Something happened to me a few years ago. I used to write code professionally and contribute to open source a lot. I was freelancing on other people's projects and contributing to mature projects so I was doing hard work, mostly at a low level (I mean algorithms, performance fixes, small new features, rather than high level project architecture). I was working on an open source contribution for a few days. Something that I struggled with, but I enjoyed the challenge and learned a lot from it. As it happened someone else submitted a PR fixing the same issue around the same time. I wasn't bothered if mine got picked or not, it happens. But I remember looking at how similar both of our contributions were and feeling like we were using our brains as computers, just crunching algorithms and pumping in knowledge to create some technical code that was (at the time) impossible for a computer to create. This stayed with me for a while and I decided that doing this technical algorithm crunching wasn't the best use of my human brain. I was making myself interchangeable with all the other human (and now AI) code crunchers. I should move on to a higher level, either architectural or management. This was a big deal for me because I did love (and still do) deeply understanding algorithms and mathematics. I was extremely fortunate with timing as it was just around one year before AI coding became mainstream but early enough that it wasn't a factor in this shift. Now an AI could probably churn out a decent version of that algorithm in a few minutes. I did move on to open my own business with my partner and haven't written much code in a few years. And when I do now I appreciate that I can focus on the high level stuff and create something that my business needs in a few hours without exhausting myself on low level algorithm crunching. This isn't meant to put down the enjoyment of writing code for code's sake. I still do appreciate well written code and the craft that goes into it. I'm just documenting my personal shift and noting that enjoyment can be found on both sides.
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.
There's no shortage of parsers in Haskell, but parsing a human language is very different from parsing a programming language. The grammar is much, much more complex, and this means that e.g. simple approaches that adequate error messages don't really work here because failures are non-actionable.
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.
> Over the past two decades, I’ve worked with a lot of talented people: backend developers, frontend developers, marketers, leaders, and more. I can lean on those experiences, fall back on how they did things, and implement their methods with AI. Will that really work? You interacted with the end product, but you don't have the experience and learned lessons that those people had. Are you sure this isn't the LLM reinforcing false confidence? Is the AI providing you with the real thing or a cheap imitation and how can you tell?
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.
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.
You were never able to stop using the techniques you learned, and you were always able to keep up with minimal effort - you didn’t need to learn any frameworks. I’m glad you’re having fun, but you didn’t need AI to overcome some laborious hurdle. The only hurdle that existed was your own laziness.
Agree with this. Like the author, I've been keeping ajour with web development for multiple decades now. If you have deep software knowledge pre-LLM, you are equipped with the intuition and knowledge to judge the output. You can tell the difference between good and bad, if it looks and works the way you want, and you can ask the relevant questions to push the solution to the actual thing that you envisioned in your mind. Without prior software dev experience people may take what the LLM gives them at face value, and that's where the slop comes from imho.
This is probably the best post i've seen about the whole LLM / vibe coding space at least in relation to web dev. Indeed, as the author states, the code / agent often needs some coralling, but if you know all the gotchyas / things to look for, you can focus 100% on the creativity part! Been loving it as well.
100% the opposite. LLMs lack high level creativity, wisdom and taste. Being a generalist is how you build these. For example, there's a common core to music, art, food, writing, etc that you don't see until you've gotten good at 3+ aesthetic fields. There are common patterns in different academic disciplines and activities that can supercharge your priors and help you make better decisions. LLMs can "see" these these connections if explicitly prompted with domains and details, but they don't seem to reason with them in mind or lean on them by default. On the other hand, LLMs are being aggressively RL'd by the top 10% of various fields, so single field expertise by some of the best in the world is 100% baked in and the default.