Its inspiring to see folks putting effort into verbalizing the conflicts and unexpected side effects of working with LLMs. Our feelings really do matter at the end of the day.
But I dont know if they matter to the employers who can only see LLMs as "free milk", and developers as the "milking machine".
> But I dont know if they matter to the employers who can only see LLMs as "free milk".
Line Must Go Up.
If treating employees with dignity and giving them intellectually challenging and satisfying tasks make Line Go Up, then that's what employers will do. If making us push "Allow Claude To Do This" hundreds of times over and over makes Line Go Up more, then that's what they'll make us do. If sitting us in a factory and giving only our finger freedom of movement makes Line Go Up, that's what they'll do. If strapping us into pods like in The Matrix makes Line Go Up, that's what they'll do. If feeding us into wood chippers makes Line Go Up, that's what they'll do.
My work Slack channels are ghost-towns. People are logged in, but they're never saying anything. I often find myself wondering if anyone is even working. PRs have their names on them, even the review comments are posted from _their_ accounts, but it is obvious that Claude wrote everything from the code, the unnecessarily verbose change summary, to their comments. Even their replies to my change requests start with "You're right — …".
I miss the days when the engineering Slack channels had long threads of new and interesting ways to do things, discussions of something we could do next to make work easier or fix long-standing issues. We used to build up our own knowledge of who was good at specific things, what they'd be interested in working on. Now everyone just has their slop-machine spit out every piece of a change for the entire stack without paying any attention to the details.
Fwiw I work at a company where engineers use AI heavily to produce the majority of work outputs but we also have a Slack that's just as lively as ever and plenty of evidence of humanity. Your experience sounds bad and you may be able to find a better one! It's not all bad everywhere.
How established is your team? I can see how teams that existed from the pre-LLM era can maintain their vitality, but would expect newer teams to struggle a lot more. Also, remote or in-person?
I don't want to hear about the state of your Confluence (or equivalent), if you do use it!
Also one more thing I started noticing is unnecessarily detailed comments in code, complete with issue numbers. And some of that belong in version control commit (IMHO).
Yeah it’s fucked, our job has been destroyed from a fun team-based intellectual activity to being a button pusher. I imagine something similar happened to tailors who became factory sweatshop workers.
No point crying about it or coping that some bubble will pop and the genie will go back in the bottle. I’m pretty confident that’s not happening, though in the distant future some society will recognize that everything that can be automated should not be automated, that society will look very different and probably won’t happen in my lifetime (it will for one, I predict bring back tailors too).
So here’s my solution, leave the field. If what you enjoyed most was creative problem solving then moving to a field that enables that is the best solution. Yes the next Ruby on Rails app will involve even lesser creativity than before, but is that the situation for the next good aeroplane? Flying car? Small modular nuclear reactor. I suspect just button pushing for that won’t work nearly as well and that’s my plan anyway.
> I imagine something similar happened to tailors who became factory sweatshop workers.
I'm really wondering where this goes. I'm not sure we are going to the "tailors", but maybe I'm also biased.
Tailoring completly got lost - there are basically none* in western europe (* if you don't count the couple of shops that adjust your clothes a little - try to find clothes Made in Europe). So are we going out-of-business and our code is coming from (name a country)?
Or are we going to exist, but it's all Fortune 500 and smaller shops have no chance of establishing themselves anymore?
Or is it going to be totally different and small shops will flourish and the Fortune 500 will loose part of the market?
This is how I have been thinking too. Programming as a mass-market career is over the same way being a tailor, a blacksmith, a cobbler a carpenter, etc for the mass market is also over. Unlike programming, those profession enjoyed millennials of history so there is still some type of romantic idea of a "hand made garment" or a "hand made leather shoe", but outside of very small market for that, there is no economical value in those anymore. The fact that a person might have enjoyed sewing or woodworking as a vocation is incidental to people's need for clothes or cabinets.
I don't think anyone would care about "hand made software", arguably no one ever did. You need a tool to do X. The enjoyment of the person producing that tool is entirely incidental. You don't care if the corn you're eating was hand picked by a person who loved manual farm labor or by a combine harvester. Just like you wouldn't care if someone enjoys driving a combine vs a self-driving combine nor if someone enjoys directing self-driving harvesters or if they are self-directing.
Yeah, I think I would avoid video games with AI art or code, I only play indie interesting video games and looking at the public’s reaction I think they too feel the same way, so I do expect a smaller market for handmade video games.
Outside of that it’s hard to envision handmade anything in software in this everything mass produced cheap consumerist society.
> I don't think anyone would care about "hand made software", arguably no one ever did. You need a tool to do X.
I absolutely do. Perhaps this is a product of my first exposure to computers, but I vividly remember the early Macintosh computers coming on the scene. The care and attention to detail on every level of the machine was special. They were so different than everything before. And it inspired many developers to produce beautiful, weird, awesome software. Does anybody remember the Talking Moose? After Dark? Spaceward Ho! HyperCard? RoboWars? Heck, even MSWord 5.1a was an amazing piece of software whose grammar checker literally taught me grammar.
Now we have “software that does X”, but that X is so bland and enshittified nearly all the joy of computing has been erased. I love writing software. I love writing good and clever software. Perhaps the world no longer cares, but I do.
Agreed. I carefully choose the software I use because I believe the author poured in some domain specific knowledge and made a tool that is novel and carefully thought through.
That does not mean a clever user cannot use an AI tool to help produce it, but so far most of it is slop. Some clever users can build some gems though.
>in the distant future some society will recognize that everything that can be automated should not be automated
No, everything that can be automated SHOULD be automated, but the automation should benefit everyone instead of just the 0.1% (actually this percentile keeps getting smaller and smaller, so the percentage of people outside of the "permanent underclass" is probably even less than that now).
The problem about AI (at its current level, barring AI2027 type scenarios) is not about AI, but about the way we've organized society as a whole.
I've brought this up before, if the USSR existed today how would Soviet mathematicians react to AI? Would they be dismayed or overjoyed? You never see mathematicians acknowledge this point, but it's the crux of the issue. In our society employment justifies existence, in a society where existence is inherently justified AI would mean freedom to people instead of causing existential dread.
> No, everything that can be automated SHOULD be automated,
I disagree, because then the "human" part of our days are over. If everything is automated, I don't need to interact with any human at all anymore - but the random small chat in the Bakery every couple of days is very nice. Ther will also be no chance to break out of the loop. Try to get a human involved if the automated system thinks "naa, not today", that's going to be difficult because companies prove they will fire the human as fast as possible because the task seemingly is fully automated.
> I've brought this up before, if the USSR existed today how would Soviet mathematicians react to AI? Would they be dismayed or overjoyed? You never see mathematicians acknowledge this point, but it's the crux of the issue. In our society employment justifies existence, in a society where existence is inherently justified AI would mean freedom to people instead of causing existential dread.
Yeah, but even once we've achieved a society in which existence is inherently justified, some things are about the destination and some things are about the journey. We need to organize society around producing people and lives, good lives, as the final economic output. A person we "produce" under such a system will probably be highly skilled and want to participate in society's productive processes, because mastery and participation are real human needs for living a good life.
The question is how we distinguish between processes that are important to the people participating in them, and those that are not. Factory work was and is a massive improvement over subsistence farming, but no population in world history has been permanently satisfied spending their lives on the assembly line, so either we can take advantage of highly automated manufacturing to just have machines do the work or we can redirect automation towards re-involving human craftspeople into producing less interchangeable, higher-quality products (the market has been moving towards customizable commodities anyway).
I agree with your first paragraph. I myself do not use AI for my personal projects (such as the game engine I'm developing), and do not intend to do so in the future regardless of how far AI develops.
I'm not arguing in favor of a human existence that is completely based on consumption, but one that maximizes automation as much as possible for the benefit of society as a whole so that all human labor becomes voluntary. At that point people will decide which processes are important for them to participate in on their own.
Yea, I got into programming because... I like programming. Not whatever the fuck this is. We've been reduced to hamsters pushing a button and getting a little pellet back, over and over.
I agree with everything in this article (though I am still optimistic that LLMs will help otherwise unskilled people write personal software), but unless labor starts meaningfully organizing and pushing back against the corporate power that causes these outcomes, things will only get worse
Like we can say "this sucks" twenty thousand times, but what's the plan? Maybe some of the senior people who can be productive because of our knowledge who may cease to exist as a class resulting in a century of slop should get together and talk praxis. Otherwise all these articles are just training data
> And that’s true: nobody wants to see how John prompts. There is something repulsive and fundamentally unsexy about talking to an agent. It feels fine when you are doing it, but others... ugh, get a chatroom. Their prompts are cringe; their agents are weird. Like looking at someone else’s TikTok feed.
So real. There’s still something fundamentally embarrassing about saying you used AI to do something. This leads to a pet theory of mine that most people use AI far more than they say they do.
This is certainly true but I am also seeing some contrarian signals: people shaming you for doing stuff AI is faster at or having absolutely no shame or being proud of using AI for their work... To the point of not realizing how useless that actually makes them. And they get promoted.
The team thing is killing us right now. Everyone is just kind of silo'd with their agents and they present these entire complex units of work with no input from the rest of the team, and by then it's too late to fix.
The current "slow down" is a back-handed attempt to let the world catch up with the amount of slop that has been generated. The speed and time-to-market bill is piling up and in the next 5 years there will no humans that can understand this mess. So agentic SWE systems, need to change. Either we trust the validation layer at the end, or we take back control and also learn along the way.
> Agents weaken the social fabric of engineering teams by reducing interpersonal communication, increasing self-reliance, and hindering skill expression.
I have a feeling that this is true and it's a bit sad.
What's been driving me nuts recently is when coworkers send me clearly AI-generated blocks of text in otherwise-human conversations. Like I'll ask in a chat window "hey, Jim, what's the difference between these two deployment pipelines," and I'll get back a block of text with markdown and headings in the style of our team's AI, and I get this sad feeling where I thought I was going to be having a conversation with a colleague, but instead my colleague was just playing as a chinese room.
There's a particular sting to being passed raw, unfiltered output from the LLM hose. I think you're onto something with the mismatch in expectations (I was expecting a conversation that led to insights we might both share, and the other party was expecting to answer a question quickly without much thought).
I think there's something deeper than that, too. Almost a feeling of betrayal? I cared in part because I thought everyone else cared, too, like we were working towards a common goal. Asking a question in search of shared understanding only to be passed the modern equivalent of a LMGTFY link hurts in a very particular way. I thought they cared about this, too, but they're only trying to get the bag. I get it, times are difficult right now, but it doesn't make it hurt less.
I must be lucky or work in a great company, because I've never seen this, and I think it would be totally unacceptable for a coworker to even think about doing this. What kind of horrible company culture normalizes this kind of behavior?
I wonder if this toxic "Why are you talking to me? Just RTFM or ATFLLM (ask the fucking llm)" attitude can be filtered out during interviewing.
And the response back will be "If you could've asked the AI, why did you ask me then?"
In some cases, it may even be the appropriate response. Interrupting somebody to ask something that could be cleared up by an AI is in the same ballpark as asking them something that could be cleared up if you read the docs.
It misses the single most powerful positive though. It is incredibly fast and empowering to the point that putting up with the four horsemen is easily justified. Coding by hand is largely in the rearview mirror unless you are more interested in the craft of writing code than simply using code to get things done.
I've struggled with these feelings over the past week as I take some time away from work and the LLM madness. I miss discussions and debates about architecture and solutions to problems. I miss the curiosity and learning!
It seems LLM usage has eroded whatever facades existed and made some of us believe we were part of teams or organizations that shared these values, or culture, I'm seeing expressed in the article and comments. Perhaps _we_ were the ones hallucinating the values existed in the first place?
I don't begrudge folks who want to solve problems by any means, and not worry about the alienation or deskilling. That's their right. However, it's now clear to me that I have to make a conscious effort to express what my own values are and to build/join and organization that shares them.
> I miss discussions and debates about architecture and solutions to problems.
If you aren’t having these, then your team is using these tools wrong. AI assisted coding should open you up to more of precisely these conversations. Then use them to implement that.
I wish! We put on a show for a while with tech spec reviews, but the specs were all AI slop. Now we don't even do that. Folks just work in their silos. I mostly learn of new functionality when I am assigned a code review. My feedback on those reviews is passed to an agent.
I feel like I'm living in an alternate universe - my company has fully adopted agentic coding, we're working with:
- large codebases
- business critical software for clients that don't tolerate downtime
- agentic and classical features
We still collaborate well, we still care about quality, we still have good knowledge of the codebase, but I haven't written a single line of code myself in over a year.
We have not had a single incident that I'm aware of where we shipped a slop and it created downtime.
We're building a "software factory" that is currently handling low-level chore tickets and merging about 1/3rd of our PRs. A year from now I imagine it will be doing significantly more, and I don't think anyone is going to get fired because of it (if anything we'll keep hiring more).
I don't see this as an either/or thing. If there is some hidden ocean of slop that we're bound to fall into I don't see it anywhere. Where is the disparity?
Hey, author here. You should definitely share your experience!! We really need to study more success stories so we could figure out what makes them successful.
If it's possible I would highly encourage your company to publish something about how you work and what you think you're doing right.
I'm a senior software engineer at my company. The AI slop is so bad that it's causing myself code review fatigue. The engineers are also intermediate with 3-4 years of experience.I had one guy report me to his manager because I wasn't letting him merge his PR in because of a critical bug with his code that his precious ai didn't understand.
My previous employer even suggested code reviews are for human code only, AI-only code can go out without review as long as CI passes since the AI can be prompted to review its own code before committing.
It never does because however you frame it, AI is always the perfect scapegoat.
"Oh, I'm sorry, the bug was introduced by the AI and it made such a good case for it. Damn you claude, we'll do better next time. I'll add a code-review agent to find regressions."
this seems to be the true killer app of AI - accountability proxies. its interpersonal opium to have a third party that two ostensibly-in-conflict people can sink their negativity into.
its a major reason why military use of AI is so chilling - "look, I explicity ASKED the murderbot not to kill babies when I authorized the napalm strike on the maternity ward! BAD BOT"
It is very possible to use these tools in the wrong way. Companies that understand how to use AI will do better, those that have these 4 problems won't.
- AI should accelerate your understanding of the codebase and technical concepts.
- Skills should ensure a higher quality of code than you could create without AI
- Engineers should stay responsible for the code they product.
- The available time freed up should be used for communication, product and marketing research. The definition of an engineer who just writes code is something that's going away.
Unless something is so simple that the AI can run it autonomously. There are actually many projects like that these days. And in those cases not looking at the code like DHH does is also a viable strategy.
this is exactly it. smart companies create entire platforms with normalized, context-specific conditions and ever-evolving context for teams to operate effectively with AI in. that means artifacts, tests, ADRs, EDDs, etc. the actual engs are in-the-loop for reviewing all of the outputs, validating it against their taste and judgement, and given sufficient time to do so
seeing AI as an individualized tool for single people to labormax with just means throwing spaghetti at a wall and seeing a lot of failures and incidents (much like my old workplace). it's very different from having a driven and iterative system in place with new processes and checks with clear leadership direction
Oh god that article about Astra is so relatable. I was wondering why it was refusing to write any whitespace and was just spitting out the worst code imaginable, now I know it's not just my harness or prompts. It's truly a horrible coding model.
My work slack used to have lots of questions. Now very less. That should be celebrated because we don’t have to depend on anyone. But I guess you can paint anything in a bad way.
I don't see the dependency amongst colleagues as a bad thing. The issues I saw when fielding those questions was folks not doing a simple search across the internal docs to answer the question themselves. Yes, LLMs make this initial search easier, and answer a majority of folks' questions.
The problem arises when it hallucinates answers. That results in colleagues operating based on invalid information, leading to bigger issues. I've seen this many times at my own company, and I simply do not know how to tell folks to be more discerning of the LLM responses while leadership is simultaneously saying do more, faster, with AI.
> That should be celebrated because we don’t have to depend on anyone.
When your work process depends on SAAS you depend on the vendor of that SAAS.
"Everyone" tells me that "noone" wants to use LLM-based code generators that you can run locally because they're so much worse than the newest ones provided by the major LLM manufacturers. If the gossip is true, then it seems like -for the foreseeable future- you're absolutely dependent on one or both of those two SAAS vendors.
Disagree on the slop point. By now the code of frontier models works well, and the need to read it is gone. The Claude word salad problem was pretty much solved with the 5.5 opus release.
The other 3 points made in article make sense though.
> By now the code of frontier models works well, and the need to read it is gone.
Like anything else, it depends on what you're working on. For small personal projects I agree, but in maintaining large scale business applications with millions of lines of code, I am still having to guide the models to reuse existing code and to be more flexible with their data structures to accommodate changing business requirements in the future.
They only see a snapshot of the world the application exists in due to their ephemeral nature, and until that is overcome, they will only be able to learn general principles and not the particular nuances of your codebase that only arise from observing how the users use it on a daily basis.
If you don't need to read the code at all, what are the engineers doing to make the other issues matter? Deskilling and alienation are still about the relationship between engineers and the code.
You still have to orchestrate these things and the wholistic system architectures, pull the slot machine handle many times to get the right thing, and review/verify the working output constantly.
That said, I think we need to be prepared for how a simple prompt like "make it faster" will work in a relatively short timeframe - and where the AI is able to adequately refactor/re-platform/be done in a way where even the architecture becomes obscure to us.
I often use simple prompts like “make it faster” and get back functionally correct commits. When I review them, I often discover that they didn’t do what I really wanted - sometimes Claude made it faster by incurring expensive costs, or doing a migration that would be risky in prod, or making a tradeoff that’s not worth it.
Perhaps I could set up a workflow to handle this without reading the code. I’ve seen people who make Claude fill out arcane templates, and then spend their time reviewing reports and tinkering with loops or whatever. But why would I want to read a TPS report about the code rather than just reading the code?
They will do these prompt just fine but the result will be a near identical copy of an open source version. And it won't tell you it cloned some existing engine, because it does not know, it just pulled it out from its model. Now you have an AI slopped 3d engine or DBMS no-one cares about that will just rot.
Again, the assumption that forms the crux of these objections of all of these is that we're going to hit some plateau where we are going to need humans to come back in, reskill, retake over, etc. I don't think most people are prepared for the fact that that's just a midwit problem and the AI will just keep getting better and won't need humans in the loop.
The backlash against agentic coding comes from the split that has already existed among professional software engineers. The ones who are most resistant to it are the ones for whom it has been "just a job", but the ones who love it are the ones who love solving problems. It's now possible for a small team (one person, a few) to solve truly daunting software problems with the help of agentic methods. If you were a 9 to 5er who valued craft but didn't dream about solving problems, AI is a buzz kill.
Im one of the more mid to resistant folks and this has never been just a job to me. I did take immense satisfaction from learning, deeply understanding how things work and the consist and repeatable behavior, which is just not there with ai. Especially the consist/repeatable behavior, which to me computers that behave inconsistently aren't nearly as worthwhile.
> The ones who are most resistant to it are the ones for whom it has been "just a job", but the ones who love it are the ones who love solving problems.
Wow, what a simplistic, uncalled for view of the world. This is just so ignorantly and offensively incorrect.
I really don't think anybody in these "debates", on either side, has a high horse to ride with respect to rhetoric and solemnity.
This in particular is a really silly hill to die on, because literally every debate about software development, from AI to language choice to tabs vs. spaces, eventually settles into a gravity well of asserting that all the good developers agree with your take.
> This in particular is a really silly hill to die on,
Stating that people can't love software development or solving problems because they are resistant to AI taking over their entire job is a silly hill to die on?
I really enjoy what I do, and have done, for the past 20 years. When I first wrote code I literally thought I discovered magic. In many ways, AI has re-triggered some of those feelings!
I also really care about building quality software for our customers.
And it infuriates me to no end when I see huge amounts of objectively incorrect code being written by AI, and the developer behind it stating they have no idea what it's doing, or when people say they can't solve a problem because they are out of AI tokens, etc.
But supposedly these are the people who care about solving problems? Not just that - they are the only people who care about solving problems.
You can choose to take offense if you want, but since I've seen literally the same sentiment expressed about whether people choose Emacs or vi, I have a very hard time taking that offense seriously.
It's a shame you package your speculation inside an insult 'cause the "problem solver" as LLM booster isn't entirely wrong and aren't entirely bad.
A LLM seems like a powerful but dangerous tool. It's dangerous even in problem solving terms since one day can output something that advances your project significantly and the next day is can output vacuous verbiage that seems like a solution but is nothing.
They deserve a critical view but they make it hard to maintain that critical view.
Oh yeah let’s play this game. The ones resistant care about their work and pour long hours getting the details just right. The ones who love it are the ones who just want to close tickets. It’s now possible for a small team (one person, a few) to create an avalanche of slop with the help of agentic methods. If you were a 9 to 5er who valued sprint velocity but never once pondered how a monad is like a burrito back in the day, AI is the All-Mother
In my opinion, you’ve got the situation backwards. The people who see it as “just a job” are the ones who like AI because they just want to get the work done and get paid. The people who genuinely enjoy solving problems, on the other hand, don’t like AI because it takes away the problem-solving part of the job.
Its inspiring to see folks putting effort into verbalizing the conflicts and unexpected side effects of working with LLMs. Our feelings really do matter at the end of the day.
But I dont know if they matter to the employers who can only see LLMs as "free milk", and developers as the "milking machine".
> But I dont know if they matter to the employers who can only see LLMs as "free milk".
Line Must Go Up.
If treating employees with dignity and giving them intellectually challenging and satisfying tasks make Line Go Up, then that's what employers will do. If making us push "Allow Claude To Do This" hundreds of times over and over makes Line Go Up more, then that's what they'll make us do. If sitting us in a factory and giving only our finger freedom of movement makes Line Go Up, that's what they'll do. If strapping us into pods like in The Matrix makes Line Go Up, that's what they'll do. If feeding us into wood chippers makes Line Go Up, that's what they'll do.
My work Slack channels are ghost-towns. People are logged in, but they're never saying anything. I often find myself wondering if anyone is even working. PRs have their names on them, even the review comments are posted from _their_ accounts, but it is obvious that Claude wrote everything from the code, the unnecessarily verbose change summary, to their comments. Even their replies to my change requests start with "You're right — …".
I miss the days when the engineering Slack channels had long threads of new and interesting ways to do things, discussions of something we could do next to make work easier or fix long-standing issues. We used to build up our own knowledge of who was good at specific things, what they'd be interested in working on. Now everyone just has their slop-machine spit out every piece of a change for the entire stack without paying any attention to the details.
Fwiw I work at a company where engineers use AI heavily to produce the majority of work outputs but we also have a Slack that's just as lively as ever and plenty of evidence of humanity. Your experience sounds bad and you may be able to find a better one! It's not all bad everywhere.
How established is your team? I can see how teams that existed from the pre-LLM era can maintain their vitality, but would expect newer teams to struggle a lot more. Also, remote or in-person?
Yeah all that time not working is spent in the slack chats. Sounds like place just sucks.
I don't want to hear about the state of your Confluence (or equivalent), if you do use it!
Also one more thing I started noticing is unnecessarily detailed comments in code, complete with issue numbers. And some of that belong in version control commit (IMHO).
Yeah it’s fucked, our job has been destroyed from a fun team-based intellectual activity to being a button pusher. I imagine something similar happened to tailors who became factory sweatshop workers.
No point crying about it or coping that some bubble will pop and the genie will go back in the bottle. I’m pretty confident that’s not happening, though in the distant future some society will recognize that everything that can be automated should not be automated, that society will look very different and probably won’t happen in my lifetime (it will for one, I predict bring back tailors too).
So here’s my solution, leave the field. If what you enjoyed most was creative problem solving then moving to a field that enables that is the best solution. Yes the next Ruby on Rails app will involve even lesser creativity than before, but is that the situation for the next good aeroplane? Flying car? Small modular nuclear reactor. I suspect just button pushing for that won’t work nearly as well and that’s my plan anyway.
> I imagine something similar happened to tailors who became factory sweatshop workers.
I'm really wondering where this goes. I'm not sure we are going to the "tailors", but maybe I'm also biased.
Tailoring completly got lost - there are basically none* in western europe (* if you don't count the couple of shops that adjust your clothes a little - try to find clothes Made in Europe). So are we going out-of-business and our code is coming from (name a country)?
Or are we going to exist, but it's all Fortune 500 and smaller shops have no chance of establishing themselves anymore?
Or is it going to be totally different and small shops will flourish and the Fortune 500 will loose part of the market?
This is how I have been thinking too. Programming as a mass-market career is over the same way being a tailor, a blacksmith, a cobbler a carpenter, etc for the mass market is also over. Unlike programming, those profession enjoyed millennials of history so there is still some type of romantic idea of a "hand made garment" or a "hand made leather shoe", but outside of very small market for that, there is no economical value in those anymore. The fact that a person might have enjoyed sewing or woodworking as a vocation is incidental to people's need for clothes or cabinets.
I don't think anyone would care about "hand made software", arguably no one ever did. You need a tool to do X. The enjoyment of the person producing that tool is entirely incidental. You don't care if the corn you're eating was hand picked by a person who loved manual farm labor or by a combine harvester. Just like you wouldn't care if someone enjoys driving a combine vs a self-driving combine nor if someone enjoys directing self-driving harvesters or if they are self-directing.
Yeah, I think I would avoid video games with AI art or code, I only play indie interesting video games and looking at the public’s reaction I think they too feel the same way, so I do expect a smaller market for handmade video games.
Outside of that it’s hard to envision handmade anything in software in this everything mass produced cheap consumerist society.
> I don't think anyone would care about "hand made software", arguably no one ever did. You need a tool to do X.
I absolutely do. Perhaps this is a product of my first exposure to computers, but I vividly remember the early Macintosh computers coming on the scene. The care and attention to detail on every level of the machine was special. They were so different than everything before. And it inspired many developers to produce beautiful, weird, awesome software. Does anybody remember the Talking Moose? After Dark? Spaceward Ho! HyperCard? RoboWars? Heck, even MSWord 5.1a was an amazing piece of software whose grammar checker literally taught me grammar.
Now we have “software that does X”, but that X is so bland and enshittified nearly all the joy of computing has been erased. I love writing software. I love writing good and clever software. Perhaps the world no longer cares, but I do.
Agreed. I carefully choose the software I use because I believe the author poured in some domain specific knowledge and made a tool that is novel and carefully thought through.
That does not mean a clever user cannot use an AI tool to help produce it, but so far most of it is slop. Some clever users can build some gems though.
>in the distant future some society will recognize that everything that can be automated should not be automated
No, everything that can be automated SHOULD be automated, but the automation should benefit everyone instead of just the 0.1% (actually this percentile keeps getting smaller and smaller, so the percentage of people outside of the "permanent underclass" is probably even less than that now).
The problem about AI (at its current level, barring AI2027 type scenarios) is not about AI, but about the way we've organized society as a whole.
I've brought this up before, if the USSR existed today how would Soviet mathematicians react to AI? Would they be dismayed or overjoyed? You never see mathematicians acknowledge this point, but it's the crux of the issue. In our society employment justifies existence, in a society where existence is inherently justified AI would mean freedom to people instead of causing existential dread.
> No, everything that can be automated SHOULD be automated,
I disagree, because then the "human" part of our days are over. If everything is automated, I don't need to interact with any human at all anymore - but the random small chat in the Bakery every couple of days is very nice. Ther will also be no chance to break out of the loop. Try to get a human involved if the automated system thinks "naa, not today", that's going to be difficult because companies prove they will fire the human as fast as possible because the task seemingly is fully automated.
> I've brought this up before, if the USSR existed today how would Soviet mathematicians react to AI? Would they be dismayed or overjoyed? You never see mathematicians acknowledge this point, but it's the crux of the issue. In our society employment justifies existence, in a society where existence is inherently justified AI would mean freedom to people instead of causing existential dread.
Yeah, but even once we've achieved a society in which existence is inherently justified, some things are about the destination and some things are about the journey. We need to organize society around producing people and lives, good lives, as the final economic output. A person we "produce" under such a system will probably be highly skilled and want to participate in society's productive processes, because mastery and participation are real human needs for living a good life.
The question is how we distinguish between processes that are important to the people participating in them, and those that are not. Factory work was and is a massive improvement over subsistence farming, but no population in world history has been permanently satisfied spending their lives on the assembly line, so either we can take advantage of highly automated manufacturing to just have machines do the work or we can redirect automation towards re-involving human craftspeople into producing less interchangeable, higher-quality products (the market has been moving towards customizable commodities anyway).
I agree with your first paragraph. I myself do not use AI for my personal projects (such as the game engine I'm developing), and do not intend to do so in the future regardless of how far AI develops.
I'm not arguing in favor of a human existence that is completely based on consumption, but one that maximizes automation as much as possible for the benefit of society as a whole so that all human labor becomes voluntary. At that point people will decide which processes are important for them to participate in on their own.
Yea, I got into programming because... I like programming. Not whatever the fuck this is. We've been reduced to hamsters pushing a button and getting a little pellet back, over and over.
I'm gonna make the claim that all of these are results of how someone uses an agent (poorly), not a result of the agents themselves.
I agree with everything in this article (though I am still optimistic that LLMs will help otherwise unskilled people write personal software), but unless labor starts meaningfully organizing and pushing back against the corporate power that causes these outcomes, things will only get worse
Like we can say "this sucks" twenty thousand times, but what's the plan? Maybe some of the senior people who can be productive because of our knowledge who may cease to exist as a class resulting in a century of slop should get together and talk praxis. Otherwise all these articles are just training data
> And that’s true: nobody wants to see how John prompts. There is something repulsive and fundamentally unsexy about talking to an agent. It feels fine when you are doing it, but others... ugh, get a chatroom. Their prompts are cringe; their agents are weird. Like looking at someone else’s TikTok feed.
So real. There’s still something fundamentally embarrassing about saying you used AI to do something. This leads to a pet theory of mine that most people use AI far more than they say they do.
This is certainly true but I am also seeing some contrarian signals: people shaming you for doing stuff AI is faster at or having absolutely no shame or being proud of using AI for their work... To the point of not realizing how useless that actually makes them. And they get promoted.
The team thing is killing us right now. Everyone is just kind of silo'd with their agents and they present these entire complex units of work with no input from the rest of the team, and by then it's too late to fix.
excellent observation.
The current "slow down" is a back-handed attempt to let the world catch up with the amount of slop that has been generated. The speed and time-to-market bill is piling up and in the next 5 years there will no humans that can understand this mess. So agentic SWE systems, need to change. Either we trust the validation layer at the end, or we take back control and also learn along the way.
> Agents weaken the social fabric of engineering teams by reducing interpersonal communication, increasing self-reliance, and hindering skill expression.
I have a feeling that this is true and it's a bit sad.
What's been driving me nuts recently is when coworkers send me clearly AI-generated blocks of text in otherwise-human conversations. Like I'll ask in a chat window "hey, Jim, what's the difference between these two deployment pipelines," and I'll get back a block of text with markdown and headings in the style of our team's AI, and I get this sad feeling where I thought I was going to be having a conversation with a colleague, but instead my colleague was just playing as a chinese room.
There's a particular sting to being passed raw, unfiltered output from the LLM hose. I think you're onto something with the mismatch in expectations (I was expecting a conversation that led to insights we might both share, and the other party was expecting to answer a question quickly without much thought).
I think there's something deeper than that, too. Almost a feeling of betrayal? I cared in part because I thought everyone else cared, too, like we were working towards a common goal. Asking a question in search of shared understanding only to be passed the modern equivalent of a LMGTFY link hurts in a very particular way. I thought they cared about this, too, but they're only trying to get the bag. I get it, times are difficult right now, but it doesn't make it hurt less.
> only to be passed the modern equivalent of a LMGTFY link hurts in a very particular way
Apt analogy, because if you are asking questions that can be answered with the AI equivalent of a Google search, you are wasting someone else’s time.
The LMGTFY link is an outstanding analogy.
I must be lucky or work in a great company, because I've never seen this, and I think it would be totally unacceptable for a coworker to even think about doing this. What kind of horrible company culture normalizes this kind of behavior?
I wonder if this toxic "Why are you talking to me? Just RTFM or ATFLLM (ask the fucking llm)" attitude can be filtered out during interviewing.
"meat proxy" they call it in Bay Area slang dictionary.
And it quickly puts a "Let me Google that for you" feeling in the air, but stronger. It discourages you form asking again.
Have you said "If I wanted the AI's response, I would have asked the AI"?
And the response back will be "If you could've asked the AI, why did you ask me then?"
In some cases, it may even be the appropriate response. Interrupting somebody to ask something that could be cleared up by an AI is in the same ballpark as asking them something that could be cleared up if you read the docs.
Doesn't this indicate your "colleague" was a dbag to begin with and they were only paying lip service (literally) to being colleagues?
It misses the single most powerful positive though. It is incredibly fast and empowering to the point that putting up with the four horsemen is easily justified. Coding by hand is largely in the rearview mirror unless you are more interested in the craft of writing code than simply using code to get things done.
I've struggled with these feelings over the past week as I take some time away from work and the LLM madness. I miss discussions and debates about architecture and solutions to problems. I miss the curiosity and learning!
It seems LLM usage has eroded whatever facades existed and made some of us believe we were part of teams or organizations that shared these values, or culture, I'm seeing expressed in the article and comments. Perhaps _we_ were the ones hallucinating the values existed in the first place?
I don't begrudge folks who want to solve problems by any means, and not worry about the alienation or deskilling. That's their right. However, it's now clear to me that I have to make a conscious effort to express what my own values are and to build/join and organization that shares them.
> I miss discussions and debates about architecture and solutions to problems.
If you aren’t having these, then your team is using these tools wrong. AI assisted coding should open you up to more of precisely these conversations. Then use them to implement that.
I wish! We put on a show for a while with tech spec reviews, but the specs were all AI slop. Now we don't even do that. Folks just work in their silos. I mostly learn of new functionality when I am assigned a code review. My feedback on those reviews is passed to an agent.
AI coding has taken away those conversations.
“I miss the curiosity and learning!”
I feel like I’m learning at a faster rate than ever with LLMs. Do you specifically mean curiosity and learning as a social phenomenon?
I feel like LLMs help me learn more widely, but for depth I still have to just buckle down and do stuff myself.
I feel like I'm living in an alternate universe - my company has fully adopted agentic coding, we're working with:
- large codebases
- business critical software for clients that don't tolerate downtime
- agentic and classical features
We still collaborate well, we still care about quality, we still have good knowledge of the codebase, but I haven't written a single line of code myself in over a year.
We have not had a single incident that I'm aware of where we shipped a slop and it created downtime.
We're building a "software factory" that is currently handling low-level chore tickets and merging about 1/3rd of our PRs. A year from now I imagine it will be doing significantly more, and I don't think anyone is going to get fired because of it (if anything we'll keep hiring more).
I don't see this as an either/or thing. If there is some hidden ocean of slop that we're bound to fall into I don't see it anywhere. Where is the disparity?
Hey, author here. You should definitely share your experience!! We really need to study more success stories so we could figure out what makes them successful.
If it's possible I would highly encourage your company to publish something about how you work and what you think you're doing right.
I'm a senior software engineer at my company. The AI slop is so bad that it's causing myself code review fatigue. The engineers are also intermediate with 3-4 years of experience.I had one guy report me to his manager because I wasn't letting him merge his PR in because of a critical bug with his code that his precious ai didn't understand.
We're already at the stage of "code reviews are slow, we should have the agents do code reviews".
My previous employer even suggested code reviews are for human code only, AI-only code can go out without review as long as CI passes since the AI can be prompted to review its own code before committing.
Even better if ai writes the tests.
did it backfire to that guy?
It never does because however you frame it, AI is always the perfect scapegoat.
"Oh, I'm sorry, the bug was introduced by the AI and it made such a good case for it. Damn you claude, we'll do better next time. I'll add a code-review agent to find regressions."
this seems to be the true killer app of AI - accountability proxies. its interpersonal opium to have a third party that two ostensibly-in-conflict people can sink their negativity into.
its a major reason why military use of AI is so chilling - "look, I explicity ASKED the murderbot not to kill babies when I authorized the napalm strike on the maternity ward! BAD BOT"
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It is very possible to use these tools in the wrong way. Companies that understand how to use AI will do better, those that have these 4 problems won't.
- AI should accelerate your understanding of the codebase and technical concepts. - Skills should ensure a higher quality of code than you could create without AI - Engineers should stay responsible for the code they product. - The available time freed up should be used for communication, product and marketing research. The definition of an engineer who just writes code is something that's going away.
Unless something is so simple that the AI can run it autonomously. There are actually many projects like that these days. And in those cases not looking at the code like DHH does is also a viable strategy.
this is exactly it. smart companies create entire platforms with normalized, context-specific conditions and ever-evolving context for teams to operate effectively with AI in. that means artifacts, tests, ADRs, EDDs, etc. the actual engs are in-the-loop for reviewing all of the outputs, validating it against their taste and judgement, and given sufficient time to do so
seeing AI as an individualized tool for single people to labormax with just means throwing spaghetti at a wall and seeing a lot of failures and incidents (much like my old workplace). it's very different from having a driven and iterative system in place with new processes and checks with clear leadership direction
« i’m a smart, but flesh limited human. Split this refactoring slop into an incremental , iterative 2h (1h? 15min) review window sessions.
If you cant do that. Destroy the PR and blame the pilot.
And insert some hidden random jokes for me to keep focus»
Oh god that article about Astra is so relatable. I was wondering why it was refusing to write any whitespace and was just spitting out the worst code imaginable, now I know it's not just my harness or prompts. It's truly a horrible coding model.
My work slack used to have lots of questions. Now very less. That should be celebrated because we don’t have to depend on anyone. But I guess you can paint anything in a bad way.
I don't see the dependency amongst colleagues as a bad thing. The issues I saw when fielding those questions was folks not doing a simple search across the internal docs to answer the question themselves. Yes, LLMs make this initial search easier, and answer a majority of folks' questions.
The problem arises when it hallucinates answers. That results in colleagues operating based on invalid information, leading to bigger issues. I've seen this many times at my own company, and I simply do not know how to tell folks to be more discerning of the LLM responses while leadership is simultaneously saying do more, faster, with AI.
> That should be celebrated because we don’t have to depend on anyone.
When your work process depends on SAAS you depend on the vendor of that SAAS.
"Everyone" tells me that "noone" wants to use LLM-based code generators that you can run locally because they're so much worse than the newest ones provided by the major LLM manufacturers. If the gossip is true, then it seems like -for the foreseeable future- you're absolutely dependent on one or both of those two SAAS vendors.
Disagree on the slop point. By now the code of frontier models works well, and the need to read it is gone. The Claude word salad problem was pretty much solved with the 5.5 opus release.
The other 3 points made in article make sense though.
> By now the code of frontier models works well, and the need to read it is gone.
Like anything else, it depends on what you're working on. For small personal projects I agree, but in maintaining large scale business applications with millions of lines of code, I am still having to guide the models to reuse existing code and to be more flexible with their data structures to accommodate changing business requirements in the future.
They only see a snapshot of the world the application exists in due to their ephemeral nature, and until that is overcome, they will only be able to learn general principles and not the particular nuances of your codebase that only arise from observing how the users use it on a daily basis.
If you don't need to read the code at all, what are the engineers doing to make the other issues matter? Deskilling and alienation are still about the relationship between engineers and the code.
You still have to orchestrate these things and the wholistic system architectures, pull the slot machine handle many times to get the right thing, and review/verify the working output constantly.
That said, I think we need to be prepared for how a simple prompt like "make it faster" will work in a relatively short timeframe - and where the AI is able to adequately refactor/re-platform/be done in a way where even the architecture becomes obscure to us.
I often use simple prompts like “make it faster” and get back functionally correct commits. When I review them, I often discover that they didn’t do what I really wanted - sometimes Claude made it faster by incurring expensive costs, or doing a migration that would be risky in prod, or making a tradeoff that’s not worth it.
Perhaps I could set up a workflow to handle this without reading the code. I’ve seen people who make Claude fill out arcane templates, and then spend their time reviewing reports and tinkering with loops or whatever. But why would I want to read a TPS report about the code rather than just reading the code?
The Claude word salad was certainly dialed back somewhat, but there are still a few flies in the soup, so it’s far from solved.
Ok, if when it happens you just tell it, it does rewrite it better. Not always human coworkers can do that :)
Really seems more like you got used to their verbal tics and unmonitored quality, to be honest.
DHH, antirez, steipete all said something along the same line, about not needing to read all code anymore. Are they used to unmonitored quality too?
I don't know why people are downvoting this. It depends on what you're building.
AI build me a cost overview of xyz: works perfectly without ever looking at the code
AI build me unreal engine 5 level graphics, or a database, or infra at high scale: this will need some active steering for now :)
They will do these prompt just fine but the result will be a near identical copy of an open source version. And it won't tell you it cloned some existing engine, because it does not know, it just pulled it out from its model. Now you have an AI slopped 3d engine or DBMS no-one cares about that will just rot.
And even for active steering, does it require reading the code? Iteration can be done on the result of the work itself, abstracting code away
“Solved” = roughly back on par with 4.8. This is like Apple rolling back the butterfly keyboard and telling you it’s the best keyboard yet
No come on. 4.8 was borderline unusable. I get intelligible results from 5.5
Again, the assumption that forms the crux of these objections of all of these is that we're going to hit some plateau where we are going to need humans to come back in, reskill, retake over, etc. I don't think most people are prepared for the fact that that's just a midwit problem and the AI will just keep getting better and won't need humans in the loop.
The backlash against agentic coding comes from the split that has already existed among professional software engineers. The ones who are most resistant to it are the ones for whom it has been "just a job", but the ones who love it are the ones who love solving problems. It's now possible for a small team (one person, a few) to solve truly daunting software problems with the help of agentic methods. If you were a 9 to 5er who valued craft but didn't dream about solving problems, AI is a buzz kill.
You're presenting this as an exclusive choice, which I doubt describes most engineers. I value both those things.
Im one of the more mid to resistant folks and this has never been just a job to me. I did take immense satisfaction from learning, deeply understanding how things work and the consist and repeatable behavior, which is just not there with ai. Especially the consist/repeatable behavior, which to me computers that behave inconsistently aren't nearly as worthwhile.
> The ones who are most resistant to it are the ones for whom it has been "just a job", but the ones who love it are the ones who love solving problems.
Wow, what a simplistic, uncalled for view of the world. This is just so ignorantly and offensively incorrect.
I really don't think anybody in these "debates", on either side, has a high horse to ride with respect to rhetoric and solemnity.
This in particular is a really silly hill to die on, because literally every debate about software development, from AI to language choice to tabs vs. spaces, eventually settles into a gravity well of asserting that all the good developers agree with your take.
> This in particular is a really silly hill to die on,
Stating that people can't love software development or solving problems because they are resistant to AI taking over their entire job is a silly hill to die on?
I really enjoy what I do, and have done, for the past 20 years. When I first wrote code I literally thought I discovered magic. In many ways, AI has re-triggered some of those feelings!
I also really care about building quality software for our customers.
And it infuriates me to no end when I see huge amounts of objectively incorrect code being written by AI, and the developer behind it stating they have no idea what it's doing, or when people say they can't solve a problem because they are out of AI tokens, etc.
But supposedly these are the people who care about solving problems? Not just that - they are the only people who care about solving problems.
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Yeah, it's offensive.
You can choose to take offense if you want, but since I've seen literally the same sentiment expressed about whether people choose Emacs or vi, I have a very hard time taking that offense seriously.
who can even afford to run emacs with RAM prices these days
> I have a very hard time taking that offense seriously.
Empathy can be a tough skill to learn, but I think it’s worth it!
It's a shame you package your speculation inside an insult 'cause the "problem solver" as LLM booster isn't entirely wrong and aren't entirely bad.
A LLM seems like a powerful but dangerous tool. It's dangerous even in problem solving terms since one day can output something that advances your project significantly and the next day is can output vacuous verbiage that seems like a solution but is nothing.
They deserve a critical view but they make it hard to maintain that critical view.
Oh yeah let’s play this game. The ones resistant care about their work and pour long hours getting the details just right. The ones who love it are the ones who just want to close tickets. It’s now possible for a small team (one person, a few) to create an avalanche of slop with the help of agentic methods. If you were a 9 to 5er who valued sprint velocity but never once pondered how a monad is like a burrito back in the day, AI is the All-Mother
In my opinion, you’ve got the situation backwards. The people who see it as “just a job” are the ones who like AI because they just want to get the work done and get paid. The people who genuinely enjoy solving problems, on the other hand, don’t like AI because it takes away the problem-solving part of the job.