Well, that explains the sloppy results Microsoft is delivering lately!
Paying $4.4k per month for the privilege of writing code is absolute madness, I'm not quite so sure with how we got to this point but it's still madness. Maybe Yegge is indeed right, maybe this is just like regular gambling/addiction, which sucks when it comes to being a programmer but at least it gets the dopamine levels higher.
But my comment was not about companies, it was just about writing code, about the freedom that used to come from it, about the agency that we used to have. There's no agency and no freedom left when you start paying that much money in order to write code. I guess that can work for some companies, but for sure it won't work for computer programmers as actual human beings (and imo this blog-post itself tries to touch on that aspect).
It should be banned in current form. No junior positions available - only those who lasted even have the chance to use them in commercial settings. After layoffs you will get how BAD it is :/ (if you are 35+)
A lot of smart people think they're "too smart" to get addicted. Plenty of tales of booksmart people who tried heroin and ended up stealing their mother's jewelry for a fix a few months later.
It does not surprise me at all that software engineers are falling into an addiction trap with AI.
Yeah, it is over for several roles, especially frontend web development given Opus 4.6 is able to one shot your React frontend from a Figma design 90% of the time.
Why would I want to hire 10 senior frontend developers on a $200K asking price salary at this point when one AI can replace 9 of them (yes it can) and require one single junior-level engineer at a significant lower price?
This idea is very tempting for many companies to continue slashing headcount with less employees to find 'cost savings' by using AI to do more with less.
Only if the front end was super simple in the first place, IMO. And also only for the v1, which is still useful, whereas for ongoing development I think AI leads people down a path of tools that cost more to maintain and build on.
It may be that AI leads to framework and architecture choices best suited to AI, with great results up front, and then all the same challenges and costs of quick and dirty development by a human. Except 10x faster so, by the time anyone in management realizes the mess they’re in, and the cost/benefit ratio tilts negative even in the short run as opposed to the obvious to engineers long term, there’s going to be so much more code in that bad style that it’s 10x more expensive for expert humans to fix it.
The vampire in the room, for me, seems to be feeling like I'm the only person in the room that doesn't believe the hype. Or should I say, being in rooms where nobody seems to care about quality over quantity anymore. Articles like this are part of the problem, not the solution.
Sure they are great for generating some level of code, but the deeper it goes the more it hallucinates. My first or second git commit from these tools is usually closer to a working full solution than the fifth one. The time spent refactoring prompts, testing the code, repeating instructions, refactoring naive architectural decisions and double checking hallucinations when it comes to research take more than the time AI saves me. This isn't free.
A CTO this week told me he can't code or brainstorm anymore without AI. We've had these tools for 4 years, like this guy says - either AI or the competition eats you. So, where is the output? Aside from more AI-tools, what has been released in the past 4 years that makes it obvious looking back that this is when AI became available?
I work in GPU programming, so there is no way in hell that JavaScript tools and database wrapper tasks can be on equal terms with generating for example Blackwell tcgen05 warp-scheduled kernels.
It's the idea/mindset that since you are working on something where the tool has a good distribution, its a skill issue or mindset problem for everyone else who is not getting value from the tool.
Here's what I find Claude Code (Opus) useful for:
1. Copy-pasting existing working code with small variations. If the intended variation is bigger then it fails to bring productivity gains, because it's almost universally wrong.
2. Exploring unknown code bases. Previously I had to curse my way through code reading sessions, now I can find information easily.
3. Google Search++, e.g. for deciding on tech choices. Needs a lot of hand holding though.
... that's it? Any time I tried doing anything more complex I ended up scrapping the "code" it wrote. It always looked nice though.
TFA mentions the slot machine aspect, but I think there are additional facets: The AI Junior Dev creates a kind of parasocial relationship and a sense of punctuated progress. I may still not have finished with X, but I can remember more "stuff" happening in the day, so it must've been more productive, right?
Contrast this to the archetypal "an idea for fixing the algorithm came to me in the shower."
When the difficulty of a task is neatly encompassed in a 200 word ticket and the implementation lacks much engineering challenge, AI can pretty reliably write the code-- mediocre code for mediocre challenges.
A huge fraction of the software economy runs on CRUD and some business logic. There just isn't much complexity inherent in any of the feature sets.
― Roy Amara
Maybe when AIs are able to say: "I don't know how this works" or "This doesn't work like that at all." they will be more helpful.
What I use AIs for is searching for stuff in large codebases. Sometimes I don't know the name or the file name and describe to them what I am looking for. Or I let them generate some random task python/bash script. Or use them to find specific things in a file that a regex cannot find. Simple small tasks.
It might well be I am doing it totally wrong.. but I have yet to see a medium to large sized project with maintainable code that was generated by AI.
Does it break down at some point to the extent that it simply does not finish tasks? Honest question as I saw this sentiment stated previously and assumed that sooner or later I'll face it myself but so far I didn't.
For example, had to update some more complex code to correctly calculate a financial penalty amount. The amount is defined by law and recently received an overhaul so we had to change our implementation.
Every model we tried (and we have corporate access and legal allowance to use pretty much all of them) failed to update it correctly. Models would start changing parts of the calculation that didn't need to be updated. After saying that the specific parts shouldn't be touched and to retry, most of them would go right back to changing it again. The legal definition of the calculation logic is, surprisingly, pretty clear and we do have rigorous tests in place to ensure the calculations are correct.
Beyond that, it was frustrating trying to get the models to stick to our coding standards. Our application has developers from other teams doing work as well. We enforce a minimum standard to ensure code quality doesn't suffer and other people can take over without much issue. This standard is documented in the code itself but also explicitly written out in the repository in simple language. Even when explicitly prompting the models to stick to the standard and copy pasting it into the actual chat, it would ignore 50% of it.
The most apt comparison I can make is that of a consultant that always agrees with you to your face but when doing actual work, ignores half of your instructions and you end up running after them to try to minimize the mess and clean up you have to do. It outputs more code but it doesn't meet the standards we have. I'd genuinely be happy to offload tasks to AI so I can focus on the more interesting parts of work I have, but from my experience and that of my colleagues, its just not working out for us (yet).
I kinda keep saying this, but in my experience:
1. You trade the time you'd take to understand the system for time spent testing it.
2. You trade the time you'd take to think about simplifying the system (so you have less code to type) into execution (so you build more in less time).
I really don't know if these are _good_ tradeoffs yet, but it's what I observe. I think it'll take a few years until we truly understand the net effects. The feedback cycles for decisions in software development and business can be really long, several years.
I think the net effects will be positive, not negative. I also think they won't be 10x. But that's just me believing stuff, and it is relatively pointless to argue about beliefs.
Companies still need to know what to build, not just build something/anything faster.
Suddenly, it's no longer enough to slap something together and call it a project. The better version with more features is just one prompt away. And if you're just a relay for prompts, why not add an agent or two?
I think there won't be a future where the world adapts to a 4-hour day. If your boss or customer also sees you as a relay for prompts, they'll slowly cut you out of the loop, or reduce the amount they pay you. If you instead want to maintain some moat, or build your own money-maker, your working hours will creep up again.
In this environment, I don't see this working out financially for most people. We need to decide which future we want:
1. the one where people can survive (and thrive) without stable employment;
2. the one where we stop automating in favor of stable employment; or
3. the one where only those who keep up stay afloat.
So yes, please adopt our work ethic and legal framework. It's going to help us tremendously.
Should a strike happen if devs are told to use Claude, or should a strike happen if devs aren't given access to Claude?
Let's spare the guy some web traffic.
> But hey, don’t take it from me. Take it from… the Copilot people. According to The Verge and a bunch of other reputable news sources, Microsoft is openly encouraging their employees to use multiple tools, and as a result, Claude Code has rapidly become dominant across engineering at Microsoft.
And what wonders they've achieved with it! Truly innovative enhancements to notepad being witnessed right now! The inability to shut down your computer! I can finally glimpse the 10x productivity I've been missing out on!
But at scale. Yegge gets close to it in this blog (which actually made me lol, good to see that he is back on form), but shies away from it.
If AI is producing a real productivity boom then we should be seeing a flood of high-quality non-AI related software. If building and shipping software is now easier and faster then all of the software that we have that doesn't quite work right should be displaced by high quality successors. It should be happening right now.
So where is it? Why is all this velocity going into tooling around AI instead? Face it, an entire industry has fallen into the trap of building the automation instead of the product they were trying to automate the production of.
Where is the new high quality C compiler that actually compiles the linux kernel to a measurably higher quality than gcc? If AI is really increasing productivity shouldn't we have that instead of a press-oriented hype flop?
You can't win with Claude Code. I understand that his API key isn't on the PID controller, so he gets a less bad deal, but he's still breaking even with some gee whizz factor.
Agents are like people on a long enough timeline: they will eventually do the lazy thing. But this happens in minutes not years.
If you don't have them on tracks made of iron, you are on a sugar high that will crash.
Formal methods, zero sorry, or it's another bounty for the vibecode cleanup guys.
A long time ago, food took effort to find, and calories were expensive. Then we had a breakthrough in cost/per/calories. We got fat, because we can not moderate our food intake. It is killing us.
A long time ago, coding took effort, and programmer productivity was expensive. Then we had a breakthrough in cost/per/feature. Now we are exhausted, because we can not moderate our energy and attention expenditure. It is killing us.
It’s a matter of opportunity cost. It used to be that when I rested for an hour, I lost an hour of output. Now, when I rest for an hour, I lose what used to be a day of output.
I need to rewire my brain and learn how to split the difference. There’s no point in producing a lot of output if I don’t have time to live.
The idea that you’ll get to enjoy the spoils when you grow up is false. You won’t. Just produce 5x and take some time off every day. You may even be more likely to reflect, and end up producing the right thing.
I keep hearing about this 10x productivity, but where is it materializing? Most developers at my company use Claude Code, but we don't seem to be shipping new features at ten times the rate. In fact, tickets still take roughly the same amount of time to complete.
These hyperbolic takes from Steve are wearing thin.
It wasn't my experience that Opus 4.5/4.6 was a sea change. It was a nice incremental improvement.
The same goes for Claude Code. Steve doesn't quantify what differentiates it from the other CLIs for him.
> And unfortunately, all your other tools and models are pretty terrible in comparison.
Personally, I like Copilot CLI. $10 a month for 300 requests. Copilot will keep working until it fulfills your request, no matter how many tokens it uses.
Put a large feature doc in a prompt. Copilot will chug away at it with Opus 4.6 or Sonnet 4.5. It could use millions of tokens. It doesn't matter. If you run out of prompts, each additional one costs just $0.04. The value is ridiculous.
Calling all other tools "pretty terrible" without specifics reminds me of crypto FOMO from the 2010s.
Der_Einzige•1h ago
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/6/69/Battlefield_3...
https://cdn11.bigcommerce.com/s-yzgoj/images/stencil/1280x12...
Downvoted within 1 minute. This website is a trash fire.
AceJohnny2•46m ago
because your comment was completely offtopic.