I agree, the whole 'developers don't code' AI defense was pretty ridiculous. I also concur that development is going to get a lot harder. Anyone that has successfully used AI coding tools knows that you can get massive productivity increases but now I have to figure out how to get a bunch of hyper active child like coding entities with memory deficiencies to build stuff without going off the rail and introducing massive security problems or building something completely mismatched to the requirements. If you can do it, yeah you can get 10x results. But now I am engineering harnesses, architecture specifications, agent structures, statistically sampling, and formal verification systems to guide the code instead of writing the code.

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maxrev17 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

No one seems to mind the quality drop though. The buyers of this stuff could never discern.

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sensanaty 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I'm definitely noticing, I imagine the populace at large will soon too. I'm not even talking about random software either, the company I work for has more and more fired that need to be put out because people are spamming out ai-generated code that was at best rubber stamped.

Not even just the customer-facing stuff either, the internal tooling is on fire more and more often. It's not sustainable in the slightest

	▲	pydry 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It took a while before the MBA hivemind woke up to this happening because of outsourcing two decades ago.

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tombert 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I suspect the massive shitshow of Windows 11 and all of its failings is a result of large quantities of vibe code being merged into the OS. People are noticing.

	▲	IshKebab 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Windows 11 was released before vibe coding was viable. And the shit show seems to be that they push ads and bloatware on people, not that it doesn't work reliably. Windows 11 IoT LTSC has been absolutely rock solid for me on both machines I have it on. Waaay more stable and reliable than Linux, and even a bit better than Mac (which is also way better than Linux). If they are vibe coding anything, it hasn't had any bad consequences yet. The ads and bloat are human decisions!

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torginus 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

They do. Most economically viable software already exists today, most people's job is to make .1% improvements, and features on top. For this work it's obviously pivotal that any change should not worsen the existing software, as that instantly nullifies the value of improvements.

Another kind of highly valuable software is a new design which digitizes some process, like the ticket management of a rail company. If you don't follow the internal processes and workings of the firm exactly, or you do not interface with existing systems 100% accurately, your software very soon becomes worthless.

Figuring out how to create a piece of code that solves the exact problem the customer has, while not breaking anything, and fitting into existing operations seems to be a big head scratcher still, and something humans still need to do, at least that was my experience so far with LLMs.

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jvanderbot 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

You forgot "as long as"

... as long as the buyers could never discern

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ryandrake 4 hours ago | parent [-]

The sad reality is that the vast majority of customers (whoever you are writing software for: clients, management, or end users) simply don't care as much about quality. If you give them the "time, cost, and quality" pick-two choice, 99.9% of customers are going to ask for fast+cheap. It's not the world I wish we were living in.

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torginus 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

This isn't true. I don't think you or me would want a car/TV/smartphone that's cheap and flashy but breaks every two weeks. Sometimes people are strapped for cash that's why they cheap out on stuff, or really are enthusiastic about it, so they tolerate it breaking all the time, but for everything else, reliability is king.

	▲	Nextgrid 41 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Nobody _wants_ it, but in practice if all cars/TVs/smartphones break every two weeks, what choice do people have? In tech, the era of competing based on quality is long gone. The winning strategy is to get a monopoly/oligopoly and then you can let the quality decay to zero and people will have no choice but to keep paying you money (or to your handful of equally-mediocre competitors).

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necovek 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

This is why I believe true engineering art comes in actually marrying all three: build great quality quickly at reasonable (small) cost!

If you need it to work for at least a month or two (instead of one and done, which some demoware is like). Following a few rules early on will ensure you can keep evolving it — even if it's MVP/demoware/whatever — as long as you know you need to evolve it soon after you build it!

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logicchains 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

>get a bunch of hyper active child like coding entities with memory deficiencies to build stuff without going off the rail and introducing massive security problems or building something completely mismatched to the requirements

Development is essentially becoming management.

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cautiouscat 5 hours ago | parent [-]

I see this comparison a lot, but I’m not sure I agree. At least not semantically. The list of what an engineer using agents is responsible for, largely hasn’t changed. Engineering managers haven’t changed responsibilities either.

Even with wrangling agents, you’re really just making them right the “correct code”. Something EMs don’t do, or at least the good ones don’t do with their ICs.

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pjmlp 5 hours ago | parent [-]

It is quite similar to architecture work when others in the team do the actual coding, and lead devs / architects only have time to try out prototypes.

Only now instead of local or offshore devs, it is agents.

	▲	pydry 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I was mainly doing architectural work as a coder long before LLMs came along. So was everyone else who wasnt slopping out boilerplate.

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croes 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Code is the written representation of your idea how to solve a problem.

Now you tell someone else your idea and have to hope they get it. Otherwise you have to argue, rephrase, start all over again.

We are back to the tree-swing project management, but we added another layer

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a2ff6eeb0 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

This is all the stuff that the frontier labs are going to ship by default next year. Except for the architecture specifications, which agents can already do adequately for most system today.

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Toutouxc 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Do you have a source for that claim?

	▲	a2ff6eeb0 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Why wouldn't they be working on better harnesses? Every feature that has gotten popular has gotten integrated so far, and their product managers aren't stupid.