Thanks for articulating this position. I disagree with it, but it is similar to the position I held in late 2024. But as antirez says in TFA, things changed in 2025, and so I changed my mind ("the facts change, I change my opinions"...). LLMs and coding agents got very good about 6 months ago and myself and a lot of other seasoned engineers I respect finally starting using them seriously.
For what it's worth:
* I agree with you that LLMs probably aren't a path to AGI.
* I would add that I think we're in a big investment bubble that is going to pop,
which will create a huge mess and perhaps a recession.
* I am very concerned about the effects of LLMs in wider society.
* I'm sad about the reduced prospects for talented new CS grads and other entry-level engineers in this world, although sometimes AI is just used as an excuse to paper over macroeconomic reasons for not hiring, like the end of ZIRP.
* I even agree with you that LLMs will lead to some maintenance nightmares in the industry. They amplify engineers' ability to produce code, and there a lot of bad engineers out there, as we all know: plenty of cowboys/cowgirls who will ship as much slop as they can get away with. They shipped unmaintainable mess before, they will ship three times as much now. I think we need to be very careful.
But, if you are an experienced engineer who is willing to be disciplined and careful with your AI tools, they can absolutely be a benefit to your workflow. It's not easy: you have to move up and down a ladder of how much you rely on the tool, from true vide coding for throwaway use-once helper scripts for some dev or admin task with a verifiable answer, all the way up to hand-crafting critical business logic and only using the agent to review it and to try and break your implementation.
You may still be right that they will create a lot of problems for the industry. I think the ideal situation for using AI coding agents is at a small startup where all the devs are top-notch, have many years of experience, care about their craft, and hold each other to a high standard. Very very few workplaces are that. But some are, and they will reap big benefits. Other places may indeed drown in slop, if they have a critical mass of bad engineers hammering on the AI button and no guard-rails to stop them.
This topic arouses strong reactions: in another thread, someone accused me of "magical thinking" and "AI-induced psychosis" for claiming precisely what TFA says in the first paragraph: that LLMs in 2025 aren't the stochastic parrots of 2023. And I thought I held a pretty middle of the road position on all this: I detest AI hype and I try to acknowledge the downsides as well as the benefits. I think we all need to move past the hype and the dug-in AI hate and take these tools seriously, so we can identify the serious questions amidst the noise.