I just spent a few days cleaning up someone's web app they created with Claude Code. There was more than 30k lines of DEAD code, and I was able to cut the code that was actually being used down by ~30-40%. If I just wrote this app myself It would have taken a day or two.

LLMs are not helpful, they make everything worse. They make you worse, or reduce you to average at best. I really just don't see what ya'll are seeing. I have access to every model with no limits, Its not issue of "holding it correctly" I can assure you, I've tried.

Yes it can create very small programs with low complexity, but anything of any size ends up as a literal Eldritch horror or with so many subtle bugs that make life miserable. I actually hate all of you that are pushing it onto people, its such a lie.

Yeah, totally agree. In my experience I've found that people think AI is making them more productive, but mostly it just seems to amplify their existing failure modes. They don't realize they are wrong, because they never had the skill in the first place.

So, for example, if someone is a poor at architecture, then they ask for AI's help to design a new feature, they won't know when to push back on the AI design, so the design will be overly complex and not solve the problem optimally.

If they are a poor debugger, and ask for the AI's help they will not know when it has incorrectly made a false assumption on the root cause or interpreting data and come to a faulty conclusion.

If they are poor at writing optimized code , and ask for ai to write some , they won't push back when the code is literally 10x the size it needs to be to solve the exact same problem.

Same, exact experience here.

This one non-technical PM guy at work used Codex to develop a project I was expecting would fall on my plate. He asked me to do a code review on it. What it produced was riddled with SQL injection vulns and the UI was complete garbage.

Off of that example, the key stakeholders on my project are demanding I start vibe-coding everything. I raised the security flag and now they are saying, "well, now we have a prototype and real development can continue," but it's clearly just to mollify me and make me shut up, because no such development effort on that other project has been planned, scheduled, budgeted, etc. They are kind of just sitting around on it, hoping they can get everyone distracted long enough to sneak it out the way it is.

"But he did it in a week!" Yeah, it would have taken me only a week to make whatever of value actually was in that project. The reason our software projects at our company take longer than a week is not because of code, it's because we have an IT department that blocks production deployment of everything unless you literally get the president of the company to make them do it. That's not a repeatable process that every project can leverage.

There was another project another more-technical-but-not-a-developer guy (he knows how to use MS Access) did in Claude Code where, yes, Claude could read a bunch of PDFs he got from the client, get the salient details out, made an Access database out of it, and made a static HTML website out of it to make those documents easier to search and navigate. But again, the UI was complete, unadulterated garbage. And, the best part, he spent several weeks on just getting Claude to reliably process the entire set of documents. He never could quite get it to end-to-end do the entire process. It kept missing documents and reprocessing the same ones over and over again. A for-loop to iterate over a directory of files would have taken 2 minutes to code by hand and he got stuck on it for over a month.

AI will speed us up, my ass.

Look, if AI means I never have to open another PowerPoint from a client to read a "quad chart" on one particular slide to get the data I need to do my project because my client doesn't understand that PowerPoint is not a data transmission format, fine. I'll be happy with just that: AI vision as a library I can call out to from my code, just like we've been trying to do with OCR but traditional OCR sucks at the job. But there's a bigger drumbeat than that and it ends in dilettantism and laying off the junior analyst and developer staff. I will be no party to that.