371–380 of 424 posts
This article is a great example of how the human is struggling to extrapolate what happens next. There won't be any humans anywhere near this part of the tech stack, just like no one building a SAAS writes assembly code; or has to put together their own server cluster a datacenter (remember pre-cloud?) for their company anymore. He's dead Jim. No one is telling anyone to ship the ML code without any testing. Human co…
Author here - I agree and have written about this before, though focusing a bit more on how far down the stack they might go, rather than up: https://chrisloy.dev/post/2025/03/23/will-ai-replace-softwar... Article being discussed in this thread isn't intended to be a luddite rejection of AI. It's just a mistake I see people keep making (and have made myself) and some thoughts on how to avoid it with the tools we have…
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Most of us do nothing but remix the past solutions. Since we don't know what else might already exist in the world without digging very deep, we fool ourselves into thinking that we do something very original and unique.
lol, this is the entire reason LLMs work so well. The bar is so low and most folks don't seem to realize it.
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Reminds me of critisms of python decades ago. that you wouldn't understand what the "real code" was doing since you were using a scripting language. But then over the years it showed tremendous value and many unicorns were built by focusing on higher level details and not lower level code
That's not the same thing. LLMs don't just obscure low-level technical implementation details like Python does, they also obscure your business logic and many of its edge cases. Letting a Python interpreter manage your memory is one thing because it's usually irrelevant, but you can't say the same thing about business logic. Encoding those precise rules and considering all of the gnarly real-world edge cases is what…
The best humans on the planet constantly fail at this so the assumption is that some post LLM AGI will do this?
I would love to see an anti-AI take that doesn't hinge on the idea that technology forces people to be lazy/careless/thoughtless. The plan-build-test-reflect loop is equally important when using an LLM to generate code, as anyone who's seriously used the tech knows: if you yolo your way through a build without thought, it will collapse in on itself quickly. But if you DO apply that loop, you get to spend much more ti…
A dev that spends an undue amount of time fiddling with knobs and configs probably sucks. Their mind isn't on the problem that needs to be solved.
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Reminds me of critisms of python decades ago. that you wouldn't understand what the "real code" was doing since you were using a scripting language. But then over the years it showed tremendous value and many unicorns were built by focusing on higher level details and not lower level code
But working with AI isn’t really a higher level of abstraction. It’s a completely different process. I’m not hating on it, I love LLMs and use em constantly, but it doesn’t go assembly > C > python > LLMs
At that point yeah, a project manager would be able to build everything.
We are not there.
I do see different behavior whether planning or exploration comes first though.
Every time I read stuff like this I honestly wonder if the author is using the same tools I am. I can have Claude Code bang out everything from boilerplate to a working prototype to a complex algorithm embedded in a very complex and confusing code base. It’s not correct 100% of the time but it’s pretty damn close. And often times it comes up with algorithms I would have never thought of initially. These things are at…
The difficulty is we skeptics have read claims like yours tens of times, and our response is always, "please share a repo built this way and an example of your prompts," and I at least have never seen anyone do so. I'd love for what you say to be possible. Comments like yours often cause me to take another crack at agentic workflows. I'm disappointed every time.
I don't view LLMs as ways of foregoing the responsibility of writing code and rather see it as my "really smart keyboard". With enough context priming and a well structured codebase I no longer need to spend time writing each line of code and can have Claude do it in a fraction of the time.
I need to start a blog sooner rather than later as I don't agree with the article nor the naysayers. Maybe a year ago I'd say that it's not possible to code with LLM agents. However ever since Cursor's release, LLMs have completely changed my workflow.
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That's not the same thing. LLMs don't just obscure low-level technical implementation details like Python does, they also obscure your business logic and many of its edge cases. Letting a Python interpreter manage your memory is one thing because it's usually irrelevant, but you can't say the same thing about business logic. Encoding those precise rules and considering all of the gnarly real-world edge cases is what…
>There are no "higher level details" in software development, those are in the domain of different jobs like project managers or analysts. Once AI can reliably translate fuzzy natural language into precise and accurate code, software development will simply die as a profession. Our jobs won't morph into something different - this is our job. I'm the non-software type of Engineer. I've always kind of viewed code as a…