The Death of the Stubborn Developer

Amazing, a company with a vested interest in our AI future of software development is bullish on the use of AI in software development.

> Many of those graph nodes are leaf-node tasks, like “write an auth library” or “modernize these unit tests”. They tend to be fairly self-contained. We often give these leaf node tasks to junior developers because the scope is small.

You know, the companies that hand "write an auth library" to their junior developers will, I'm sure, do just fine by having an LLM do it for them. No worse than their normal output, absolutely.

I'm sure a future where this is a good idea is coming, but I've seen nothing to persuade me that this is where we are now. IMO they're glorified intellisense - useful, but if you trust them blindly they'll take you where you deserve to go.

Does anyone have any hard data (not anecdotes/opinions) to suggest I'm wrong on this?

This is spot on. Fully agree with this point:

> Chat-oriented programming is hard, but many folks believe that autonomous agents are right around the corner, and that they will handle all that heavy lifting for you. You’ll just need to write short prompts and spot-check the results, with much less toil involved. [...] I think those people are smoking some serious crack. But many are well-funded, so they’re going to get a chance to give it the old college try, burning investor money like jet fuel along the way.

I think the time-horizon presented by the author is about right. Like they mention, sure, we could see a magical breakthrough soon, but it's not likely. I'd argue that we won't see 100% autonomy on the code side in our lifetime (and I use an LLM every day) based on current evidence. The models are good, but they're several iterations away from evening being close to autopilot.

In the event that we do get 100% autonomy, a whole lot more hell is going to break loose than what's happening with CHOP (as the author refers to it).

I think the biggest nightmare that lies ahead is the point in the metaphorical chart where new/junior programmers "learn" by getting some result that passes the sniff test and assume it's correct (i.e., they don't learn the gritty details you get from experience, just surface level knowledge).

Eventually, we'll hit a point where the majority of programmers learn this way, which means technological progress will come to a halt first, and second, when serious bugs inevitably creep up, there will be a relatively small pool—if not non-existent—of people who can fix it (and will charge handsomely to do so).

Sadly, I think the only real solution is to just play it by ear. But the advice in the article is sound: if you're not learning/using this stuff now, you're falling behind. If you're a junior trying to level up, don't rely on your job or co-workers to teach you. Start building stuff (in whatever area you're trying to work in) in your spare time and consider it an investment in your future.

Is the author suggesting that current AI tools are capable of:

> “write an auth library” or “modernize these unit tests” ?

If so, I'm genuinely interested to know what tools people are using that can do this.

Our experience is that AI will perform well if given a specific and well-bounded sub-task ("parse the JWT token and return a collection of claims" or "re-write this test using framework x" to extend the author's examples), but would still need a competent developer (junior or otherwise) to fit the pieces together and act as quality control.

I think he's right, and I hate it.

I'm also depressed by his endgame, which he glosses over - LLMs prevent the gradual buildup of expertise through hard, repeated, work.

All our handwriting (and hell, even our grammar) is basically trash, because who can be arsed putting in the time to write beautifully with a pen when you can just fling out an email?

LLMs will cause an analogous decline in code and coders - every codebase a cesspit of messy mediocrity in outputs, authors, and professional culture.

Fuck the future, man.

> In my blog post I called this phenomenon Chat-Oriented Programming, CHOP for short (or just chop). Chop isn’t just the future, it’s the present. And if you’re not using it, you’re starting to fall behind the ones who are.

> I’m going to stop qualifying this assertion as my opinion, because at this point it is entering into well-established fact territory.

Ok one of these guys, moving on...