I’m convinced much of this is all noise - people seem to be focusing on the wrong unit of analysis. Producing software and lots of it has never been a problem - coming up with the right projects and producing a vertically differentiated product to what already exists is.
That's true.
The noise is being generated by people who are directly or indirectly incentivized to talk about it.
> coming up with the right projects and producing a vertically differentiated product to what already exists is.
Agreed but not all engineers are involved with this aspect of the business and the concern applies to them.
I feel exactly like Karpathy here. I have some work to do, and I know exactly what I need to do, and I'm able to explain it to AI, and the AI seems to understand me (I'm lately using Opus 4.5). I wrote down a roadmap, it should take me a few weeks of coding. It feels like with a proper workflow with AI agents, this work should be doable in one or two days. Yet, I know by now that it's not going to be nearly that fast…
“We just both feel this sense of possibility, and the fact that we can't make AI help us more is frustrating” The mirage is alluring.
The real mirage is the utility of median developers
Does any of you bother the fact that now you have to pay money in order to do your job? I mean AI model subscriptions. Somehow it feels wrong for me to pay for tools that are trying to replace me.
If indeed he doesn't have the heart for basic honesty then why should anyone listen to him about anything? This is not a high bar. This is not some impossible moral standard to be held to. This really is an easy one.
Being honest about self-driving AI gets you sued by the richest guy on earth.
Everything has a cost. Fear of doing the right thing isn't worth it.
"I've never felt this much behind as a programmer. The profession is being dramatically refactored as the bits contributed by the programmer are increasingly sparse and between. I have a sense that I could be 10X more powerful if I just properly string together what has become available over the last ~year and a failure to claim the boost feels decidedly like skill issue. There's a new programmable layer of abstraction to master (in addition to the usual layers below) involving agents, subagents, their prompts, contexts, memory, modes, permissions, tools, plugins, skills, hooks, MCP, LSP, slash commands, workflows, IDE integrations, and a need to build an all-encompassing mental model for strengths and pitfalls of fundamentally stochastic, fallible, unintelligible and changing entities suddenly intermingled with what used to be good old fashioned engineering. Clearly some powerful alien tool was handed around except it comes with no manual and everyone has to figure out how to hold it and operate it, while the resulting magnitude 9 earthquake is rocking the profession. Roll up your sleeves to not fall behind."
As an Opus user, I genuinely don’t understand how someone can work for weeks or months without regularly opening an IDE. The output almost always fails.
I repeatedly rewrite prompts, restate the same constraints, and write detailed acceptance criteria, yet still end up with broken or non-functional code.its very frustrating to say the least Yesterday alone I spent about $200 on generations that now require significant manual rewrites just to make them work.
At that point, the gains are questionable. My biggest success is having the model take over the first Design in my app and I take it from there, but those hundred lines if not thousand lines of code it generates are so Messi, it's insanely painful to refactor the mess afterwards