Everyone in SWE (who got into it for the love of writing code) is experiencing this. I've been direct with my team about it being a legitimate feeling of grief and the grieving process that comes along with it. It's been helpful for folks to hear that they aren't alone in that feeling.

And also that on the other side of that grief is something new and potentially exciting, but very different than what we're all used to.

Yeah the AI companies slurped up all our work and are now selling it back to us in the form of trained LLMs.

What's the point of contributing to OSS if anyone can just LLM wash your work knowingly or unknowingly? You won't even get credit. Heck, you won't even know if anyone is using it!

But then what if you have a larger project than a library. Do all the leg work figuring out what works and what doesn't. What users like. Then anyone can just point an LLM at it and clone it for $50? Fun.

it feels like a transition from artisan level work to factory based industrial manufacturing.

the functionally same product is still being made, but there is less human involvement in the craft, and more of a human management over the manufacturing process

I am always doing everything alone, so I am liking the LLMs a lot. My own code is very good, but nobody but myself cared about that. Even the one job that I got which allowed me to gather the capital needed to move into trading feels like complete luck. This is a new golden age for entrepreneurs and apocalypse for wage workers. Nobody whose status depends on his own productivity would complain about it going up sharply.

Probably the LLMs saved me because deep down I knew that my own power by itself wouldn't be enough to let me do what I really want, but right now the future does seem bright.

It doesn't have to be one or the other. Having a machine that does most of the coding for you means you can have more of the collaborative, human input. You can focus on the UX, you can fix all bugs, you can experiment with new ideas faster than ever. There will be zero excuses for poorly done work - think of all the half-assed corporate apps you have had to use during your career. I think this is the start of a great era in software development.

I imagine it was what it felt like for miners when they went from working next to each other with pickaxes, to operating massive machines by themselves, although that timeline was much longer and less jarring, taking a generation or two.

You have to wonder if this site will go next.

Just like with mathematicians, is it all really just about people losing a random, replaceable job and what they enjoyed about it?

Being able to program means in particular, you can read those programs and understand what they do.

What happens when you don't understand them anymore?

Living in a reality where everything is a black box, doing its thing as if by magic, leaves you in a position devoid of control. The objects upholding your life are incomprehensible to you, you cannot change them or even only reliably exchange them with alternatives.

How is that being disillusioned?

One of the things I've started noticing at work is that for the last few months I was banging away at having multiple streams at a time. But over time, I've reached the point where there is some human blocker on the stream, be it QA to test it, other humans to have attention to pick it up for the next step, deployment of some sort, or in some happy cases, it made it through to deployment and the problem is now solved. In the past couple of weeks my multistreaming is toning down and more often I'm back to one stream of work. Often a much higher level stream than I would have been working at a couple of years ago, and I'm moving faster in a number of ways. Some of that "faster" has been burned up in things like changing environments that I previously just wouldn't have done, though.

Open source has had a QA problem pretty much its entire life... not in the sense that it stinks necessarily, but in that getting it at all is a challenge and was in many projects probably already the blocker to further progress.

One wonders if what is happening here is just that even in the software space, where the fluidity and flexibility is maximized as we work with nearly entirely digital constructs, that once we burn through the dry tinder of "all the stuff we know we needed but didn't have the coding time to get to" and the frontier of "work to do" advance on all fronts to "some sort of human or real-world blocker", it may just turn out that the steady state improvement in productivity after accounting for Amdahl's Law, even when code is "nearly free", is only a maybe 2x or 3x improvement after all. If this is true, goodness help the financial bubble which is assuming that something like 5x or 10x indefinitely is a lower bound, if even in the best possible domain for AI that's all we really get.

I think this comment is premature. It hasn't really been 2-3 years accelerated LLM development. Even 6 months ago, LLM development was much less refined than it is now. There's been a few years of figuring out how to use these tools (which are constantly changing) and maybe a year of using them effectively.

You point all these new software but some of them are literally only a few months to a few weeks old and complaining that they aren't up to standard yet. Even if LLMs didn't get any better than they are right now, these projects have barely even begun, and there is plenty of time and resources to build them up.

I've written a bunch of cool new software with LLMs in my spare time -- are you sure you even have a way to notice all the new cool software that exists?

> buggy, as they were 4-5 years ago

I wish!

The quality of commercial software has really gone downhill the past decade. Some of it may be AI, but it has likely more to do with the fact that fewer and fewer want to pay for QA.

On the endless framework treadmill, money is better spent going forward and changing things.

I thinks what's more happening is bespoke software made by people for themselves mostly, often with a user count of 1. That's quite a huge change, for users of that software. Of course such things are not replacing existing apps.

We have seen a huge proliferation of vibed audio plugins. Most of them are very bad or replicate things DAWs can already do. And vibed video games. If anything it has become harder for many audiences to find good software because algorithmic curation is driven by gameable engagement metrics not quality.

Yes! It's just repeatedly asserted that vibecoding is taking over, going to replace us all. I have yet to see evidence of it (no, marketing stunts aren't evidence).

> But where is the new cool software ?

No matter what you think about it, it's impressive what the folk at Omarchy[1] have been doing with LLMs.

1: https://omarchy.org/

I personally think the agents and the harnesses themselves are pretty cool software. Claude code, openclaw, hermes, and now the consumer facing ones. I have been doing all kinds of cool things with them. If you gave somebody the claude desktop app with blender mcp 10 years ago their minds would be absolutely blown.

A lot of these harnesses and mcps themselves are built with llms.

This is the great paradox that many people have observed: why are we still using frustrating, buggy, hard-to-use, expensive software all day?

We're pretty much still building the tools to build the software renaissance.

It's here already, but not at a global scale.

You can pick any application you pay for, but only use 10% of the features of, and create a bespoke version that only has that 10% in it. It'll take you a day to get an MVP and maybe a week or two for it to be "good enough".

> No new utilities that are super useful in day work. thats the renaissance for you - you no longer need the utilities, just ask the agent to do that, whatever it might be.

Do you count ArtCraft?

> Reverse Engineering became much easier, it is plus. Finding vulnerabilities also became much easier, another plus. Models are getting better.

I think the models are good at this because we can just set them loose and they can permute through their training and because a lot of things are common patterns, this can work, but is also generating massive amounts of slop that people are dumping on maintainers who are getting overwhelmed by it. I really want to know how many failed iterations a successful run cost.

One unanswered question is if this is economical. Like, if this is just gobs of money and is unsustainable, what did we just spend the last few years doing? I think these things have value, but not like this.

> M$ & Goog, who are DEEPLY Vested into AI, have access to the best possible frontier models and large groups of highly proficient engineers. Yet, Windows and Android are as laggy & buggy, as they were 4-5 years ago.

This tells us the problem of developing good software is not that people are writing bad code. There are all kinds of social, economic, and physical limitations to why Windows can't become perfect overnight despite throwing AI programmers at the problem.

building great software has not been constrained on throughput nor technical for a while. it's limited by the human aspect, and there is no reason imo to believe by default that ai would change this.

I don't want to toot my own horn but I developed a mix of Photoshop / Pixelmator for AI assisted Photo editing and I use it every day instead of Pixelmator Pro [ 1 ]. I think it is in many respects the better app because I added many features I always wanted to have (replicate layers, any content as masks, crazy effects, etc). Granted it is buggy and still needs polish, but most software has bugs. So I've completely switched over to a complex AI generated app.

[ 1 ] https://pixellect.app/

This is not representative of what's actually going on, though. It's much more like an artisan carpenter who wants to build houses using bespoke hand-tools and precise joinery. That's great, and there are beautiful works of art created by those skills. But in the last year robots were developed that build homes exactly to spec. The robots work 24/7 and finish entire houses in a few days. That same skilled carpenter is being hired to monitor the robots and check over their work. There is, economically speaking, no place in the process for him to apply his craft. In the time he rips a single board, the robots build the wall. In the time he drives a handful of nails, the drywall is up and the paint is drying. He costs $200/hr, the robots cost $1/hr.

The carpenter is free to exercise his craft as he see's fit, but it's going to take place mostly in his personal workshop, for personal reasons, not to develop homes or run a business in the way he did before.

We can talk for ages about the quality of the robot's work, the maintainability of the resulting home, etc. But it's clear that, at this time, the market and ecosystem are embracing the robots whole-heartedly so those of us used to the old ways are having to rapidly adjust.

The trick to sleeping in a shit-covered bed is to slap a big sheet of plastic on it and never look under it.

The Claude Code development team has pioneered that new way of sleeping.

Quite profound.

I think the author is trying to say that a code base once infected with vibes, becomes indecipherable to the average human being. It's still just code, but full of Claudisms.

Let's be honest though, maybe "in the same way it's no longer feasible for tailors to spin their own yarn and weave their own cloth".

i'm sick of scatological metaphor.

Next time someone complains about software do me a favor and compare it to a nail through the foot or grabbing a hot dish and burning yourself or something else negative in the human experience. There is plenty to choose from.

We don't need 300 variations of enshitification, the folks at Pompeii and Herculaneum have that well covered.

sounds like bullshit. I'm actually glad that the people that hold this view are getting out of the way, they are the people that gatekept open source and made it annoying to work with. Do I miss having to wait for months to fix a trivial bug because I first need to convince 15 people that the fix is even necessary?

No, not really.

Doesn't that imply that there's nothing inherently wrong about shitting in someone's bed and then sleeping in it?

> when there's a noticeable decline in stability and development

When?

Well, people aren’t coding to keep their skills and knowledge fresh.

And they’re not even learning from their AI agents since they’re not closely reviewing the code.

The chance of code quality increasing seems remote.

And that’s not to mention the new generation—having rarely coded enough to properly review code.

Nor to mention the AI learning from AI coded slop: mad cow disease for AI.

What do we have, no programmers, no one knowing what’s going on inside the test passing slopy black box, except a caretaker guy who’s kept their skills sharp by not using AI—with their time taken up trying to understand constantly rewritten code?

Presumably, private companies and individuals with the money to pay for tokens continue forward rolling their own in-house solutions and slowly abandon OSS as it rots. What happens when each organization has its own entire stack though? Sure, FAANGs already were like that but most smaller companies were sort of "speaking the same language" and reusing software like apache, mongodb, nginx etc.

I'd say just knowing when to walk away in anything, not just this industry, is one of the best skills you can have as a human.

This industry is actively working on making people walk away regardless of joy status.

Eventually maintainers will just throw up their hands and leave the repo under the care of a LLM. "Merge PRs that align with the product's vision/design/intention. Meticulously examine for malicious contributions. Email me if there are doubts."

The top tier LLMs would be as good at this as a lot of maintainers, right?

yeah maybe. i think it's become a lot more feasible to fork and modify vs wait for new features or fix bugs. the future might be that the main repo for a project forms the "core", and consumers use their own forks which are automatically kept up to date. the core doesn't need to be as configurable or flexible as the forks can add functionality directly. in theory it could be easier for the maintainers.

The source is open, but the ownership of the "text" and 130 other gems still resides with the blog author... maybe he could add the projects to https://www.codeshelter.co/ or something.

No need to vice signal that hard.

The LLM can maintain it now.

There’s lots of ways to find joy in things.

Take woodworking. For some people, the act and meditative work of building it piece by piece is the part that they strive for. For others, it’s the planning phase and the “how will all these pieces go together” phase. For even others, it’s the staining phase. Some people like every part, others like just one part and work through all that extra just to get the chance to do that next part. For some, while they may not enjoy the preface to the work they want, they appreciate it because they feel that blitzing past it cheapens the stage they love.

Everyone is different and AI is hitting everyone just a little bit differently, and that’s just in areas that directly impact their specific craft.

It definitely varies person-by-person. People who enjoyed l33tcoding, the act of programming, and the building process feel one way vs. the people who are in it for the end product, or enjoy the design process feel another. In a way, it's almost like those who enjoy the journey vs. the result (although the design process is also a journey).

Personally I enjoyed the act of programming/building. I'm struggling to put this into words, but software engineers have often been interested in solving technical problems, rather than business problems. At least I've felt this personally. I'm working on shifting that enjoyment toward the requirements gathering/design process. At the end of the day, it's still problem solving (which is the root of what I enjoy). But now it's more focused on solving business problems vs. technical problems. Which at the end of the day, is what is valuable to the business.

From the business perspective, this is great, because the end goal of software for the business is "business value". But it is a tough shift for some people to make (me included).

Edited to add: Writing code vs. designing software are both creative. Writing code has a much more concrete/objective feedback loop though.

I also particularly hate the feeling of AI being shoved down everyone's throat.

And I don't enjoy digging through the mess that AI creates, whenever I have a particular bug that it can't quite get right.

For most of us, as much as we enjoy making clever things, without the context of a job there aren't that many fun problems we have time to engage with.

It matters because doing so used to be worthwhile economically. Now it is exclusively a part-time for people who have time to do it for fun.

>Why should I care if other people use LLMs to do so?

No man is an island. I've been watching my love for programming die as I've seen so many of my peers and engineering heroes turn into vibe coders.

Community is a powerful thing.

> I'm so conflicted about this. I do love being able to create and bring ideas to life at the light of speed. But I also see the unique value in the experience of coding, deeply caring about the craft. Can we have both?

Yes, but only if you're very wealthy.

As always, everyone else can suck it.

I think it's like any other craft. Buildings and most furniture are built using mass produced lumber and machinery, but many people still enjoy doing woodworking by hand.

Yes, but it may be hard to justify the "experience of coding" from a commercial standpoint.

Casey Muratori had a take on a podcast that I liked comparing writing code vs. using an LLM to generate code to playing guitar by hand vs. playing digital music. Although it's arguably more efficient to play an mp3, people still enjoy the art of playing the guitar.

No.

If the client cares for your craftsmanship.

You can have both, but there are very few people who care about it purely as a craft. They want pay, recognition, etc along with it.

As a hobby you can’t live from

Yes, choose both or choose one of them and, for god's sake, STFU and make something!

> If AI can do what we deem creative work, say implementing a chunk of a Ruby gem, should we still consider such work creative in the first place?

Assuming that it can, and it can also do a great number of things that we previously considered creative work, what’s left?

I recently played some music for a friend by an artist I really like (mitch murder), and his comment was that Suno AI could generate plenty more songs along the same lines. Now, I’m not so sure it actually can; I think the human behind the music is bringing something special to it, but this nuance is lost on my friend. Suno AI is good enough for him.

I think the situation with these ruby gems is similar. I, personally, would rather use the human crafted gems, but there are plenty of people like my friend who think there’s either no difference or no important difference between what the creative human made and what the machine can make.

I think this is really an excellent comment because it challenges us to reframe what we take for granted as creativity, enforces us to reconsider what creativity could be in the face of really powerful automation.

Actually nobody is preventing you from building library with LLM.

On top of it you can in parallel work on the library, groom its shape and then have another workflow integrating that library into bigger library and so on.

The biggest issue I always had was integration between components. Today's that's free lunch. You can extract, abstractize, re-integrate things for free.

Long before LLMs there was a concept of Big Ball of Mud. The slop existed before LLMS and all software eventually rotten. Today just as LLMs whip out faster the code rot happens faster too.

But engineers learned way into how not to make systems decay fast and (not surprisingly) the same methods work just as well with LLMs.

I find LLMs like a blender. If you are ignorant in use everything will become a tasteless grey sludge. But it's a indispensable tool in a kitchen that makes many things simple, easy and tasty.

Is it? I thought I read somewhere that it was one of the most token-efficient ones. Also, Rails + LLMs is magic and speed (of development).

Why wouldn’t the rails/ruby users just use rust too?

The social aspect of a craft is more than just "clout" or "smart creds" from an in-group, it is also collaboration, commentary, discussion, and the joy of helping others find their feet, for example. LLM-centric programming takes away not just the "clout" part but also all the other less egocentric social aspects of programming as a hobby. If the hobby's ecosystem gets whittled down to posting a finished demo and saying "look at what Claude did," well, what is there to talk about, really? The whole "process" aspect of the hobby gets obliterated, or at least effectively ceases to exist as a social phenomenon.

As a teacher of CS I'm very aware of this. Year after year, for the last 15 years the CS program has been the largest program where I work because the job prospects have been the best. But you can tell, in a class of 100 there are only 1-2 students who are in it for the love of material. The other 98-99% are in it for the job after college. Which is fine and expected.

But as soon as the paycheck dried up, those 98% were out and don't even care about the field. The 1-2% stick around no matter what.

It would not be absurd: Ruby (not Rails, Ruby, I insist) puts very high the "joy of coding", its syntax pleasant to write and read for humans, and its welcoming community. It never was the most performant, it's been a long time since it last was the cool kid on the block, but all those other aspects make it very attractive for very different reasons. That's a big part of why I started writing Ruby a long time ago vs. other languages, and why I enjoyed it so much, and I don't think I'm the only one.

I believe the Ruby community counts many people who resonate with this aspect of the language and of the community. And if you joined and enjoyed Ruby because you love collaborating around elegant code with/for other humans, you're surely not enjoying the current AI trend a lot.

I'm not writing Ruby daily anymore these days, but I still feel this way, and I really do not enjoy my work much these days.

DHH hasn't been helping.

yes, a lot of them hate dhh and believe him to be problematic, and since he's a big ai guy now the natural thing is to oppose him on that

I'd rather tell LLM to rewrite project in Python. There is no good reason to use Ruby/Rails now, the community and job market is shrinking and the language is nothing special.

Workers, shut up and listen to your betters.

I am pretty sure that the whole open source ideology was developed and disseminated exactly by a cartel of those massive corporations with the sole intention to amass as much human-written code as possible to train AI.

AI algorithms were developed in 1950s, and what all those vultures were waiting for was a good dataset and enough compute power, which they saw coming in advance.

> whilst making billions for their shareholders

> I am yet to see this trickle down

hmm...these two sentences don't agree with each other.

FSF has been the greatest pro-corporate activist, convincing thousands if not millions of programmers to give away their code.

If LLMs aren't an example of trickle down, I don't know what is

I really would like to believe that GPL is the answer here but I know it won’t change anything for them. If they can steal and destroy books, nothing will ever stop them.

But the robots are mostly "fine", and "fine" is good enough for most things we get paid for: enterprise SaaS products, mobile apps, etc.

I was where it sounds like you are a month or so ago (denial), so no downvotes here. It definitely sucks; it's like losing a huge part of my identity. I'm still grieving it.

I'm trying to deal with it by separating my identity from my job. I can still write code or learn new languages in my free time (such as it is). It's mostly a hobby now. And I can choose to not use LLMs at all in my personal life. But I do have bills to pay and a family to support, so at work I'm trying to learn how to do my new job of LLM orchestrator/babysitter. It's way less fun, but the money's still decent, so I'm hoping I can swallow my pride enough to keep going.

> The biggest LLM sellouts in open source

I'm pretty sure someone will soon call Linus a sell-out. The hate / denial / radicalisation is just sad at this point... Do, or don't, but at least don't hate the others. Be and let be. No need to call other people names just because you don't like their sand castle. There's plenty of sand on the beach.

You can't both be nice and believe that LLMs are useful tools?

> Ironically Oracle [...] is now being the good guy.

Reminder: oracle is also an acronym, and you might want to take a gander at what its subject is up to.

There is no future in which oracle is the good guy no matter the axis. Least of all the subject of AI.

Seems unnecessarily harsh. LLMs are a power tool. I'm not on-board with how it's being used in a lot of places, once things shake out I believe it's going to be net positive.

'Oracle is the good guy' is a sort of canary in the coal mine that perhaps you've got your worldview a bit upside down

I'm glad someone else called out Matz on this.

He started being ambivalent about it maybe two years ago, and reached metastasis in the latest Rails World fiasco, with dhh telling him to his face that his life's work (Matz's terms) is irrelevant now.

I personally find him detestable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Heinemeier_Hansson#:~:te...

Blunt, honest, and a eugenicist.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Heinemeier_Hansson#:~:te...

Even worse, "I refuse to code in this language because I disagree with political opinions of an author of a famous library that uses the language."

The list of things you can get canceled for is growing endlessly.

If your argument is strong, you don't need crutches like "imagined future" here. Nothing has to be imagined.

> there’s still community benefit in having a canonical version somewhere, rather than everyone writing bespoke solutions for themselves.

There is sharply reduced benefit to the maintainer, however as they are now buried in slop bug reports and PRs, and a bunch of people with no context and a Claude subscription think they can do it better.

I expect a lot of open-source maintainers will walk away from that particular bargain in the near future