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The AI Vampire

steve-yegge.medium.com

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Re: The AI Vampire

#21

Post by TomasBM »

We're certainly in the middle of a whirlwind of progress. Unfortunately, as AI capabilities increase, so do our expectations.

Suddenly, it's no longer enough to slap something together and call it a project. The better version with more features is just one prompt away. And if you're just a relay for prompts, why not add an agent or two?

I think there won't be a future where the world adapts to a 4-hour day. If your boss or customer also sees you as a relay for prompts, they'll slowly cut you out of the loop, or reduce the amount they pay you. If you instead want to maintain some moat, or build your own money-maker, your working hours will creep up again.

In this environment, I don't see this working out financially for most people. We need to decide which future we want:

1. the one where people can survive (and thrive) without stable employment;

2. the one where we stop automating in favor of stable employment; or

3. the one where only those who keep up stay afloat.

Re: The AI Vampire

#22

Post by Bishonen88 »

fileeditview wrote: post #16

All this praise for AI.. I honestly don't get it. I have used Opus 4.5 for work and private projects. My experience is that all of the AIs struggle when the project grows. They always find some kind of local minimum where they cannot get out of but tell you this time their solution will work.. but it doesn't. They waste my time with this behaviour enormously. In the end I always have to do it myself. Maybe when AIs a…

At what point does the project outgrow the AI in your experience? I have a 70k LOC backend/frontend/database/docker app that Claude still mostly one shots most features/tasks I throw at it. Perhaps, it's not as good remembering all the intertwined side-effects between functionalities/ui's and I have to let it know "in the calendar view, we must hide it as well", but that takes little time/effort.

Does it break down at some point to the extent that it simply does not finish tasks? Honest question as I saw this sentiment stated previously and assumed that sooner or later I'll face it myself but so far I didn't.

Re: The AI Vampire

#23

Post by strstr »

Bishonen88 wrote: post #20

Some interesting parts in the text. Some not so interesting ones. The author seems to be thinking that he's a big deal it seems, though - a month ago, I did not know who he is. My work environment has never heard of him (SDE at FAANG). Maybe I'm an outlier and he indeed influences the whole expectation management at companies with his writing, or maybe the success (?) of gastown got to him and he thinks he's bigger t…

Popular blogger from roughly a decade ago. His rants were frequently cited early in my career. I think he’s fallen off in popularity substantially since.

Re: The AI Vampire

#24

Post by fhd2 »

fileeditview wrote: post #16

All this praise for AI.. I honestly don't get it. I have used Opus 4.5 for work and private projects. My experience is that all of the AIs struggle when the project grows. They always find some kind of local minimum where they cannot get out of but tell you this time their solution will work.. but it doesn't. They waste my time with this behaviour enormously. In the end I always have to do it myself. Maybe when AIs a…

I think most of us - if not _all_ of us - don't know how to use these things well yet. And that's OK. It's an entirely new paradigm. We've honed our skills and intuition based on humans building software. Humans make mistakes, sure, but humans have a degree and style of learning and failure patterns we are very familiar with. Humans understand the systems they build to a high degree, this knowledge helps them predict outcomes, and even helps them achieve the goals of their organisation _outside_ writing software.

I kinda keep saying this, but in my experience:

1. You trade the time you'd take to understand the system for time spent testing it.

2. You trade the time you'd take to think about simplifying the system (so you have less code to type) into execution (so you build more in less time).

I really don't know if these are _good_ tradeoffs yet, but it's what I observe. I think it'll take a few years until we truly understand the net effects. The feedback cycles for decisions in software development and business can be really long, several years.

I think the net effects will be positive, not negative. I also think they won't be 10x. But that's just me believing stuff, and it is relatively pointless to argue about beliefs.

Re: The AI Vampire

#27

Post by epicureanideal »

rvz wrote: post #11

> But if you haven’t used specifically Opus 4.5/4.6 with specifically Claude Code for at least an hour, then you’re in for a real shock. Because all your complaining about AI not being useful for real-world tasks is obsolete. AI coding hit an event horizon on November 24th, 2025. It’s the real deal. Yeah, it is over for several roles, especially frontend web development given Opus 4.6 is able to one shot your React f…

> Yeah, it is over for several roles, especially frontend web development

Only if the front end was super simple in the first place, IMO. And also only for the v1, which is still useful, whereas for ongoing development I think AI leads people down a path of tools that cost more to maintain and build on.

It may be that AI leads to framework and architecture choices best suited to AI, with great results up front, and then all the same challenges and costs of quick and dirty development by a human. Except 10x faster so, by the time anyone in management realizes the mess they’re in, and the cost/benefit ratio tilts negative even in the short run as opposed to the obvious to engineers long term, there’s going to be so much more code in that bad style that it’s 10x more expensive for expert humans to fix it.

Re: The AI Vampire

#28

Post by nhinck3 »

> Let’s start with the root cause, which is that AI does actually make you more 10x productive, once you learn how.

> But hey, don’t take it from me. Take it from… the Copilot people. According to The Verge and a bunch of other reputable news sources, Microsoft is openly encouraging their employees to use multiple tools, and as a result, Claude Code has rapidly become dominant across engineering at Microsoft.

And what wonders they've achieved with it! Truly innovative enhancements to notepad being witnessed right now! The inability to shut down your computer! I can finally glimpse the 10x productivity I've been missing out on!

Re: The AI Vampire

#29

Post by augment_me »

dwedge wrote: post #13

Every time I say I don't see the productivity boost from AI, people always say I'm using the wrong tool, or the wrong model. I use Claude with Sonnet, Zed with either Claude Sonnet 4 or Opus 4.6, Gemini, and ChatGPT 5.2. I use these tools daily and I just don't see it. The vampire in the room, for me, seems to be feeling like I'm the only person in the room that doesn't believe the hype. Or should I say, being in roo…

I am with you on this, and you can't win, because as soon as you voice this opinion you get overwhelmed with "you dont have the sauce/prompt" opinions which hold an inherent fallacy because they assume you are solving the same problems as them.

I work in GPU programming, so there is no way in hell that JavaScript tools and database wrapper tasks can be on equal terms with generating for example Blackwell tcgen05 warp-scheduled kernels.

Re: The AI Vampire

#30

Post by amoss »

Nobody wants to admit that we are living through this: https://xkcd.com/1319/

But at scale. Yegge gets close to it in this blog (which actually made me lol, good to see that he is back on form), but shies away from it.

If AI is producing a real productivity boom then we should be seeing a flood of high-quality non-AI related software. If building and shipping software is now easier and faster then all of the software that we have that doesn't quite work right should be displaced by high quality successors. It should be happening right now.

So where is it? Why is all this velocity going into tooling around AI instead? Face it, an entire industry has fallen into the trap of building the automation instead of the product they were trying to automate the production of.

Where is the new high quality C compiler that actually compiles the linux kernel to a measurably higher quality than gcc? If AI is really increasing productivity shouldn't we have that instead of a press-oriented hype flop?

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