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i'd bet that above some number there will be contradictions. Things that apply to different semantic contexts, but look same on syntax level (and maybe with various levels of "syntax" and "semantic"). And debugging those is going to be nightmare - same as debugging requirements spec / verification of that
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Architects went from drawing everything on paper, to using CAD products over a generation. That's a lot of years! They're still called architects. Our tooling just had a refresh in less than 3 years and it leaves heads spinning. People are confused, fighting for or against it. Torn even between 2025 to 2026. I know I was. People need a way to describe it from 'agentic coding' to 'vibe coding' to 'modern AI assisted s…
"When was the last time you reviewed the machine code produced by a compiler?" Compilers will produce working output given working input literally 100% of my time in my career. I've never personally found a compiler bug. Meanwhile AI can't be trusted to give me a recipe for potato soup. That is to say, I would under no circumstances blindly follow the output of an LLM I asked to make soup. While I have, every day of…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Architects went from drawing everything on paper, to using CAD products over a generation. That's a lot of years! They're still called architects. Our tooling just had a refresh in less than 3 years and it leaves heads spinning. People are confused, fighting for or against it. Torn even between 2025 to 2026. I know I was. People need a way to describe it from 'agentic coding' to 'vibe coding' to 'modern AI assisted s…
It's not about the tooling it's about the reasoning. An architect copy pasting existing blueprints is still in charge and has to decide what the copy paste and where. Same as programmer slapping a bunch of code together, plumbing libraries or writing fresh code. They are the ones who drive the logical reasoning and the building process. The ai tooling reverses this where the thinking is outsourced to the machine and…
I find it a bit rare that this is the case though. Usually I have to carefully review what it's doing and guide it. Either by specific suggestions, or by specific tests, etc. I treat it as a "code writer" that doesn't necessarily understand the big picture. So I expect it to fuck up, and correcting it feels far less frustrating if you consider it a tool you are driving rather than letting it drive you. It's great when it gets things right but even then it's you that is confirming this.
> Break down sessions into separate clear, actionable tasks. Don't try to "draw the owl" in one mega session. This is the key one I think. At one extreme you can tell an agent "write a for loop that iterates over the variable `numbers` and computes the sum" and they'll do this successfully, but the scope is so small there's not much point in using an LLM. On the other extreme you can tell an agent "make me an app tha…
> Break down sessions into separate clear, actionable tasks. What this misses, of course, is that you can just have the agent do this too. Agent's are great at making project plans, especially if you give them a template to follow.
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It's not about the tooling it's about the reasoning. An architect copy pasting existing blueprints is still in charge and has to decide what the copy paste and where. Same as programmer slapping a bunch of code together, plumbing libraries or writing fresh code. They are the ones who drive the logical reasoning and the building process. The ai tooling reverses this where the thinking is outsourced to the machine and…
> The ai tooling reverses this where the thinking is outsourced to the machine and the user is borderline nothing more than a spectator, an observer and a rubber stamp on top. I find it a bit rare that this is the case though. Usually I have to carefully review what it's doing and guide it. Either by specific suggestions, or by specific tests, etc. I treat it as a "code writer" that doesn't necessarily understand the…
This is such a lovely balanced thoughtful refreshingly hype-free post to read. 2025 really was the year when things shifted and many first-rate developers (often previously AI skeptics, as Mitchell was) found the tools had actually got good enough that they could incorporate AI agents into their workflows. It's a shame that AI coding tools have become such a polarizing issue among developers. I understand the reasons…
If the author is here, please could you also confirm you’ve never been paid by any AI company, marketing representative, community programme, in any shape or form?
I don't think you appreciate how un-bribeable this particular author is, and I don't just mean in a moral sense.
For those of working on large proprietary, in fringe languages as well, what can we do? Upload all the source code to the cloud model? I am really wary of giving it a million lines of code it’s never seen.
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"When was the last time you reviewed the machine code produced by a compiler?" Compilers will produce working output given working input literally 100% of my time in my career. I've never personally found a compiler bug. Meanwhile AI can't be trusted to give me a recipe for potato soup. That is to say, I would under no circumstances blindly follow the output of an LLM I asked to make soup. While I have, every day of…
Everything more complex than a hello-world has bugs. Compiler bugs are uncommon, but not that uncommon. (I must have debugged a few ICEs in my career, but luckily have had more skilled people to rely on when code generation itself was wrong.) Compilers aren't even that bad. The stack goes much deeper and during your career you may be (un)lucky enough to find yourself far below compilers: https://bostik.iki.fi/aivoitu…
I've also used a logic analyzer to debug communications protocols quite a few times in my career, and I've grown to rather like that sort of work, tedious as it may be.
Just this week I built a VFS using FUSE and managed to kernel panic my Mac a half-dozen times. Very fun debugging times.