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Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance
441–450 of 575 posts
Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance
#442Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's like a tool that has caused a fan out of both good and bad outcomes. Good: you can refactor your codebase at will, throw out legacy cruft by the megabyte, improve build/CI time, and simplify ruthlessly. Not to mention kick out new features in simple and consistent ways that align with what a user actually wants. Or you could add megabytes of vibe coded crap, solutions that add a ton of mass but don't actually so…
> My hope is that we'll see a number of companies collapse as they scale - with basically no hope of rescue If you worked in SV like I did from 2010-2020 you know that the exact opposite of that will happen. I saw hundreds of companies successfully scale out of their garbage stack such as Facebook and PHP. The only thing that matters is the problem you’re solving and the quality of the code is irrelevant.
They didn't succeed per-se, they rode a gigantic wave of free money and barely avoided catastrophe.
I think much of what we see there is really heroic efforts: subsystems get swapped out with things that suck less, PHP gets a new optimized runtime, etc. Basically - unsung people do the hard work that rights the ship, meanwhile 10x more people are adding tons of crap and it barely balances out.
Now that 10x is more like 1000x - and if we don't use these tools responsibly, I think we'll see the costs outweigh any kind of benefit.
Or I could be completely wrong. Worse might actually be better. People can vibe up a new replacement thing when the original thing becomes unmaintainable. That feels wrong/gross to me, but maybe I'm just old fashioned (like the old folks from Inmos/Symbolics/Transmeta were).
Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance
#443My experience is that AI has significantly boosted the value of a quality code-base. A good codebase essentially codes itself.
There are project I've built from scratch that I would feel confident to hand off to a bunch of non-technical vibe coders and I know they would be productive and the product would likely be secure; because the existing codebase already exhibits all the patterns and principles that are required for that kind of project.
It would probably slowly degrade over time if a lot of vibe-coded logic is added on top but I think they could get very far feature-wise whilst keeping the software reliable.
But even though the value of such codebase has increased, people haven't adapted to this new reality. People are generally not good at telling what is good code. Because we don't actually have consensus on a definition. My definition is that good code is code that is easy to extend and maintain.
If implementing a feature requires a huge amount of tokens, then there's a good chance the codebase is not great.
I've worked on a codebase where a small feature requires might require 3k tokens, but on a different codebase, a feature of similar complexity would require 30k tokens minimum... And it's not about the size of the project; it's more about how the logic is divided and the architecture. And importantly; it's not a one-off; it's a clear observable, repeatable pattern.
Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance
#444Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's like a tool that has caused a fan out of both good and bad outcomes. Good: you can refactor your codebase at will, throw out legacy cruft by the megabyte, improve build/CI time, and simplify ruthlessly. Not to mention kick out new features in simple and consistent ways that align with what a user actually wants. Or you could add megabytes of vibe coded crap, solutions that add a ton of mass but don't actually so…
> My hope is that we'll see a number of companies collapse as they scale - with basically no hope of rescue If you worked in SV like I did from 2010-2020 you know that the exact opposite of that will happen. I saw hundreds of companies successfully scale out of their garbage stack such as Facebook and PHP. The only thing that matters is the problem you’re solving and the quality of the code is irrelevant.
Scaling means something different in this context IMO. It's not whether your DB can go from serving 100 to 10000 users, it's whether your B2B app can serve 100 to 10000 different real world customers without starting to fall apart. While it becomes an unintelligible 40000 line "if else" tree that breaks in a new way every time you open a ticket with your agent to Vibe Jira a fix (but forget to specify 1 out of the hundreds of niche constraints that someone doing the job likely knows from experience). You then ask it to reimplement cleanly, but it basically reimplements the broken mess of business logic you're trying to escape since the current codebase is the only reliable source of truth.
Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance
#445I see a large emphasis placed on headless agentic/vibe coding, what I don't see people talking about is how great guided coding is. I have over a 15 YoE writing software and guided coding sessions - that is, using an editor like Zed or VSCode with an LLM integrated, writing code how you normally would but using a flash model to prompt away the annoying parts and/or plan - is as productive as vibe coding, produces sig…
This is EXACTLY how I am working with these tools, you summarized everything about why I use this approach perfectly. Zed + OpenCode + Mimo/GLM/Kimi models are incredible. I haven't touched a "frontier model" for months.
I really treat them as "delegation layer". They're systems that sit right alongside your stack, and at this point, at every level in it, like a connective tissue that intersects at all points. I can delegate a spec, a function, a file, a whole feature set, an app, a debugging loop, etc.. My day-to-day isn't all that different, it's just like having the "Ship's Computer" that I can ping anytime I need something. I'm enjoying the benefits that a smart data processing pattern interpolator provides, but I'm not giving up any personal control or agency. My goal isn't to go faster, nor is it to avoid coding, because coding isn't drudgery or below us just because we have new code generation tools.
Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance
#446This article _perfectly_ summarizes what I mean when I say that AI is "f** you, got mine" technology. Dunning-Kruger at scale, basically.
Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance
#447100% We're already seeing this at the enterprise level. Companies have dictates from leadership that "if you're writing code manually, you're doing it wrong." Okay, that kind of works for a while. We are indeed producing a shit-ton of code, but the reality is that engineers are pumping out code faster than the humans can understand and (honestly) review it. That sounds great until you realize that "hey Claude, read t…
> That sounds great until you realize that "hey Claude, read this Jira ticket and implement the feature in this code base" isn't really worth $200K/year. Nor even €50k/year. Two things are true: 1) The coding part of my career is over. LLMs are capable of doing everything I've ever been paid to *write*. 2) My actual job also included non-coding work: Does this attempted solution even work at all? Is this solving the…
> 1) The coding part of my career is over. LLMs are capable of doing everything I've ever been paid to write.
Horrible if you got into this industry because you loved to code.
Amazing if you only ever saw the code as a means to an end.
Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance
#448Earlier quoted context omitted.
This analogy breaks down because computers aren't going away unlike horse drawn carriages or sailing vessels. Computers aren't being replaced by something. It's that fewer people will understand how they work while the efficiency and reach of computers extends into areas of life previously unreachable due to the scale of having humans build it or the refusal of humans. I could wax philosophical about what that leads…
Boats didn't go away with the demise sailing as a commercially viable mode of transport.
>Boats didn't go away with the demise sailing as a commercially viable mode of transport.
No, but there's now more people who know how to engineer reliable ships then ever before.
In 10 years, how many people will still understand the codebases they work on?
Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance
#449Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance
#450So far I think I have learned far more from LLMs than I've lost to them. I forget some syntax, definitely. But I now reach for a much wider range of tools that I have become familiar with because of LLMs. So, partly agree, partly disagree.
Yeah, I have to say some of this deskilling argument sounds like Socrates complaining about the invention of writing ruining people's ability to truly own the text. I really don't mourn my lost assembly skills or my lost C skills. And I'm not missing the details of whatever web framework du jour my Claude is vibing for me on my extremely useful dataviz internal tools; and I have learned how to rein the agents in to n…
It's not just speculation, we have data from multiple studies at this point that suggest leaning on AI for productivity leads to skill depreciation across domain.