I think this is very good take on AI adoption: https://mitchellh.com/writing/my-ai-adoption-journey. I've had tremendous success with roughly following the ideas there.
> The point is: let the agent do the boring stuff, the stuff that won't teach you anything new, or try out different things you'd otherwise not have time for. Then you evaluate what it came up with, take the ideas that are actually reasonable and correct, and finalize the implementation.
That's partially true. I've also had instances where I could have very well done a simple change by myself, but by running it through an agent first I became aware of complexities I wasn't considering and I gained documentation updates for free.
Oh and the best part, if in three months I'm asked to compile a list of things I did, I can just look at my session history, cross with my development history on my repositories and paint a very good picture of what I've achieved. I can even rebuild the decision process with designing the solution.
It's always a win to run things through an agent.
Companies will face the maintenance and availability consequences of these tools but it may take a while for the feedback loop to close
It’s very hard to say right now what happens at the other side of this change right now.
All these new growing pains are happening in many companies simultaneously and they are happening at elevated speed. While that change is taking place it can be quite disorienting and if you want to take a forward looking view it can be quite unclear of how you should behave.
What are you building? Does the tool help or hurt?
People answered this wrong in the Ruby era, they answered it wrong in the PHP era, they answered it wrong in the Lotus Notes and Visual BASIC era.
After five or six cycles it does become a bit fatiguing. Use the tool sanely. Work at a pace where your understanding of what you are building does not exceed the reality of the mess you and your team are actually building if budgets allow.
This seldom happens, even in solo hobby projects once you cost everything in.
It's not about agile or waterfall or "functional" or abstracting your dependencies via Podman or Docker or VMware or whatever that nix crap is. Or using an agent to catch the bugs in the agent that's talking to an LLM you have next to no control over that's deleting your production database while you slept, then asking it to make illustrations for the postmortem blog post you ask it to write that you think elevates your status in the community but probably doesn't.
I'm not even sure building software is an engineering discipline at this point. Maybe it never was.
Aren't you conveniently ignoring the fact that there were people saw through that and didn't go down those routes?
Or better yet point out the better paths they chose instead. Were they wrestling with Java and "Joda Time"? Talking to AWS via a Python library named after a dolphin? Running .NET code on Linux servers under Mono that never actually worked? Jamming apps into a browser via JQuery? Abstracting it up a level and making 1,400 database calls via ActiveRecord to render a ten item to-do list and writing blog posts about the N+1 problem? Rewriting grep in Rust to keep the ruskies out of our precious LLCs?
Asking the wrong questions, using the wrong tools, then writing dumb blog posts about it is what we do. It's what makes us us.
On one hand there's an approach to computing where it is a branch of mathematics that is universal. There are some creatures that live under the ice on a moon circling a gas giant around another star and if they have computers they are going to understand the halting problem (even if they formulate it differently) and know bubble sort is O(N^2) and about algorithms that sort O(N log N).
On the other hand we are divided by communities of practice that don't like one another. For instance there is the "OO sux" brigade which thinks I suck because I like Java. There still are shops where everything is done in a stored procedure (oddly like the fashionable architecture where you build an API server just because... you have to have an API) and other shops where people would think you were brain damaged to go anywhere near stored procs, triggers or any of that. It used to be Linux enthusiasts thought anybody involved in Windows was stupid and you'd meet Windows admins who were click-click-click-click-clicking over and over again to get IIS somewhat working who thought IIS was the only web server good enough for "the enterprise"
Now apart for the instinctual hate for the tools there really are those chronic conceptual problems for which datetime is the poster child. I think every major language has been through multiple datetime libraries in and out of the standard lib in the last 20 years because dates and times just aren't the simple things that we wish they would be and the school of hard knocks keeps knocking us to accept a complicated reality.
I'm laughing over the current Delve/SOC2 situation right now. Everyone pulls for 'licenses' as the first card, but we all know that is equally fraught with trauma. https://xkcd.com/927/
Pedanticism (or pedantry) is the excessive, tiresome concern for minor details, literal accuracy, or formal rules, often at the expense of understanding the broader context.
Neither myself nor the vast majority of other “software engineers” in our field are living up to what it should mean to be an “engineer”.
The people that make bridges and buildings, those are the engineers. Software engineers, for the very very most part, are not.
“Developers build things. Engineers build them and keep them running.”
I like the linguistic point from a standpoint of emphasizing a long term responsibility.
https://www.howtheworldbecamerich.com/
Edit-on a related note, are there any studies on the all-in long-term cost between companies that "develop" vs. "engineer". I doubt there would be clean data since the managers that ignored all of the warning of "tech debt" would probably have the say on both compiling and releasing such data.
Does the cost of "tech-debt" decrease as the cost of "coding" decreased or is there a phase transition on the quality of the code? I bet there will be an inflection point if you plotted the adoption time of AI coding by companies. Late adapters that timed it after the models and harnesses and practices were good enough (probably still some time in the near future) would have less all-in cost per same codebase quality.
In software there's a lot more emphasis on post-hoc fixes rather than up front validation, in my experience.
Most recently I wrote cloudformation templates to bring up infra for AWS-based agents. I don't use ai-assisted coding except googling which I acknowledge is an ai summary.
A friend of mine is in a toxic company where everyone has to use AI and they're looked down upon if they don't use it. Every minute of their day has to be logged doing something. They're also going to lay off a bunch of people soon since "AI has replaced them" this is in the context of an agency.
Of course, we use that term for something else in the software world, but architecture really has two tiers, the starchitects building super fancy stuff (equivalent to what we’d call software architects) and the much more normal ones working on sundry things like townhomes and strip malls.
That being said I don’t think people want the architecture pay grades in the software fields.
Maybe software tinkerer?
It isn't. Show me the licensing requirements to be a "software engineer." There are none. A 12 year old can call himself a software engineer and there are probably some who have managed to get remote work on major projects.
Where specifically? I've been working as a "Software engineer" for multiple decades, across three countries in Europe, and 2-3 countries outside of Europe, never been sued or received a "big fine" for this, even have had presentations for government teams and similar, not a single person have reacted to me (or others) calling ourselves "software engineers" this whole time.
That's assuming the axiom that "engineer" must require licensing requirements. That may be true in some jurisdictions, but it's not axiomatically or definitionally true.
Some kinds of building software may be "engineering", some kinds may not be, but anyone seeking to argue that "licensing requirements" should come into play will have to actually argue that rather than treat it as an unstated axiom.
For the other countries, though, arguing "some countries do it that way" is as persuasive as "some countries drive on the other side of the road." It's true, but so what? Why should we change to do it their way?
As I said, "That may be true in some jurisdictions, but it's not axiomatically or definitionally true.". The law is emphatically not an axiom, nor is it definitionally right or wrong; it only defines what's legal or illegal.
When the article raised the question of whether "building software is an engineering discipline", it was very obviously not asking a question about whether the term 'engineering' is legally restricted in any particular jurisdiction.
Now I barely look at ticket requirements, feed it to an LLM, have it do the work, spend an hour reviewing it, then ship it 3 days later. Plenty of fuck off time, which is time well spent when I know nothing will change anyway. If I'm gonna lose my career to LLMs I may as well enjoy burning shareholder capital. I've optimized my life completely to maximize fuck off time.
At the end of the day they created the environment. It would be criminal to not take advantage of their stupidity.
Personally I think that whole Karpathy thing is the slowest thing in the world. I mean you can spin the wheels on a dragster all you like and it is really loud and you can smell the fumes but at some point you realize you're not going anywhere.
My own frustration with the general slowness of computing (iOS 26, file pickers, build systems, build systems, build systems, ...) has been peaking lately and frankly the lack of responsiveness is driving me up the wall. If I wasn't busy at work and loaded with a few years worth of side projects I'd be tearing the whole GUI stack down to the bottom and rebuilding it all to respect hard real time requirements.
That's increasingly not possible. This is the first time for me in 20 years where I've had a programming tool rammed down my throat.
There's a crisis of software developer autonomy and it's actually hurting software productivity. We're making worse software, slower because the C levels have bought this fairy tale that you can replace 5 development resource with 1 development resource + some tokens.
Just another reason we should cut software jobs and replace them with A(G)I.
If the human "engineers" were never doing anything precisely, why would the robot engineers need to?
The ones who got acquired - never really had to stand up to any due diligence scrutiny on the technical side. Other sides of the businesses did for sure, but not that side.
Many of you here work for "real" tech companies with the budget and proper skin in the game to actually have real engineers and sane practices. But many of you do not, and I am sure many have seen what I have seen and can attest to this. If someone like the person I mentioned above asks you to join them to help fix their problems, make sure the compensation is tremendous. Slop clean-up is a real profession, but beware.
Other places were "hack it until we don't know of any major bugs, then ship it before someone finds one". And now they're "hey, AI agents - we can use that as a hack-o-matic!" But they were having trouble with sustainability before, and they're going to still, except much faster.
[1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/08/09/the-joel-test-12-s...
It's a craft.
But in many agent-skeptical pieces, I keep seeing this specific sentiment that “agent-written code is not production-ready,” and that just feels… wrong!
It’s just completely insane to me to look at the output of Claude code or Codex with frontier models and say “no, nothing that comes out of this can go straight to prod — I need to review every line.”
Yes, there are still issues, and yes, keeping mental context of your codebase’s architecture is critical, but I’m sorry, it just feels borderline archaic to pretend we’re gonna live in a world where these agents have to have a human poring over every single line they commit.
I'm one-shotting AI code for my website without even looking at it. Straight to prod (well, github->cf worker). It is glorious.
I'm responding to this statement: "Nothing should go straight to prod ever, ever ever, ever."
Air Traffic Controller software - sure. 99% of other softwares around that are not mission-critical (like Facebook) just punch it to production - "move fast and break shit" has been cool way before "AI"
The answer is that it's very easy for bad code to cause more problems than it solves. This:
> Then one day you turn around and want to add a new feature. But the architecture, which is largely booboos at this point, doesn't allow your army of agents to make the change in a functioning way.
is not a hypothetical, but a common failure mode which routinely happens today to teams who don't think carefully enough about what they're merging. I know a team of a half-dozen people who's been working for years to dig themselves out of that hole; because of bad code they shipped in the past, changes that should have taken a couple hours without agentic support take days or weeks even with agentic support.
Does it feel archaic because LLMs are clearly producing output of a quality that doesn't require any review, or because having to review all the code LLMs produce clips the productivity gains we can squeeze out of them?
https://gist.github.com/ontouchstart/d43591213e0d3087369298f...
(Note: pi was written by the author of the post.)
Now it is time to read them carefully without AI.
We are all rabbits.
Integration is the key to the agents. Individual usages don't help AI much because it is confined within the domain of that individual.
Pull the bandaid off quickly, it hurts less.
I'm one of those people and I'm not going to slow down. I want to move on from bullshit jobs.
The only people that fear what is coming are those that lack imagination and think we are going to run out of things to do, or run out of problems to create and solve.
So are you aiming for death poverty? Once those bullshit jobs go, we’re going to find a lot of people incapable of producing anything of value while still costing quite a bit to upkeep. These people will have to be gotten rid of somehow.
> and think we are going to run out of things to do, or run out of problems to create and solve.
There will be plenty of problems to solve. Like who will wipe the ass of the very people that hate you and want to subjugate you.
Again:
The only people that fear what is coming are those that lack imagination and think we are going to run out of things to do, or run out of problems to create and solve.
- NFTs
- Surveillance schizos
- Global Pedophile Cabal schizos
- Anyone who didn’t believe we were a year out from Star Trek living when LLMs first started picking up steam
- People who predicted the flood of people entering Software via bootcamps, etc. would never cause any problems because their god of software is consuming the world too quickly for supply and demand to ever be a real concern.
- Anyone amongst the sea of delusional democrats who did indeed believe Trump could win a second term.
All of those doomers were vindicated, and that’s just recently.
Committing a crime with someone bonds you to them.
First, it's a kind of shared social behavior, and it's one that is exclusive to you and your friends who commit the same kinds of crimes. Any shared experience bonds people, crimes included. Having a shared secret also bonds people.
Second, it creates an implied pact of mutually assured destruction. Everyone knows the skeletons in everyone else's closet, so it creates a web of trust. Anyone defecting could possibly be punished by selectively revealing their crimes, and vice versa. Game theoretically it overcomes tit-for-tat and enables all-cooperate interactions, at least to some extent, and even among people who otherwise don't like each other or don't have a lot in common.
Third, it separates the serious from the unserious. If you want to be a member of the club, do the bad thing. It's a form of high cost membership gating.
This works for other kinds of crimes too. It's not that unusual for criminal gangs to demand that initiates commit a crime and provide evidence, or commit a crime in front of existing members. These can be things like robbery, murder, and so on. Anyone not willing to do this probably isn't serious and can't be trusted. Once someone does do it, you know they're really in.
It naturally creates cabals. The crime comes first, the cabal second, but then the cabal can realize this and start using the crime as a gateway to admission.
Every mutual interest creates a community, but a secret criminal mutual interest creates a special kind of tight knit community. In a world that's increasingly atomized and divided, that's power. I think it neatly explains how the Epstein network could be so powerful and effective.
- Surveillance schizos - Society still works
- Global Pedophile Cabal schizos - Again, funny use of 'doomers' but that's what the current society seems to be run by so I wouldn't say it's fitting for doomerism.
- People who predicted the flood of people entering Software via bootcamps, etc. would never cause any problems because their god of software is consuming the world too quickly for supply and demand to ever be a real concern.
-- I'm a software "engineer" for ~14 years now. I still have no concern.
Also, there have been plenty of awful things caused by technological progress. Tons of death and poverty was created by the transition to factories and mechanization 150 years ago.
Did we come out the other end with higher living standards? Yes, but that doesn't make the decades of brutal transition period any less awful for those affected.
That's generous. Climate scientists were right, climate doomers were definitely wrong.
Society is mostly unchanged due to climate change. That's not to say climate has no effect, but it is certainly still not some doomer scenario that's played out. New York and Florida are most certainly not underwater as predicted by the famous "Inconvenient Truth". People still live in deserts just as they always have. Human lifespan is still increasing. We have less hunger worldwide than ever before, etc.
Climate change doomers conveniently leave out the part where climate has ALWAYS affected society and is one of the main inputs to our existence, therefore we are extremely adaptable to it.
Before "climate change" ever entered the general consciousness, climate wiped out civilizations MORE FREQUENTLY than it does now. All signs point to doomers being wrong and yet they all hold onto it stubbornly.
Doomers were never impressive because they got anything right, they are impressive because they have the unique skill of moving the goalpost when they are wrong. Any time you think the goalpost can't be moved further out, they prove it's possible.
The earth is becoming more hostile to it's inhabitants. There are famines caused by climate change. We will undoubtedly within the next 20 years see mass migration from the areas hardest hit.
Climate scientists, and climate reporting, often UNDERSTATED the worst of these effects.
I think it'd be worth stating what your definition of doomerism is. For me, seeing the increases in forest fires, seeing the sky reddened and the air quality diminish and floods and hurricanes increase... I don't think being able to buy a big mac doesn't make that any less pessimistic.
Did I miss something? I haven't used it in a minute, but why is the author claiming that it's "uninstallable malware"?
I don't agree, but bigger issue to me is many/most companies don't even know what they want or think about what the purpose is. So whereas in past devs coding something gave some throttle or sanity checks, now we'd just throw shit over wall even faster.
I'm seeing some LinkedIn lunatics brag about "my idea to production in an hour" and all I can think is: that is probably a terrible feature. No one I've worked with is that good or visionary where that speed even matters.
His blog post on pi is here: https://mariozechner.at/posts/2025-11-30-pi-coding-agent/
That may be the case where AI leaks into, but not every software developer uses or depends on AI. So not all software has become more brittle.
Personally I try to avoid any contact with software developers using AI. This may not be possible, but I don't want to waste my own time "interacting" with people who aren't really the ones writing code anymore.
One thing about the old days of DOS and original MacOS: you couldn't get away with nearly as much of this. The whole computer would crash hard and need to be rebooted, all unsaved work lost. You also could not easily push out an update or patch --- stuff had to work out of the box.
Modern OSes with virtual memory and multitasking and user isolation are a lot more tolerant of shit code, so we are getting more of it.
Not that I want to go back to DOS but Wordperfect 5.1 was pretty damn rock solid as I recall.
The sad fact is that now, because of the ease of pushing your fix to everything without requiring anything more from the user than that their machine be more or less permanently connected to a network, even an OS is dealt with as casually as an application or game.
It's not the glut of compute resources, we've already accepted bloat in modern software. The new crutch is treating every device as "always online" paired with mantra of "ship now! push fixes later." Its easier to setup a big complex CI pipeline you push fixes into and it OTA patches the users system. This way you can justify pushing broken unfinished products to beat your competitors doing the same.
This is a great point.
I have been avoiding LLM's for awhile now, but realized that I might want to try working on a small PDF book to Markdown conversion project[0]. I like the Claude code because command line. I'm realizing you really need to architect with good very precise language to avoid mistakes.
I didn't try to have a prompt do everything at once. I prompted Claude Code to do the conversion process section by section of the document. That seemed to reduce the mistake the agent would make
[0]: https://www.scottrlarson.com/publications/publication-my-fir...
0xbadcafebee•1h ago
As somebody who has been running systems like these for two decades: the software has not changed. What's changed is that before, nobody trusted anything, so a human had to manually do everything. That slowed down the process, which made flaws happen less frequently. But it was all still crap. Just very slow moving crap, with more manual testing and visual validation. Still plenty of failures, but it doesn't feel like it fails a lot of they're spaced far apart on the status page. The "uptime" is time-driven, not bugs-per-lines-of-code driven.
DevOps' purpose is to teach you that you can move quickly without breaking stuff, but it requires a particular way of working, that emphasizes building trust. You can't just ship random stuff 100x faster and assume it will work. This is what the "move fast and break stuff" people learned the hard way years ago.
And breaking stuff isn't inherently bad - if you learn from your mistakes and make the system better afterward. The problem is, that's extra work that people don't want to do. If you don't have an adult in the room forcing people to improve, you get the disasters of the past month. An example: Google SREs give teams error budgets; the SREs are acting as the adult in the room, forcing the team to stop shipping and fix their quality issues.
One way to deal with this in DevOps/Lean/TPS is the Andon cord. Famously a cord introduced at Toyota that allows any assembly worker to stop the production line until a problem is identified and a fix worked on (not just the immediate defect, but the root cause). This is insane to most business people because nobody wants to stop everything to fix one problem, they want to quickly patch it up and keep working, or ignore it and fix it later. But as Ford/GM found out, that just leads to a mountain of backlogged problems that makes everything worse. Toyota discovered that if you take the long, painful time to fix it immediately, that has the opposite effect, creating more and more efficiency, better quality, fewer defects, and faster shipping. The difference is cultural.
This is real DevOps. If you want your AI work to be both high quality and fast, I recommend following its suggestions. Keep in mind, none of this is a technical issue; it's a business process isssue.
pixl97•51m ago
In the past with smaller services those services did break all the time, but the outage was limited to a much smaller area. Also systems were typically less integrated with each other so one service being down rarely took out everything.