Comment by lbrito
8 hours ago
What a great phrase!
>When people claim that it’s no longer sustainable to write code by hand, they’re not entirely wrong, but only in the same way that it’s no longer sustainable to sleep in a bed once someone has taken a shit in it.
This is not representative of what's actually going on, though. It's much more like an artisan carpenter who wants to build houses using bespoke hand-tools and precise joinery. That's great, and there are beautiful works of art created by those skills. But in the last year robots were developed that build homes exactly to spec. The robots work 24/7 and finish entire houses in a few days. That same skilled carpenter is being hired to monitor the robots and check over their work. There is, economically speaking, no place in the process for him to apply his craft. In the time he rips a single board, the robots build the wall. In the time he drives a handful of nails, the drywall is up and the paint is drying. He costs $200/hr, the robots cost $1/hr.
The carpenter is free to exercise his craft as he see's fit, but it's going to take place mostly in his personal workshop, for personal reasons, not to develop homes or run a business in the way he did before.
We can talk for ages about the quality of the robot's work, the maintainability of the resulting home, etc. But it's clear that, at this time, the market and ecosystem are embracing the robots whole-heartedly so those of us used to the old ways are having to rapidly adjust.
This analogy hinges on the economic argument (that a robot costs 200x less than a human), but far from being an established fact, that notion is more or less entirely based on vague, misleading and exaggerated claims from the token peddlers.
The truth is no one knows how much the robot costs, and we probably won't know until its too late. Its extremely naive, though, to simply buy into the PR from the peddlers and redistribute their propaganda verbatim in the way you are doing. Although none of us know for sure, considering R&D, infrastructure capex and externalities, the robots are most definitively _not_ cheap.
> Its extremely naive, though, to simply buy into the PR from the peddlers
OK, so don’t buy their PR, and try it yourself.
But if you do this, you will find there is a lot of evidence for the economic argument.
I tested out Google Argon 4 release by having it build a Web app to replace a binder I have for reconciling payments with reimbursable expenses.
It did it, as well as I would have and in much less time. I just set it to high and supervised it, it cost about $2. Even if you throw in a “supervision cost” to account for the time I had to spend interacting with it, it was substantially cheaper than had I done it at normal salary rates. Probably 2 orders of magnitude cheaper, even.
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> We can talk for ages about the quality of the robot's work, the maintainability of the resulting home
All of this stuff is so new, and we're supposed to hand wave away quality and maintainability?
You're thinking with your engineering brain.
For corporations, sales, probability and feature release cycles take priority over maintainability or code quality. AI is allowing businesses to build features faster than ever, so management is happy.
By the time maintainability issues hit, they've either pivoted, raised more capital or can throw money at the problem.
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Almost anyone will accept a 50% quality decrease for a 99% cost decrease. The only reasons I'm not living in a stack of cardboard boxes for $1 rent are that it's illegal, and the police won't protect it from break-ins.
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Not that tired old parable again. It doesn't hold.
If someone complains they take pride in understanding and designing deterministic processes, you can't reply that this is just like when robots took over manual labor.
No, because it is not manual labor, and robots hasn't taken over. Robots are computers. Robots are deterministic.
A better comparison would be an artisan architect, a blueprint designer being replaced by a special paint splatter, which when thrown against a piece of paper looks almost exactly like a blueprint of an almost completely liveable house. Great! What's not to like? It will allow anyone to design a house.
Good luck with the eventual rugpull. It always happens.
(1) We help you
(2) We undercut you
(3) You go out of business
(4) Your buddies go out of business as well
(5) Prices start rising
Supermarkets, restaurant chains, mathematicians or programmers it makes no difference.
The difference is the open and self-hosted models are not far behind the closed models. You can't rugpull if you don't own the rug.
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Except the robots actually cost far more than $1/hour, it’s just that the owners have enough capital to operate at a massive loss until the carpenters have largely been replaced. Only then will we learn what the robots actually cost.
Plus robots (software and hardware) will increasingly be used to invade even the most basic privacy, to control people etc. They are not just productivity tools anymore, they are also mass surveillance tools and every bad thing that comes with it.
Example: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ca7ufSI1Qxg&ra=m
Most depressing part is humans are training robots to replace themselves
Self-hosted and/or open models are fast approaching (or have reached) the quality bar necessary to handle a great deal of software development work. The models needed to cause the OP's problem are becoming commoditized.
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Forget robots, what you're describing already happened in the trades. Modern construction techniques are all about lowering the skill required to build a house and standardizing the process so it can be done with minimal training. E.g. drywall and caulk replacing plaster and precise joinery.
You can find example of this in all of the trades. Often, these are also talked about as "safety improvements" - which they sort of are. Given the same baseline intelligence, it's harder to dangerously fuck up plumbing or electrical in 2026 than it was in 1926.
The trick to sleeping in a shit-covered bed is to slap a big sheet of plastic on it and never look under it.
The Claude Code development team has pioneered that new way of sleeping.
I have been told that it keeps you warm and adapts to your body's shape for increased comfort.
Still have to deal with the stench. But nothing a nose clip can't solve, I reckon?
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I have been told it is the future of sleeping, and if I don‘t sleep with a plastic cover directing the pooping agent I will fall behind and eventually become obsolete. And that sleeping like this will eventually cure cancer and build swarms of mining rigs in space.
Quite profound.
I think the author is trying to say that a code base once infected with vibes, becomes indecipherable to the average human being. It's still just code, but full of Claudisms.
100%. Although large handwritten software code bases are often indecipherable to the average human being (actually, almost always indecipherable to the average human being, but often indecipherable even to skilled software engineers too); sometimes due to inherent complexities, sometimes due to Enterprise-isms.
Yeah, but only LLMs shit the bed at computer speed.
Let's be honest though, maybe "in the same way it's no longer feasible for tailors to spin their own yarn and weave their own cloth".
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sounds like bullshit. I'm actually glad that the people that hold this view are getting out of the way, they are the people that gatekept open source and made it annoying to work with. Do I miss having to wait for months to fix a trivial bug because I first need to convince 15 people that the fix is even necessary?
No, not really.
i'm sick of scatological metaphor.
Next time someone complains about software do me a favor and compare it to a nail through the foot or grabbing a hot dish and burning yourself or something else negative in the human experience. There is plenty to choose from.
We don't need 300 variations of enshitification, the folks at Pompeii and Herculaneum have that well covered.
Doesn't that imply that there's nothing inherently wrong about shitting in someone's bed and then sleeping in it?
What kind of autism is it that makes someone dig into the specific technical implications of a joke about sleeping in a bed someone took a shit in?
I thought Rich Hickey's sand cookie analogy was more apt than this bed shitting one.
They mean it's technically possible, but you wouldn't want to.
Society is pretty tolerant about this though?
Who is anyone to judge another person's kinks?
Only if you're into vibe coding.