Comment by hollowturtle
5 hours ago
> Yes, at work, where you are paid to produce value for a business, the economics of purely hand-written code have changed
I'd love to genuinely love these blog posts but they are all the same! They're all like "now that machine are better than us $xyzargument". I'm so pissed off when I read so blantant lies like AI "writing code better than me" maybe better than you! But in general it's just a big lie.
> the economics of purely hand-written code have changed
who are you to know? I still hand code and produce a lot of value because I do care and polish everything I do. There are some pieces of the software that I wrote that I never touched again, they work perfectly, no errors no customer complaints
I don't know that it's a lie. The code that I can get Claude Sonnet to produce is pretty much what I would and that's two iterations behind. We've vibecoded scripts recently that genuinely are better than what I would have written and I don't think I'm terrible.
There are a lot of mediocre programmers aren't there, I wouldn't be surprised if on average Claude is doing better than what exists. It's not a "lie", anyways, just a point of view.
> We've vibecoded scripts recently that genuinely are better than what I would have written and I don't think I'm terrible.
I'm ok with vibecoding scripts, I love programming the machine and making the end user happy and not dealing with bash! I don't judge scripts quality as long as they are tools in the workflow, I dont care about that, unless they will somehow be part of the production. The name Script implies that, there isn't any architecture and Claude Opus sucks at architecture
...are you sure that Claude Sonnet writes code that you'd write?
For me, it writes code that mostly works, which is great. It insists on adding some of the least readable comments I've seen. It also likes to pad out the code to about double or triple what I would write.
It doesn't seem to have that little voice that says "hey, this approach sucks" so it needs the harness or the prompter to tell it to go back and refactor. Even Fable and Opus struggle with this.
This. I hate that Claude Code is taking the fun part of my job, but the reality is that Claude Code Opus 5 can one-shot a script in 15 seconds that would have taken me 45 minutes to write.
I don't begrudge the business for making the prudent choice of making me use AI, I just sort of lament that what I spent years enjoying and getting good at was so utterly derivative that it was perfect for the LLMs. It would be insulting if it weren't just a fact.
Every time you don’t write the script you lose a little of the ability to do so.
Just like if you don’t read you will lose the ability to.
These skills are not innate to us and can be forgotten over time.
I wonder if it will get to the point where people don’t even know what to ask for. Or how to judge if what the machine produces could have been better. Or if it does what they think it does.
It depends on your definition of better. Some businesses value speed above almost all else. Especially early-stage businesses where time to market and test ideas is paramount. I think in those cases, LLMs are better than probably any human.
On the other hand, if you mean tight, performant, simple, well-factored code, then yeah. LLMs simply aren't there, and may never be. On the other hand, maybe that matters less than we thought it did. Time will tell.
> Especially early-stage businesses where time to market and test ideas is paramount
To me it's just crazy of how dumb it is to test an idea with a vibecoded shitty app. I'm not saying it should be perfect from day zero, let's pretend we are talking about cakes, how crazy it would sound you will tell people to try and judge your new idea of a cake you don't even know how it taste or what's inside?
Well there’s at least two reasons people might not buy your cake: they don’t want cake, or the cake is bad.
For the first group, it doesn’t matter how good your cake is. If you spend a year perfecting it, you won’t sell them any more cakes. And for many products, this group is basically 100% of customers.
How is this different than testing an idea with a janky, rushed, handcoded protype or MVP? That's how a lot of product development has always been done.
I agree. You shouldn't test an idea with a vibecoded shitty app. That doesn't mean you shouldn't test it with an LLM-generated, refined, well-tested (by human users) app. I don't think it's a boolean. I think it's a continuum.
Those companies, and those people within otherwise decent companies, have existed since long before the advent of LLMs. Avoiding their influence is a career skill as important as the code itself. And I'm not saying you can just avoid them for your whole career, they're everywhere and are being supercharged by LLMs.
It's disappointing that the prevailing sentiment now is that architecture is less important than we thought. Software is always going to be getting more important, and all of it should be well thought out. If these people had these tools in 2004 they might've made thousands of fragmented buggy social media startups and actually slowed progress on that front.
Although "lies" might be too strong a word, I agree with you that the the AI-is-the-future people haven't done nearly enough to prove their claims. But that's nothing new in our industry, really.
I would recommend "The Leprechauns of Software Engineering" by Laurent Bossavit for an insightful and entertaining overview of just how much of software "engineering" is based on "truths" that we don't question.
The industry is in a desperate race to throw away what little quality it had (could you imagine if other fields of engineering had catastrophic failures at the rate software does?) in favour of "look at all the lines of code I generated today but don't actually read them please". It's always been a fad-heavy field, but this time it's really gone fully off the deep end. The whole "it's better than me" is just re-asserted endlessly. Nobody even pretends to care about evidence. I wish the boosters would go ahead and "leave me behind" already, I've been waiting years for it to happen now. The zone has never been more flooded, I think.
> I wish the boosters would go ahead and "leave me behind" already, I've been waiting years for it to happen now.
I completely agree. The fact that the software from places that are very vocally pro-AI (microsoft, salesforce, etc...) is still so full of bugs is really contrary evidence.
I read so blantant lies like AI "writing code better than me" maybe better than you! But in general it's just a big lie.
Those weren't lies. The AI does produce better code than those people. They simply weren't very good programmers to begin with.
Exactly. Someone on HN put it really succinctly earlier in the year: "LLMs look like they are good at things you are not good at."
I think this goes a long way to explain why there is such a huge difference in opinion about the quality of AI-written code: Some people say LLMs write code far better than they could, and others say the code is always terrible and requires a great deal of fixing before it's acceptable. How can two different developers say those very different things about the same product?
It might be a tough pill to swallow, but if you think your LLM is producing better code than you could produce... well, I might have some bad news for you about your own skills.
In my case I am more than capable of producing better code than the LLM, but I have never been the fastest on my team. My development speed was acceptable because the quality and robustness of the output was worth the time that thoughtfulness took. I was also able to improve the comprehensibility and robustness of my colleagues' code during code reviews.
But in the new environment of LLM-assisted coding, the LLM produces acceptable code so much faster than I can write it. Just taking time to understand and retool the LLM's output means an order of magnitude lower productivity and it doesn't feel like that's acceptable in this era.
Folks I know are landing 10+ PRs a day and nobody is reviewing anymore, and these are not companies that would have been skipping code review 2 years ago. The whole culture is turning against taking the time to comprehend and reason about our own work.
Here's the thing, it doesn't have to produce code better than me.
There is a wide range of code that will do the same job. 15s vs 2h for code 60% as good? 10 minutes for code 80% as good? 10 minutes today and 10 minutes tomorrow to fix something that is 30% as good?
A lot of people are going to draw that line in a different place and now that people can make that trade off you will quickly find they will and it probably wont fall where you would like it to.
At the end of the day a business pays you to produce value that will earn them money / customers. They don't pay you to write good code. Sometimes those two align and both sides are happy but they don't and often wont.
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And the number of those people will grow as more people lean too heavily into AI coding.
Thank you! It's made me lose a lot of respect for my field how credulous everyone is to any argument that starts out with a fig leaf of pretending to be on your side.
"The AI labs are scared of their own models, surely they must be credible sources on how powerful those models are"
"They are asking the government for regulation, they must be even more responsible than the average company"
"They are claiming to be a software engineer who automated their job with AI, surely I have to buy their course"
There are many boilerplate pieces of software that an LLM can generate faster than a human, but nearly half a decade into the LLM era there is no evidence that it's leading to the apocalyptic end of software organizations. And that's all with the subsidy in place that is now disappearing. Everyone online is lying for money, and that money is coming out of the same investor-subsidized marketing budgets.