| ▲ | llmslave2 2 days ago | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
It's true that some people will just continually move the goalposts because they are invested in their beliefs. But that doesn't mean that the skepticism around certain claims aren't relevant. Nobody serious is disputing that LLM's can generate working code. They dispute claims like "Agentic workflows will replace software developers in the short to medium term", or "Agentic workflows lead to 2-100x improvements in productivity across the board". This is what people are looking for in terms of evidence and there just isn't any. Thus far, we do have evidence that AI (at least in OSS) produces a 19% decrease in productivity [0]. We also have evidence that it harms our cognitive abilities [1]. Anecdotally, I have found myself lazily reaching for LLM assistance when encountering a difficult problem instead of thinking deeply about the problem. Anecdotally I also struggle to be more productive using AI-centric agents workflows in areas of expertise. We want evidence that "vibe engineering" is actually more productive across the entire lifespan of a software project. We want evidence that it produces better outcomes. Nobody has yet shown that. It's just people claiming that because they vibe coded some trivial project, all of software development can benefit from this approach. Recently a principle engineer at Google claimed that Claude Code wrote their team's entire year's worth of work in a single afternoon. They later walked that claim back, but most do not. I'm more than happy to be convinced but it's becoming extremely tiring to hear the same claims being parroted without evidence and then you get called a luddite when you question it. It's also tiring when you push them on it and they blame it on the model you use, and then the agent, and then the way you handle context, and then the prompts, and then "skill issue". Meanwhile all they have to show is some slop that could be hand coded in a couple hours by someone familiar with the domain. I use AI, I was pretty bullish on it for the last two years, and the combination of it simply not living up to expectations + the constant barrage of what feels like a stealth marketing campaign parroting the same thing over and over (the new model is way better, unlike the other times we said that) + the amount of absolute slop code that seems to continue to increase + companies like Microsoft producing worse and worse software as they shoehorn AI into every single product (Office was renamed to Copilot 365). I've become very sensitive to it, much in the same way I was very sensitive to the claims being made by certain VC backed webdev companies regarding their product + framework in the last few years. I'm not even going to bring up the economic, social, and environmental issues because I don't think they're relevant, but they do contribute to my annoyance with this stuff. [0] https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-o... [1] https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2025/11/is-ai-dulling... | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| ▲ | lunar_mycroft 2 days ago | parent [-] | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
> Thus far, we do have evidence that AI (at least in OSS) produces a 19% decrease in productivity I generally agree with you, but I'd be remiss if I didn't point out that it's plausible that the slow down observed in the METR study was at least partially due to the subjects lack of experience with LLMs. Someone with more experience performed the same experiment on themselves, and couldn't find a significant difference between using LLMs and not [0]. I think the more important point here is that programmers subjective assessment of how much LLMs help them is not reliable, and biased towards the LLMs. [0] https://mikelovesrobots.substack.com/p/wheres-the-shovelware... | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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