The growing divide between AI hype and software engineering reality

slowin

I think this post (and the OSS projects that he mentions that ban AI) are very reactionary. > But the idea that AI has or will surpass humans any time soon in either capabilities or efficiency is simply not true AI is already better than most developers. I'm not sure what alternative reality people are remembering, but human coders for the most part have been really awful at writing code. I think the average PR from an LLM is head and shoulders above the average PR from a human. Does it write code in the preferred style and architecture of the project maintainer 100% of the time? No, and neither did humans. I think there are many legitimate criticisms of AI, but "they suck at coding" isn't one of them. The progress we've seen in the last couple of years alone suggest that very soon they will be better at coding than any person. As a coder of over 30 years, I've embraced this fact and come to terms with it. Leverage your knowledge of systems, software engineering and product design and you can be living in a golden era for software development. That's how it feels to me at least.

digitcatphd

First, I don’t think it’s widely accepted financial markets are in an AI bubble or there is actually any evidence to support this, most market cap growth is supported by real earnings per share. It is debatable how long that will continue and if it is sustainable, but that isn’t a bubble it’s a cycle. Even the most skeptical investors to bubbles like Buffet and Burry, have large stakes in Google and Microsoft, front line bets on AI. Second, I agree with the distinction evals are not enough, and this is dangerously making people reckless, I think the conclusion is still quite incorrect. There is essentially nothing magical about being human. Our primitive brains were trained on logic, reasoning and processes. An LLM is simply this on less efficient hardware, but, improving at a speed faster than human evolution.

preommr

This conversation again? They go nowhere because people are using wildly different definitions and contexts. There's one already in here about how ai is better than humans at coding. - Yes llms are better at the mechanics of coding - no they're not good enough for overall software dev. - yes, this stuff should've been automated years ago in frameworks and in libs, or through sane programming langs that dealt with memory and logic flow better. - yes, they're much more useful for documentation, search, etc. than they are at actual coding - no, your stats aren't useful - 90% of coding is meaningless if you've also massively increased the amount of slop produced - yes, llms do make you more productive overall, whether it's 10-30% or 1000% is context dependent - yes and no that AI will change everything; no it doens't make sense to keep comparing pre-ai and post-ai worlds, it is very likely that the gains cancel each other out and we all just move up a layer of abstraction, and end up in a simlar situation to now. - no we don't know what will actually happen to the job market, things can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent. We've had the technology to be where are 20-30 years ago if we were focused as a society. Things take time, and real world is complicated.

chermi

Exactly the post you'd expect at this stage in the technology adoption and hype cycle. People got over hyped not understanding how technology and technology adaption works. Then they get a bunch of like 6-12 month lagging indicators further convincing them of the worse. Right when they become most certain the technology is useless is precisely when the people that have adopted it and truly understand it leave them in the dust. There's gotta be a name for it?

daishi55

> But are LLMs actually getting smarter, or just better at fooling us? They’re getting smarter. Next question.

joduplessis

I think, if the bubble pops, LLM assisted coding is here to stay. It's novel & useful enough to offer a real advantage, but can also be misused easily by folks who think software is now "solved" obviously. Either way - the middle ground is the sweet spot, and I think you're probably just looking at the disappearance of the bottom layer: grunt work, templates, straightforward SaaS apps, tooling, utils, etc. Job-wise though, I think juniors & interns are the ones who's caught in the storm unfortunately.

ma2kx

I really want to agree but the arguments he brings up make that extremely hard > Also, it seems that many don’t want to learn but instead expect to have all understanding outsourced to LLMs. Many seniors have noticed this and have stopped teaching juniors as the seniors don’t like the feeling of having their time wasted by teaching people who don’t want to learn. Or may be it is because now a junior dev is expected to deliver to output of a senior? > Also stop saying “please” to an LLM. It does not have any feelings. Yes, but I still prefer a nice tone. Like why should I change my manners just because it has no feelings? If anything the statistic predicts a friendlier answer when I say "please". > Again, I recommend people try running small LLMs locally where temperature and other settings are fully exposed and configurable to see this themselves. It is a good antidote to falling for the illusion that LLMs would actually be intelligent. It's like recommending someone to buy the cheapest Lenovo Thinkpad to prove that Lenovo sucks. > However, the best models still have a pass rate of only about 50% on the Humanity’s Last Exam. Haha, as if he (or really most people) even would understand 50% of those questions. I find it rather mind blowing that it's possible to put such diverse knowledge into a couple of TB. Or may be I'm just an idiot and it's common knowledge, "how many paired tendons are supported by the sesamoid bone of hummingbirds within Apodiformes". > LLMs are not a scam, but a useful tool and technology that has its uses. But the idea that AI has or will surpass humans any time soon in either capabilities or efficiency is simply not true He's not wrong that LLMs are just useful tools but isn't it the purpose of a tool to surpass human capabilities and efficiency? Like even a bicycle makes traveling more efficient than just walking and a car has the capability to transport more items than any human. And its know more than two decades since computer surpassed human capabilities in chess. If a tool is neither more capable nor efficient, it's just a useless tool. I mean I get his point that GenAI is to some degree over hyped but his arguments just dont hold in my opinion.

dcanelhas

On the "Stop saying please" part. I personally like to use polite language, as an exercise. According to this one paper on arxiv, toxic behavior gets better accuracy https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.04950 It was published a while ago. But I wonder if it still holds true today.

karmakurtisaani

Tangentially related, I'm starting to think LLM assisted coding will increase the jobs in software engineering. Think about it: code is cheap now. You'll have accountants realizing they can create scripts to automate their work flow, so they hack together something. These scripts will become the backbone of the accounting pipeline of a company. Now someone needs to productionalize and maintain these scripts, but the accountants don't even have the vocabulary required for that, so they hire a software engineer to do so. A simplified example, but I can see that happening. The only (personal) issue I have with this is that the LLMs get to take the fun part of the job.

goldenarm

I'm confused by the situation. I'm the last manual coder of my company, and am shipping projects faster than my colleagues who are spending fortunes in tokens. I was intrigued by the hype and gave a chance this week to codex+sol 5.6 and cc+opus 5. They cheated, lied, disobeyed, and shipped subtle bugs so often, it wasted more time that if I did it myself. Is half of the industry under AI psychosis right now ? Will models get better ?

simianwords

> It is widely accepted that there is an AI bubble in the financial markets at the moment No its not. No one serious truly believes 1. AI is going away 2. its obvious that the total market cap of AI related stocks will go down more than 60-70% Its obviously true that there are some related AI companies that will go bust as with any new technology. And its also true that the rise won't be monotonic. What we instead get is perpetually pushed timelines for the bubbles and a religious belief that the end will come and people would pay for it. To drive my point further, I ask for a single metric you would like to see that should be a certain way for you to believe it is not a bubble. Should the revenues have been 2x higher? Should the costs be 3x lower? Anything?

dave_sid

I wish developers could just walk out the door en masse tomorrow and let orgs replace them all with AI as has been touted for so long, then see what happens. It gets boring trying to explain that developers don’t just write code. “What do they do then?” I can almost hear a manager saying in a smug tone. If you have to ask, you’ll never knowww… ♬ ♬ ♬ ♬

vikramkr

Weird article. Feels very 2025 for a 2026 article (both in ways it reads too anti AI to me and ways it seems not critical enough of ai) >Also stop saying “please” to an LLM. It does not have any feelings. It emulates having feelings and it's a next token predictor. The next token in a dataset where you respond to an engineer rudely and call them stupid is rarely said engineer locking in and delivering incredible code. You have to play along to get the output you want. > Again, I recommend people try running small LLMs locally where temperature and other settings are fully exposed and configurable to see this themselves. This is like saying you should experiment with a paper airplane to see why fighter jets are overrated. Also the general understanding of temperature is not super solid here - it's not just that its "too boring" without it - random sampling is required for the models to work. >Why are benchmarks showing they're still improving? Ironically this section is far too generous to LLMs and benchmarks. lLMs cheat and companies benchmax. Don't trust benchmarks. They lie Also in the what I do section - are these using local LLMs too? "Sometimes looping llms on itself can make it fix its own errors" feels very 2025 - the modern state of things is more "we've given up on one shots and getting it to produce the right answer immediately, set it up with a test harness so it can fix its own mistakes and let it loop otherwise it won't work." Also "asked fellow developers to make sure their code is well structured, easy to follow and documented. LLMs unfortunately make it easier for people to cheat in this regard" - really? Easy to follow? Maybe gpt models with good steering but trying to get an anthropic model to speak coherently and clearly and write documentation that isn't incomprehensible slop is a Herculean effort

chrisjj

> But are LLMs actually getting smarter, or just better at fooling us? They look smarter to people they've made dumber.

cratermoon

I see the author has used the "it's just a tool" argument for "responsible LLM usage. When you have an LLM ready-to-hand, what's possible and desirable is determined by the capabilities of the LLM. https://deadsimpletech.com/blog/no-such-thing-as-just-a-tool