches, curious what you are doing:
1. Spec -> plan -> code (all agent driven, maybe with grill-me or ultraplan)
2. Handwritten spec -> agent driven plan -> agent driven code
3. Agent driven spec -> vibed code -> Fix by handholding until ok-ish
4. Vibed throwaway prototypes -> extract useful patterns -> rewrite with handholding
5. Generate file structure with handholding -> manual TODO comments -> Fill in blanks with handholding
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I don't feel the need to justify my salary, since I'm simply lucky in that regard. But I'm pretty sure you couldn't do my job just because you had access to a coding agent. Most of my time at the office is spent discussing high-level architecture and strategy, ideas, customer requests, backward compatibility, safety, security, quality assurance, etc.
Writing the actual code is a significant part of that, but the codebase is so complex that even Opus 4.7 and GPT-5.5 struggle with it without being fed a *lot* of context and constraints. And even then, they need a *lot* of steering due to making bad decisions that only someone with an intimate knowledge of the theory behind our software is able to catch.
I can only assume that people who think coding agents can completely replace an actual developer mostly deal with trivial software regarding both scope and the type of customers they serve (individuals instead of big companies in industry).
They're using a tool that anyone can use for $20 an hour, sure. But that's not what they're "just" doing. This is what is so insane about non-technical people talking about code - writing the actual syntax is not really the hard part.
What you're saying is like "how do you justify your salary as a NASA engineer when anyone can use Simulink and generate the code?"
It is extremely ignorant.
Please see Ben Evans’ podcast on a good take on this. Coding is just one of the task you do in your job, it is not the job or at least it probably is not. You do not get paid to code, you get paid to make a set of decisions that create value to the company. If this is automated then yes sadly your salary is not justified.
> Coding is just one of the task[s] you do in your job
But it's by far the most fun part and the only reason to take such a job...
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Which episode ?
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Never to feed the trolls ... but, how does my carpenter deserve $100 an hour when he is using an electric drill and power saw I can get at Home Deepo for $100 bucks?
Most good developers are not employed because just because they can code well.
What is over is: fizzbuzz and trivial CS algorithm regurgitation as a gate.
How do you justify your salary given that you sit in a chair all day, likely making the world worse, and make 5x as much as someone saving lives, building houses, or teaching kids how to read?
Supply and demand. Not many people are good at programming and it's highly in demand.
The question is how many people will be good at vibe coding? If the answer is "lots" then we can definitely expect programming salaries to return to "normal" levels. His question is very relevant; you can't dismiss it as easily as that.
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Someone competent using them is today a requirement and for awhile will make the marginal utility of skilled workers greater than that of unskilled. The justification is that they are much more productive than they were before.
no engineers on staff and stakeholders think the company is incompetent
Coinbase is paying the price for that for every UX glitch, after the CEO was gleeful about HR personnel shipping production code
You can build things quickly with AI, but you can’t delegate your responsibilities to AI. Once the AI starts struggling, you’ll need to takeover and figure it out.
This is _the_ question we must all be able to answer, so here goes my attempt - we all have access to the same tools, before stackoverflow it was forums, books/manuals, so its always been about “getting there, showing up, figuring it out” your hypothetical boss has other things to do than kick a LLM around at that price
I don't think you understand how programming as a job works, writing code is the final output of the process but it's not the job in itself.
There is no good justification for anyone's salary really, except perhaps doctors and underwater welders.
Because the tool will happily give you a "solution" that kinda works for a few inputs. It will happily correct itself when you give it more incorrect tests.
It will almost never converge on the general solution that will pass tests you haven't given it yet.
This is why AI is sooo good at Javascript and related slop. A solution that "kinda works" is good enough 9 times out of 10 and if some tests fail well ... YOLO and the web page will probably render anyway.
Contrast that to using Scheme or Lisp where AI will have trouble simply keeping the parentheses balanced.
To be fair, take away a human's paren highlighting and see how well they do.
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With very different final results though..?
They don't need to justify it!
> Before opus 4.5, I was doing a lot of hand holding and was coding a lot myself, but I have not written code since that day more or less.
I still must hand hold it every day, as it always does things wrong. Especially after it got seriously nerfed in March.
Note: experiences vary a lot depending on the programming language used, and projects. And the experience of the person coding.
Same experience here. I now think AI writes much better code than me. So I shifted my focus to finding requirements, analyzing possibilities, and making good plans.
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