Gas Town Decoded

Here’s a professional developer who built a product used across the planet daily saying they built a feature for said product, and then asked AI to build the same feature based on the design doc: the AI succeeded and did the same work in minutes: https://antirez.com/news/158

You could always test this yourself. Draw up a design doc for a problem, and implement it. Then ask an AI to do the same thing. Compare your time.

The insecurity is mind-boggling. So many engineers afraid to touch this stuff for one reason or another.

I pride myself in being an extremely capable engineer who can solve any problem when given the right time and resources.

But now, random unskilled people can do in an afternoon what it might have taken me a week or more to do before. Of course, I know their work might be filled with major security issues, or terrible architectural decisions and hidden tech debt that will eventually grind development to a complete halt.

I can be negative and point out these issues, or I can adopt these tools myself, and have the skilled hand required to keep things on rails. Now what I can do in a week cannot be matched by an unskilled engineer in an afternoon, because we have the same velocity multipliers.

I remember being such a purist in my youth that I didn't even want autocomplete or intellisense, because I feared it would affect my recall or stunt my growth. How far we have come. How I code has changed completely in the last year.

I code 8-20 hours a day, all day. I actively work on several projects at once, flipping between contexts to check results, review code, iterate on design/implementation, hand off new units of work to various agents. It is not a perfect process, I am constantly screaming and pulling my hair out over how stupid and forgetful and stubborn these tools can be sometimes. My output has still dramatically increased, and I have plenty extra time to ensure the quality of the code is secure and good enough.

I've given up on expecting perfection from code I didn't write myself; but what else is new? Any skilled individual who has managed engineers before knows you have to get over this quickly and accept that code from other engineers will not match your standards 100%.

Your role is to develop and enforce guidelines and processes which ensure that any code which hits production has been thoroughly reviewed, made secure and performant. There might be some stupid inline metacomments from the LLM that slip through, but if your processes are tight enough, you can produce much more code with correct interfaces, even if the insides aren't perfect. Even then, targeted refactors are more painless than ever.

Engineers who only know how to code, and at a relatively mediocre level, which I imagine is the majority of engineers now in the field who got into it because of the money, are probably feeling the heat and worried that they won't be employable. I do not share that fear, provided that anyone at all is employable.

When running a business, you'll still need to split the workload, especially as keeping pace with competition becomes an increasingly brutal exercise. The money is still in the industry, and people with money will still find ways to use it to develop an edge.

Even if I looked past the overwrought, self-indulgent Mad Max LARP (and the poor judgment evidenced by the prioritization of world-building minutia while the basic architecture is imploding), the cost of finding those kernels in a monstrosity of this size negates any ROI. 189k lines in four weeks will inevitably surface interesting pattern combinations — that's not merit, that's sample size. You might as well search the Library of Babel; at least the patterns are guaranteed to exist there.

The other problem with that reasoning is that whatever patterns ARE interesting are more likely to be new to AI-assisted coding generally – meaning a cleaner system built for the same use case will surface them without the archaeological dig, just by virtue of its builder having the skill to design it (and crucially, being more interested in designing it than in creating AI drawings of polecats in steampunk-adjacent garb).

I'm also a bit curious about at which point you start considering someone an idiot when they keep making objectively idiotic moves – the whimsical Disneyfied presentation, the "please don't download this" false modesty while keeping the repo public, the inexplicable code growth all come from the same place. They're not separate quirks: they're the same inability to edit, the same need for immediate audience validation, the same substitution of volume and narrative for actual engineering discipline. Someone who thinks "Polecats" and "Guzzoline" are good names for production abstractions is not suddenly going to develop the editorial rigor to scrap a codebase and rebuild.

Which is why it's worth remembering that Yegge's one successful shipped project was Grok, an internal tool used by Google engineers, so Yegge seems to have bought his own hype, missing how much of that project's success was likely subsidized by its user base comprising people skilled enough to route around its limitations.

These days he seems to be building for developers in general, but critically might be missing that actual developers immediately clock the project's ineptitude + Yegge's immature, narcissistic prioritization and peace the fuck out. The end result of this is filtering for the self-described vibe-coder types, people already Dunning-Krugered enough to believe you can prompt your way into a complete system without knowing how to reason about that system in order to guide the AI.

Which, fittingly, is how you end up with users who can't even follow "please don't download this yet".