Its a bit unkind to talk like this - the obvious and equally unproductive response is to question if you are really as good as you think you are. Are those junior developers not making a mess, or do you lack the insight to see it?

I've seen two camps of people within the same company I work at. Some think AI is generating acceptable code. Others think it's generating slop.

I sit in the middle a lot of the time as my opinion on code quality vary depending on how important the code actually is.

I will say one thing, the people who I generally deemed as worse developers prior to the wide AI roll out are the ones that are more accepting of AI code. And consequently, they're the ones spending a magnitude more money each day. The people who were writing better code and, in my opinion, were stronger developers, are spending less on AI and are generating more acceptable code when they use it. And they can spot issues from a mile away, because they actually understand the code being generated. They're not just committing lots of redundant code.

We had an AI outage for a day or two a few weeks back. The reaction from some people was like it was the end of the world and they couldn't do any work. Some projects got put on hold because no one actually knew how to work on the code base without AI. Other, better in my opinion, developers just went shrugged it off and got on with their job.

AI over-dependence is a big issue that people will face more and more. Weaker juniors used to just be a bit slower and stagnate a bit, but they could still kinda work independently and understand what they were doing. Now they are almost entirely prompt monkeys, take away their Claude Code terminal and they are completely stumped.

It’s not a mess as in spaghetti code, which you will find with novice programmers. It’s a mess as in complex and disjointed codebase. Happy path works somewhat, but it crumbles if you run it long enough or encounters an edge case.

You need a very good level of insight to build a codebase to do what is supposed to do, to not do what it shouldn’t do, and to still be comprehensible. Because a software is a system and building system well is what engineering is about.

I have solo built this:

https://github.com/bobjansen/Ibex

Ibex is a usable DSL for table manipulation that is quite fast

https://bobjansen.github.io/Ibex/benchmarks.html

I'm still managing to add more features, such as multithreading. The LLM's do make mistakes but they have gotten better and they tend to self correct these days. I'm also comparing results to mature products such as Polars and DuckDB and the results match.

> you have to remember, 70 million people voted for the current US regime and many of them billionaires.

Many of the 70 million Republican voters were billionaires? What are you talking about?

The naysayers aren't cooked at all. They have really, really good points that align with my own experience so perfectly It's eerie. Vine coding has a price tag attached that will have to be paid with interest eventually. The trouble is that it takes a whole damn lot of experience see these signs early.

That doesn't mean that LLM slop code can't be useful. But you just can't build a whole business entirely by surfing a wave of vibe coded slop. That wave will break over you and drown you eventually.

This is an absurdly overgeneralized take for a wide and diverse field, and it's also false. Of course for some people it's true, but hardly for everyone. I doubt it's even the majority of all programmers.

Prompt engineering died like 2 years ago.

Prompt engineering? Proof reading? That's so last month, who even does that anymore? What a nerd.

All this condescending drivel about how "anyone who still writes code by hand is a loser, but not me, I'm a prompt engineer because I'm smart and forward-thinking" is so painfully tone-deaf, as if this "prompt engineering" has any lasting value and isn't just a momentary stepping stone towards a techno-feudalist future where every tech company consists of a small group of very wealthy executives, typing what they want in plain words into a text box and having the AI do everything for them, with no need for anyone below them.

> Yeah the financial value of a codebase is in successfully solving a problem

It doesn't even need do it successfully, plenty of slow buggy codebases that are raking in huge amounts of money every day.

I knew it was bad when I started getting tickets to "improve the skeleton loader" because its displayed for so long the project owner had time to contemplate changes to it.

It's like a variant of the halting problem though: given N agents in a review loop reviewing a codebase, will it ever terminate and say the thing is done and bug free?

It seems to me just from @codex review, given a codebase of any appreciable size, if you ask the agent to find things to fix, it'll find things to fix. And despite N agents agreeing that some code is ready to ship, I've still sat down to try it and nothing actually works as advertised.

So the need for better verification tools that are not AI is very urgent. Because the AI can be told to write a thing without mistakes, it does write code that compiles, N-agent AI review process fixes bugs and eventually the code is approved, and then run against an extensive suite of tests to prove certain functionality which all pass... and yet it still can be the case that nothing actually works in production.