As an engineer with 20 years experience, I can say this is bogus. LLMs still - right now, today, with the latest model - make errors that humans would never make. They cannot be trusted. So you have to carefully review everything they produce, which negates the productivity gains. You may as well just write your own code, it will be similarly fast and better quality.

I don’t know, I feel like he is using a lot more convincing arguments than just being dismissive without real substance like you are. When you say huge externalities are you referring to something that hasn’t been seen in other major industrial paradigm shifts?

Dan Luu's recent blog post [0] reminded me of Gas Town. Gas Town was all the hype when it debuted. Us, mere mortals, had a few days left in the business of software. Now, only the crickets remain in the Gas Town. Not even its creator is there [1].

[0] We should be more ambitious with the software we build. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50225695

[1] https://x.com/danluu/status/2099800154639581353

I went down a rabbit hole of copyright and one of the things that clicked along the way is that a vibe coded app is not copyrightable. If someone says their app is completely Built with AI, they’re also saying: here is a public domain program that you can repackage as you wish.

It’s not quite that simple - there may be minor things here and there that are copyrightable like the name. But anything purely prompt generated is fair game to be copied and reused.

It will be interesting to see this tested, but companies telling people AI is writing their software may be a liability in the not-to distant future.

(This is based on USCO opinions and congressional testimony: https://www.copyright.gov/ai/ . EULAs are different things, and may restrict rights otherwise granted by the law, etc., etc.)

I’m tired of the “omg huge externalities!” argument.

The externalities can literally be solved with just more AI. Especially even better AI as it emerges every year. Problems that primitive agents created back in 2024 have now long been solved by the advanced agents of 2026. And in 2028, agents will solve problems the 2026 agents leave behind.

There is never going to be a moment where a massive problem created by AI finally arrives and everyone throws their hands up and says “oh no we should have just coded by hand all along!” Most software doesn’t really even live that long before it has to be changed due to new requirements.

Every problem will be solved by AI and if not then everything just gets trivially rewritten.

Mind you, we have not even entered the insane era yet where local LLMs etched in silicon chips will be putting out code at an insane 16k/tokens per second for just the cost of electricity. Let that sink in.

It’s over for handwritten code (in professional contexts).

Programming has arguably never been the most important part of making video games though, except when people stuff it up and a game doesn't run well on the hardware people want to play it on.

Story, design, game mechanics...these all have something in common, and it's that at a moderate sized studio they're not even slightly the programmers job.

Arguably if you wanted to make games then now is the best time to do it because a lot of the boilerplate won't be in your way.

I can't personally vouch for whether top AIs have broadly exceeded (median) human ability here, but as far as bounties go (or even just fixing things in existing projects), what I usually hear about involves a lot of maintainers auto-rejecting AI-assisted contributions because they are AI-assisted, with the charitable reason usually being that it's necessary to have some kind of attention gate or else they get flooded out. (To be clear, this seems like a reasonable response to me; the existing structure often wasn't made to handle that kind of influx, and the spectrum of current-day AI includes a ton of lower-quality models and harnesses that will be cheerfully overconfident. The meta signal can be ruined even if there is also high-quality stuff that people who know how to get it can get!) This plus popular anger over AI developments seems to mean that people who do successfully use AI to find bugs have a lot of incentive to not publish anything or try to get it upstreamed because they'll immediately come under fire. Highly reputable people and organizations sometimes use their existing clout to vouch for AI-assisted bug reports for prominent projects, but a lot of others just quietly adopt the AI fix in their own tree and give up on sharing it.