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The AI Vampire

steve-yegge.medium.com

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Re: The AI Vampire

#61

Post by amelius »

augment_me wrote: post #39
WithinReason wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience LLMs are useless for GPU compute code, just not enough in the training set.

Yeah, the argument here is that once you say this, people will say "you just dont know how to prompt, i pass the PTX docs together with NSight output and my kernel into my agent and run an evaluation harness and beat cuBLAS". And then it turns out that they are making a GEMM on Ampere/Hopper which is an in-distribution problem for the LLMs. It's the idea/mindset that since you are working on something where the tool…

Now please get back to coding GPU stuff so we can train our models on your code. Thank you.

Re: The AI Vampire

#62

Post by dwedge »

Davidzheng wrote: post #35
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 don't understand what including the time of "4 years" does for your arguments here. I don't think anyone is arguing that the usefulness of these AIs for real projects started at GPT 3.5/4. Do you think the capabilities of current AIs are approximately the same as GPT 3.5/4 4 years ago (actually I think SOTA 4 years ago today might have been LaMDA... as GPT 3.5 wasn't out yet)?

> I don't think anyone is arguing that the usefulness of these AIs for real projects started at GPT 3.5/4

Only not in retrospect. But the arguments about "if you're not using AI you're being left behind" did not depend on how people in 2026 felt about those tools retrospectively. Cursor is 3 years old and ok 4 years might be an exaggeration but I've definitely been seeing these arguments for 2-3 years.

Re: The AI Vampire

#63

Post by sublinear »

Scaevolus wrote: post #43
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…

Many engineers get paid a lot of money to write low-complexity code gluing things together and tweaking features according to customer requirements. When the difficulty of a task is neatly encompassed in a 200 word ticket and the implementation lacks much engineering challenge, AI can pretty reliably write the code-- mediocre code for mediocre challenges. A huge fraction of the software economy runs on CRUD and some…

Complexity is not where the value to the business comes from. In fact, it's usually the opposite. Nobody wants to maintain slop, and whenever you dismiss simplicity you ignore all the heroic hard work done by those at the lower level of indirection. This is what politics looks like when it finally places its dirty hands on the tech industry, and it's probably been a long time coming.

As annoying as that is, we should celebrate a little that the people who understand all this most deeply are gaining real power now.

Yes, AI can write code (poorly), but the AI hype is now becoming pure hate against the people who sit in meetings quietly gathering their thoughts and distilling it down to the simple and almost poetic solutions nobody else but those who do the heads down work actually care about.

> A huge fraction of the software economy runs on CRUD and some business logic.

You vastly underestimate the meaning of CRUD applied in such a direct manner. You're right in some sense that "we have the technology", but we've had this technology for a very long time now. The business logic is pure gold. You dismiss this not realizing how many other thriving and well established industries operate doing simple things applied precisely.

Some Ella Fitzgerald for you: https://youtube.com/watch?v=tq572nNpZcw

Re: The AI Vampire

#64

Post by insin »

hebrides wrote: post #44

>With a 10x boost, if you give an engineer Claude Code, then once they’re fluent, their work stream will produce nine additional engineers’ worth of value. I keep hearing about this 10x productivity, but where is it materializing? Most developers at my company use Claude Code, but we don't seem to be shipping new features at ten times the rate. In fact, tickets still take roughly the same amount of time to complete.

10x is doing a year's work in ~5 weeks

No shot

I'm seeing that some tickets are "finished" (i.e. ready for PR) more quickly, but they end up needing so many changes and to be re-reviewed so many times it takes longer than it ever did because someone is saying yes to the LLM instead of designing software. When it's clear your review comments are just going back into the maw of the LLM, I've given up trying to guide and now just outright suggest actually workable designs (taking more of my time too), and that merely cuts down the number of times it will come back for review again.

Re: The AI Vampire

#65

Post by enraged_camel »

exfalso wrote: post #33
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…

Exact same experience. Here's what I find Claude Code (Opus) useful for: 1. Copy-pasting existing working code with small variations. If the intended variation is bigger then it fails to bring productivity gains, because it's almost universally wrong. 2. Exploring unknown code bases. Previously I had to curse my way through code reading sessions, now I can find information easily. 3. Google Search++, e.g. for decidin…

>> 1. Copy-pasting existing working code with small variations. If the intended variation is bigger then it fails to bring productivity gains, because it's almost universally wrong.

This does not match my experience. At all. I can throw extremely large and complex things at it and it nails them with very high accuracy and precision in most cases.

Here's an example: when Opus 4.5 came out I used it extensively to migrate our database and codebase from a one-Postgres-schema-per-tenant architecture to a single schema architecture. We are talking about eight years worth of database operations over about two dozen interconnected and complex domains. The task spanned migrating data out of 150 database tables for each tenant schema, then validating the integrity at the destination tables, plus refactoring the entire backend codebase (about 250k lines of code), plus all of the test suite. On top of that, there were also API changes that necessitated lots of tweaks to the frontend.

This is a project that would have taken me 4-6 months easily and the extreme tediousness of it would probably have burned me out. With Opus 4.5 I got it done in a couple of weeks, mostly nights and weekends. Over many phases and iterations, it caught, debugged and fixed its own bugs related to the migration and data validation logic that it wrote, all of which I reviewed carefully. We did extensive user testing afterwards and found only one issue, and that was actually a typo that I had made while tweaking something in the API client after Opus was done. No bugs after go-live.

So yeah, when I hear people say things like "it can only handle copy paste with small variations, otherwise it's universally wrong" I'm always flabbergasted.

Re: The AI Vampire

#66

Post by xyzsparetimexyz »

Hammershaft wrote: post #15
iberator wrote: post #8

AI takes jobs faster than it creates new ones. It should be banned in current form. No junior positions available - only those who lasted even have the chance to use them in commercial settings. After layoffs you will get how BAD it is :/ (if you are 35+)

Even as a software developer affected by it, I don't think it should be banned. Productivity improvements are how we get richer in aggregate over the long term, even if those impacted (like you & me) might feel the brunt of transitional pain.

Its how some people will get rich. It won't be how you get rich.

Re: The AI Vampire

#67

Post by xyzsparetimexyz »

AceJohnny2 wrote: post #17
Der_Einzige wrote: post #2

The last time I saw so much blue and orange (see the images) was the era of Battlefield 3/Battlefield 4 box art. I really do miss it tbh. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/6/69/Battlefield_3... https://cdn11.bigcommerce.com/s-yzgoj/images/stencil/1280x12... Downvoted within 1 minute. This website is a trash fire.

> Downvoted within 1 minute. This website is a trash fire. because your comment was completely offtopic.

Its not off topic. The ai art in the blog post is really ugly and detracts from what's being discussed.

Re: The AI Vampire

#68

Post by exitb »

sublinear wrote: post #63
Scaevolus wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many engineers get paid a lot of money to write low-complexity code gluing things together and tweaking features according to customer requirements. When the difficulty of a task is neatly encompassed in a 200 word ticket and the implementation lacks much engineering challenge, AI can pretty reliably write the code-- mediocre code for mediocre challenges. A huge fraction of the software economy runs on CRUD and some…

Complexity is not where the value to the business comes from. In fact, it's usually the opposite. Nobody wants to maintain slop, and whenever you dismiss simplicity you ignore all the heroic hard work done by those at the lower level of indirection. This is what politics looks like when it finally places its dirty hands on the tech industry, and it's probably been a long time coming. As annoying as that is, we should…

That's a false dilemma. If that's what you want, you absolutely can use the AI levers to get more time and less context switching, so you can focus more on the "simple and poetic solutions".

Re: The AI Vampire

#69

Post by MrScruff »

augment_me wrote: post #29
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…

There's going to be a long tail of domain-specific tasks that aren't well served by current models for the foreseeable future, but there's also no question the complexity horizon of the SotA models is increasing over time. I've had decent results recently with non-trivial Cuda/MPS code. Is it great code/finely tuned? Probably not but it delivered on the spec and runs fast enough.

Re: The AI Vampire

#70

Post by crnkofe »

What's with all the AI fear mongering and doomspeak? Feels like people have never been so excited about getting laid off and becoming obsolete. It used to be that workers fought for their rights but maybe decades of software engineering proliferation has dampened that survival instinct. These days feels like OpenAI is paying writers to scare as many people into believing they're no longer needed.

I also find it kind of funny that the only perspective on AI is about being laid off. This says a lot about who's writing all these articles. But beware the cobra effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive . If the AI boom allows a company to lay off a large amount of its engineers the engineers can also simply band together and as-easily become a competitor unburdained by legacy code resulting in profits going down for existing businesses. Alternatively they can simply join the customers of various SaaS businesses and roll their own solution with same net effect.

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