On top of that there's a not insignificant chance you've actually just stolen the code through an automated copyright whitewashing system. That these people believe they're adding value while never once checking if the above is true really disappoints me with the current direction of technology. LLMs don't make everyone better, they make everything a copy. The upwards transfer of wealth will continue.
Actually, the invention of the printing press in 1450 created a similar disruption, economic panic and institutional fear similar to what we're experiencing now: For centuries, the production of books was the exclusive domain of professional scribes and monks. To them, the printing press was an existential threat. Job Displacement: Scribes in Paris and other major cities reportedly went on strike or petitioned for bans, fearing they would be driven into poverty. The "Purity" Argument: Some critics argued that hand-copying was a spiritual act that instilled discipline, whereas the press was "mechanical" and "soulless." Aesthetic Elitism: Wealthy bibliophiles initially looked down on printed books as "cheap" or "ugly" compared to hand-illuminated manuscripts. Some collectors even refused to allow printed books in their libraries to maintain their prestige. Sound familiar? From "How the Printing Press Reshaped Associations" -- https://smsonline.net.au/blog/how-the-printing-press-reshape... and "How the Printing Press Changed the World" -- https://www.koolchangeprinting.com/post/how-the-printing-pre...
At some point no-one is going to have to argue about this. I'm guessing a bit here, but my guess is that within 5 years, in 90%+ jobs, if you're not using an AI assistant to code, you're going to be losing out on jobs. At that point, the argument over whether they're crap or not is done. I say this as someone who has been extremely sceptical over their ability to code in deep, complicated scenarios, but lately, claude opus is surprising me. And it will just get better.
Search “centre a div” in Google Wade through ads Skim a treatise on the history of centering content Skim over the “this question is off topic / duplicate” noise if Stack Overflow Find some code on the page Try to map how that code will work in the context of your other layout Realize it’s plain CSS and you’re looking for Tailwind Keep searching Try some stuff until it works Or… Ask LLM. Wait 20-30 seconds. Move on to the next thing.
Or, given that OP is presumably a developer who just doesn't focus fully on front end code they could skip straight to checking MDN for "center div" and get a How To article ( https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/How_to/Layo... ) as the first result without relying on spicy autocomplete. Given how often people acknowledge that ai slop needs to be verified, it seems like a shitty way to achieve something like this vs just checking it yourself with well known good reference material.
> I felt in love with the process to be honest. I complained my wife yesterday: "my only problem now is that I don't have enough time and money to pay all the servers", because it opened to me the opportunities to develop and deploy a lot of new ideas. What opportunities? You aren't going to make any money with anything you vibe coded because, even the people you are targeting don't vibe code it, the minute you have even a risk of gaining traction someone else is going to vibe code it anyway . And even if that didn't happen you're just reducing the signal/noise ratio; good luck getting your genuinely good product out there when the masses are spammed by vibe-coded alternatives. When every individual can produce their own software, why do you think that the stuff produced by you is worth paying for?
> Even with refinement and back-and-forth prompting, I’m easily 10x more productive Developers notoriously overestimate the productivity gains of AI, especially because it's akin to gambling every time you make a prompt, hoping for the AI's output to work. I'd be shocked if the developer wasn't actually less productive.
I accept there are productivity gains, but it's hard to take "10x" seriously. It's such a tired trope. Is no one humble enough to be a meager 2.5x engineer?
I'm building an AI agent for Godot, and in paid user testing we found the median speed up time to complete a variety of tasks[0] was 2x. This number was closer to 10x for less experienced engineers [0] tasks included making games from scratch and resolving bugs we put into template projects. There's no perfect tasks to test on, but this seemed sufficient
That sounds reasonable to me. AI is best at generating super basic and common code, it will have plenty of training on game templates and simple games. Obviously you cannot generalize that to all software development though.
> That sounds reasonable to me. AI is best at generating super basic and common code I'm currently using AI (Claude Code) to write a new Lojban parser in Haskell from scratch, which is hardly something "super basic and common". It works pretty well in practice, so I don't think that assertion is valid anymore. There are certainly differences between different tasks in terms of what works better with coding agents, but it's not as simple as "super basic".
I'm sure there is plenty of language parsers written in Haskell in the training data. Regardless, the question isn't if LLMs can generate code (they clearly can), it's if agentic workflows are superior to writing code by hand.
As you get deeper beyond the starter and bootstrap code it definitely takes a different approach to get value. This is in part because context limits of large code bases and because the knowledge becomes more specialized and the LLM has no training on that kind of code. But people are making it work, it just isn't as black and white.
I recently used AI to help build the majority of a small project (database-driven website with search and admin capabilities) and I'd confidently say I was able to build it 3 to 5 times faster with AI. For context, I'm an experienced developer and know how to tweak the AI code when it's wonky and the AI can't be coerced into fixing its mistakes.
Numbers don't matter if it makes you "feel" more productive. I've started and finished way more small projects i was too lazy to start without AI. So infinitely more productive? Though I've definitely wasted some time not liking what AI generated and started a new chat.
A year or so ago I was seriously thinking of making a series of videos showing how coding agents were just plain bad at producing code. This was based on my experience trying to get them to do very simple things (e.g. a five-pointed star, or text flowing around the edge of circle, in HTML/CSS). They still tend to fail at things like this, but I've come to realize that there are whole classes of adjacent problems they're good at, and I'm starting to leverage their strengths rather than get hung up on their weaknesses. Perhaps you're not playing to their strengths, or just haven't cracked the code for how to prompt them effectively? Prompt engineering is an art, and slight changes to prompts can make a big difference in the resulting code.
Perhaps it is a skill issue. But I don't really see the point of trying when it seems like the gains are marginal. If agent workflows really do start offering 2x+ level improvements then perhaps I'll switch over, in the meantime I won't have to suffer mental degradation from constant LLM usage.
I think it depends what you are doing. I’ve had Claude right the front end of a rust/react app and it was 10x if not x (because I just wouldn’t have attempted it). I’ve also had it write the documentation for a low level crate - work that needs to be done for the crate to be used effectively - but which I would have half-arsed because who like writing documentation? Recently I’ve been using it to write some async rust and it just shits the bed. It regularly codes the select! drop issue or otherwise completely fails to handle waiting on multiple things. My prompts have gotten quite sweary lately. It is probably 1x or worse. However, I am going to try formulating a pattern with examples to stuff in its context and we’ll see. I view the situation as a problem to be overcome, not an insurmountable failure. There may be places where an AI just can’t get it right: I wouldn’t trust it to write the clever bit tricks I’m doing elsewhere. But even there, it writes (most of) the tests and the docs. On the whole, I’m having far more fun with AI, and I am at least 2x as productive, on average. Consider that you might be stuck in a local (very bad) maximum. They certainly exist, as I’ve discovered. Try some side projects, something that has lots of existing examples in the training set. If you wanted to start a Formula 1 team, you’re going to need to know how to design a car, but there’s also a shit ton of logistics - like getting the car to the track - that an AI could just handle for you. Find boring but vital work the AI can do because, in my experience, that’s 90% of the work.
Mmm, I do a lot of frontend work but I find writing the frontend code myself is faster. That seems to be mostly what everyone says it's good for. I find it useful for other stuff like writing mini scripts, figuring out arguments for command line tools, reviewing code, generating dumb boilerplate code, etc. Just not for actually writing code.
> I'd be shocked if the developer wasn't actually less productive I agree 10x is a very large number and it's almost certainly smaller—maybe 1.5x would be reasonable. But really? You would be shocked if it was above 1.0x? This kind of comment always strikes me as so infantilizing and rude, to suggest that all these developers are actually slower with AI, but apparently completely oblivious to it and only you know better.
I would never suggest that only I know better. Plenty of other people are observing the same thing, and there is also research backing it up. Maybe shocked is the wrong term. Surprised, perhaps.
There are simply so many counterexamples out there of people who have developed projects in a small fraction of the time it would take manually. Whether or not AI is having a positive effect on productivity on average in the industry is a valid question, but it's a statistical one. It's ridiculous to argue that AI has a negative effect on productivity in every single individual case.
We’re seeing no external indicators of large productivity gains. Even assuming that productivity gains in large corporations are swallowed up by inefficiencies, you’d expect externally verifiable metrics to show a 2x or more increase in productivity among indie developers and small companies. So far it’s just crickets.
Either the projects he's working on are side projects, and in that case I don't see why he would need to use the complex pipelines, just Vanilla JS and PHP still work super fine, even better nowadays actually, or the projects are professional ones and then to ship code written by AI is extremely dangerous and he should have resources (time and people) to do things properly without AI. So, I'm clearly not convinced.
so is it fun because you had fallen behind and now you think you can fit with the people with more experience? well, I have news for you, the people with experience are also using AI too and they can still produce better and more than you do.
As someone who always dabbled in code but never was a “real” developer, I’ve found the same thing. I know the concepts, I know good from bad — so all of a sudden I can vibe code things that would have taken me months of studying and debugging and banging my head against the wall. If you’ll forgive a bit of self promotion, I also wrote some brief thoughts on my Adventures In AI Prototyping: https://www.andrew-turnbull.com/adventures-in-ai-prototyping...
Going in 2026, the frontend has many good options, but AI is not one of them. We have many typesafe (no, not TypeScript!) options with rock solid dev tooling, and fast compilers. AI is just a badaid, its not the road you want to travel.
I have this suspicion that the people who say they have 10x productivity gains from AI might largely see improvements from a workflow change which fixes their executive dysfunction. Back in the day I never had any issue just sitting down and coding something out for 4 hours straight. So I don’t think LLMs feel quite as big for me. But I can see the feeling of offloading effort to a computer when you have trouble getting started on a sub-task being a good trick to keep your brain engaged. I’ve personally seen LLMs be huge time savers on specific bugs, for writing tests, and writing boilerplate code. They’re huge for working in new frameworks that roughly map to one you already know. But for the nitty gritty that ends up being most of the work on a mature product where all of the easy stuff is already done they don’t provide as big of a multiplier.
More related to the title, i've found the same. I was always an aggressive pixel-pusher, so web dev took me AGES. But with shadcn + llms I'm flying through stuff, no lie, 5-20x faster than I was before. And i dont hate it anymore
I work at most 3-4 hours a day, and my work is prompting Cursor. Certainly an improvement over suffering 8 hours a day, but still not quite what I'm looking for.
Strong agree! Forget all those studies that say “but developers are slower” or whatever — I’m actually building way more hobby projects and having way more fun now. And work is way more fun and easier. And my node_modules folder size is dropping like crazy!
I have learned more - not just about my daily driver languages, but about other languages I wouldn't have even cracked the seal on, as well as layers of hardware and maker skills - in the past two years than I did in the 30 years leading up to them. I truly don't understand how anyone creative wouldn't find their productivity soar using these tools. If computers are bicycles for the mind, LLMs are powered exoskeletons with neural-controlled turret cannons.
Web development is perhaps "fun" again if you consider PHP 4 and jQuery as "fun". A "problem" arises for those of us who prefer Ruby, Rails, and HotWire. I'm not gonna lie, I use AI every day (in the form of Grammarly). But LLMs and so-called "agents" are less valuable to me, even if they would help me to produce more "output". It will be interesting to me to discover the outcome of this bifurcation!
Yeah. I love programming. I even love the business side where you solve real problems for people. What I don't love is the constant pressure to just deliver faster and faster. So forcing these chatbots on us fill a need for the CEOs and manager types that just want to DELIVER DELIVER DELIVER, but the benefit for the people that are forced to use them are marginal at best. There are some valid use cases for LLM-based tools, but businesses mostly aren't interested in those because it doesn't make line go up. Streamlining operations? Nah. Shove a Chatbot where it doesn't belong so you can try to get a billion dollar investment? NOW WE ARE COOKING C-suites and managers don't give a shit about quality unless they feel the pain. That's the most important thing I've learned. If you can find a way to push the pain up to the people that make the decisions, the more likely they are incentivised to improve it. It doesn't matter if you see a problem that takes 2 days to fix coming a year away - they do not care until the application crashes because of it. Office politics sucks.
We need better chatbots to fix the bugs from the current chatbots that fixed the bugs from the previous chatbots when they fixed the bugs from the previous generation of chatbots that….. Just give Sam Altman more and more of your money and he’ll make a more advanced chatbot to fix the chatbot he sold you that broke everything. You don’t even need to own a computer, just install an app on your phone to do it all. It doesn’t matter that regular people have been completely priced out of personal computing when GPT is just gonna do all the computing anymore anyway. Clearly a sustainable way forward for the industry.
>>Starting a new project once felt insurmountable. Now, it feels realistic again. Honestly, this does not give me confidence in anything else you said. If you can't spin up a new project on your own in a few minutes, you may not be equipped to deal with or debug whatever AI spins up for you. >>When AI generates code, I know when it’s good and when it’s not. I’v seen the good and the bad, and I can iterate from there. Even with refinement and back-and-forth prompting, I’m easily 10x more productive Minus a baseline, it's hard to tell what this means. 10x nothing is nothing. How am I supposed to know what 1x is for you, is there a 1x site I can look at to understand what 10x would mean? My overall feeling prior to reading this was "I should hire this guy", and after reading it my overwhelming thought was "eat a dick, you sociopathic self-aggrandizing tool." Moreover, if you have skill which you feel is augmented by these tools, then you may want to lean more heavily on that skill now if you think that the tool itself makes everyone capable of writing the same amazing code you do. Because it sounds like you will be unemployed soon if not already, as a casualty of the nonsense engine you're blogging about and touting.
> Clicks, expecting some new spec or framework that actually made web dev fun again > Looks inside > "AI has entered the chat" What did I even expect. I wonder how many clickbait posts of this type are gonna make the HN front page.