Pretty much, The one thing I use it for is as a sanity check, pretty much "Look at <SomeFile>, point out issues you see, summarise them tersely" and it'll spot stuff a code review by a human might have spotted (in the mythical land where people actually do code reviews properly and don't just flag a spelling mistake to "show they looked at it").

Beyond that I don't trust it at all and I still write all my code the meat sack way.

Trust is earned not given and it hasn't earned it yet.

I can share a weird story:

Usually, I take my time to understand each keyword of the code I'm looking at, especially if it is new to me, like terraform.

I work in a team/with one architect, who only did the DevOps/Infra stuff for the past years and I had the expectation he knows what he is doing and talking about.

At around 2 weeks, I noticed how his knowledge has severe gaps and how he takes things at face value or uses terminology interchangably, which confuses me. It sounds plausible, but it does not actually translate into a working system or shared understanding.

Then one day I did some pair programming with him and whenever there was an error or a resource missing, he would type it into the LLM, copy paste it out of it and then brute force error messages. He did not even wait a second to think or reconcile whats happening on the screen or what the exact requirement is. Never taking one step back and questioning any assumption.

Now that the timeline is shifting and everyone starts to be stressed, he continues to vibe code through me and it is so tiring, there is no higher level planning or architecture, its just a reactive type of trial and error to be faster. It feels like these people are so used to talking to bots, that they treat you like an agent they can chat to or talk through monologs with.

It is quite shocking how people went from being humble (learn the basics or close the gaps in understanding) to full on authority on everything and berating people 24/7...

So right now I'm considering quitting IT for a couple of years until people calm down, but I think its pretty futile

I saw this the past year - new employees would put problems into Claude first instead of debugging. A year back I was debug manually first, now I do the same.

The speed AI debugs at is incredible and yes, we lose touch the more we use it like any manager feet up barking orders to their underlings to get things done.

In my mind, this, not copyright or water use, is the best reason to boycott AI. It'll make you incompetent.

At least at my company the OKRs are quite clear and demand heavy AI utilization above all else

So how do you build competence in a world where AI is preached to be the most reasonable way to solve problems because it's supposed to be faster than humans?

incompetent people, surely?

That sounds somewhat applicable to many tools. Like Vim/Emacs, for example. Or computers and smart phones in general.

I think there are many cases where it was the tech workers themselves who argued for isolation from the customer so that they may focus harder on whatever tasks. I used to be one of these workers. I argued very hard for it. I regret that today.

On the surface it seems rational, but it quickly turns into a system of perverse incentives because now the development team must maintain an illusion that they are constantly overwhelmed with tasks and could never hope to spare a microsecond to assist the customer. This misalignment is how you wind up building your own web frameworks and databases from scratch. It turns into a self serving monster that eventually dominates the entire business. From the perspective of the business, many of these development teams look like they're behind some modern day iron curtain.

Claude regular spits out six helper functions instead of... A twenty line for loop. It overengineers most things.

Overabstracting, deduplicating things that don't need to be. Building metaclasses because it saw a single orchestrator in the whole codebase.

If it is a better engineer than you... You need practice.

So after 30 years of outsourcing to the bottom 10%, you think Claude is better than the bottom 90% even though it’s so stupid that it doesn’t even know it should ask for advice or more information when it’s stuck?

Because simplicity is hard and often the result of careful thought. Anybody can keep piling pile of shit on top of pile of shit which is why that sort of code is so common in our industry.

While I actually agree with you (though, outsourcing to lowest bidder would account for much of what you're seeing with humans), I just saw Bug Hunt Bench scores that gave me some pause:

https://x.com/PawelHuryn/status/2095982259761475945

https://bughunt.productcompass.pm/?preset=all

Claude Opus 4.8 ranks near last on this Bug Hunt benchmark, and missed 96% of the deliberately introduced bugs. If you're a developer who has been falling back to Opus 4.8 because of how Opus 5 talks, and Fable 5 being so expensive that it needs to be rationed... well, turns out Opus 4.8 can actually be quite poor for finding bugs.

(Which feels weird to me, because Opus 4.6 fixed a bug that myself and a group of humans had been hunting down for over a decade. Models are spiky.)

Also surprising to me: Luna Max performing better than Fable 5.1 High, at least on this benchmark. But Astra 6 & Fable 5.1 on Max both perform at the top as you would expect.

> At this point we can assume, it is better than 90% of engineers (including me).

Hard disagree. We absolutely cannot assume that. You can posit it, and we can have an informed debate about it. This is what irks me the most about LLM fans: they constantly try to reframe the debate to have their worldview as the agreed-upon starting point.

That final 10% is the hard part. 90% is easy.