AI Can Make You Suck Faster Too

Lapalux

Pre-AI, the limiter on my bad code was how much code I could type in a day..... Now with AI I can 10x my output and 10x my bad code!

Zakis1

> Uses only DeepSeek and comes to the conclusion that LLM's are bad at coding? Why not use actual frontier models, and you know do some real research, before writing a blog post?

blfr

There are some good points, and I ask the question of where is the ground breaking stuff myself, but severely weakened by * stretching the timeline: the actual real programming ability appeared in LLMs in the last 6-8 months, not 3-4 years, * using the weakest possible tool: and I bought $10 worth of DeepSeek credits that is a far cry from Claude with Fable. Also, I know nothing about marathons but for most uses putting the app, database, and background processes on the same server is very much the right starting point. With the next steps being employing Cloudflare or similar solutions long before managing a fleet of servers.

dr_dshiv

“I wanted to see if I can get in on this 10x magic. I decided to put my money where my mouth was and I bought $10 worth of DeepSeek credits to use with a project I was working on.“ Wow. I guess that’s the punchline!

reconnecting

'Or else admit this is a dopamine game that makes you feel like The Universe's Most Special Programmer™ when it's really just gamified mass-scale intellectual dependency.' Disesdi Shoshana Cox

lelanthran

Previously, the limit on bad code entering any serious product was gated by having devs that at least knew how to change what they copied from SO. Seriously, that was the lowest level of skill I saw in 30 years of development. Now we have people who can't even do that proudly showing off PRs to widely used products. "B-b-but I do the systems design and hard thinking". Sure, buddy.

mikenew

> The chatbot recommended some of the dumbest shit you could possibly do The "I tried it and it sucked" is borderline conspiratorial at this point. There are enough talented, thoughtful developers saying there's something real here, and it is worth believing them and investing some time to understand it, even if you come out the other side and decide you don't want to use LLMs. Use a very good model. Set up a good harness. Spend some time on your system prompts and skills. Develop your intuitions about how the model works, what it's good at, how to scope the work, and how to steer it. Recognize when it's alleviating menial work and recognize when it's making choices you really need to understand yourself. Be patient and accept that the failures are going to be very painful for a while. Don't write it off until you've genuinely seen the upsides.

pacifika

If you don’t understand how the sausage was made you have made legacy sausage.

coatmatter

If one truly believes it's not in a bubble, then borrow and leverage an unlimited amount and bet the house & your family on creating a business with infinite growth and value. Don't know how to do your own prompts? Borrow and then hire others to do it for you. If those who you hire don't know, they can hire others too.* [* This is not financial advice. Please don't actually do this.]

bwhiting2356

> three AirBnBs, two Stripes, and three Dropboxes you want more SaaS?

imafish

His AI experience is $10 of DeepSeek - but I think he is right anyway in the main points. You can most definitely ship crap much faster than you used to. It's obvious to anyone when you're shipping crap. And it seems everywhere I look people are shipping crap. Both software and writing. The hardest part of shipping quality software is not and has never been "writing the code". The hard parts are product taste, architecture and ensuring your product actually solves the problems it should in an efficient and secure manner. If you don't have an intuition of those, you will likely still be shipping crap. Just faster.

sriniwasx

The code smell in my repos are at an all time high and I'm a senior dev, can't image how worse vibe coders have it.

ilitirit

I tried really hard to get senior management to understand this where I work. Yes, AI is an accelerator, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's going to accelerate you in the "right" direction.

shevy-java

AI is like a tool used by mega-corporations to change the world according to what they want. We see this with the increase in RAM prices. I don't want to pay the overprice here - AI companies owe us money. People seem still mostly in the AI hype phase, but a lot more criticism has amplified in the last months. It is only a matter of time until the hype phase is over.

spiderfarmer

Why does it have to lead to a 10x increase in revolutionary companies? Next to maintaining and expanding my own network of websites I 10xd writing boring CRUD applications for companies that were otherwise unable to afford it, making all their employees more productive. There's true economic value in that.

jtrn

I have a coffee cup with the writing "Do stupid thing faster with cafe". That's how I feel about myself when I use AI carelessly... The speed with which I can make a mess is astronomical!

MrScruff

In general, the frontier models are not capable of reliably authoring non-trivial code without careful oversight yet. They are great at producing code that can pass tests, but not neccessarily a code review. This means if you care about code quality you still need a human in a loop understanding what has been done, and that becomes the bottleneck. And less disciplined folks will indeed become increasingly dependent. However, over time the complexity of problems where you can get away with less/no oversight is increasing. And the models are already great at solving certain classes of problems where one doesn't really care that much about code quality, that wouldn't have even been attempted in a pre-LLM world. Over the weekend I was using Claude to add features to the compiled (no source available) firmware of one of my audio devices, adding workflow features by patching assembly and custom DSP code. In coding, as with other areas, what's emerging is jagged intelligence.

orwin

I now started to us AI to help review my juniors PRs, because I couldn't keep up with the amount of code they ship. It started poorly, but now I have my method: I first read the code and flag the lines I'm not sure about, then ask any frontier model (I like Claude here for analysis, even if I don't use it for the rest) to explain the PR and to put effort on the parts I flagged (basically explain in detail the code, not only the PR), and to search through the libraries. Sometimes it notices something I would have missed (like missing an 'order_by' or off by one errors, because the underlying lib wasn't coded like the original AI pretended it was). I also changed the way I do review because it has been more than a year and the juniors/new hire are still lost, wether on domain knowledge for the older new hire, or just capabilities for the juniors, and discussing with other departments, it's the same for like 95% of them. Now, rather than correcting the PR or adding a request for change, I add a whole unit/functional test to the PR and let that as an exercise to pass the test. They can use AI but I tell them to try to find what part of the code doesn't work before generating the fix, hopefully they'll take ownership of the code if I keep doing that.

trvz

I don't disagree with the title of this weblog post, but its premise is wrong: the existence of AI has an impact on the total number of tech companies, but not on the number of companies that make it real big (the AirBnBs, Stripes and Dropboxes the author is looking for).

padolsey

Bit of a humbling/jarring moment when I realized that people are doing real paid work using LLMs that they could not otherwise do. I mean, it's quite obvious I suppose. But up until now I just assumed it was only a (massive) catalyst for things people would already be able to do with enough time. But nope -- it seems people are right now employed in roles that they would not be able to fulfil the tasks within if AI wasn't there telling them what to write/say/produce. Nobody is really going to come out and say that ... it's not something the less-AI-literate superiors would take kindly to.