611–620 of 870 posts
I'm hopeful that 2026 will be the year that the biggest adopters are forced to deal with the mass of product they've created that they don't fully understand, and a push for better tooling is the result.
Today's agentic tools are crude from a UX POV from where I am hoping they will end up.
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I've gone years without coding and when I come back to it, it's like riding a bike! In each iteration of my coding career, I have become a better developer, even after a large gap. Now I can "code" during my gap. Were I ever to hand-code again, I'm sure my skills would be there. They don't atrophy, like your ability to ride a bike doesn't atrophy. Yes you may need to warm back up, but all the connections in your brai…
Have you ever learnt a foreign language (say Mongolian, or Danish) and then never spoken it, nor even read anything in it for over 10 years? It is not like riding a bike, it doesn’t just come back like that. You have to actually relearn the language, practice it, and you will suck at it for months. Comprehension comes first (within weeks) but you will be speaking with grammatical errors, mispronunciations, etc. for m…
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It's important to understand that he's talking about a specific set of models that were release around november/december, and that we've hit a kind of inflection point in model capabilities. Specifically Anthropic's Opus 4.5 model. I never paid any attention to different models, because they all felt roughly equal to me. But Opus 4.5 is really and truly different. It's not a qualitative difference, it's more like it…
People have said this about every single model release.
My opinion isn't based on what other people are saying, it's my own experience as a fairly AI-skeptical person. Again, I highly suggest you give it an honest try and decide for yourself.
> I am bracing for 2026 as the year of the slopacolypse across all of github, substack, arxiv, X/instagram, and generally all digital media. 2026 is just when it picks up - it'll get exponentially worse. I think 2026 is the year of Business Analysts who were unable to code. Now CC et all are good enough that they can realize the vision as long as one knows exactly the requirements (software design not that important)…
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Same. This kind of coding feels like it got rid of the building aspect of programming that always felt nice, and it replaced it entirely with business logic concerns, product requirements, code reviews, etc. All the stuff I can generally take or leave. It's like I'm always in a meeting. >If I was intellectually excited about telling something to do this for me, I'd have gotten into management. Exactly this. This is t…
Maybe I don't entirely get it, but what is stopping you to just continue coding?
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There are definitely parallels though. eg you could swap out your compiler for a different one that produces slightly different assembly. Similarly a LLM may implement things differently…but if it works do we care? Probably no more than when you buy software you don’t care precisely what compiler optimisation were used. The precise deterministicness isn’t a key feature
> but if it works so we care? It often doesn't work. That's the point. A calculator works 100% of the time. A LLM might work 95% of the time, or 80%, or 40%, or 99% depending on what you're doing. This is difference and a key feature.
To me that isn’t a show stopper. Much of the real world works like that. We put very unreliable humans behind the wheel of 2 ton cars. So in a way this is perhaps just programmers aligning with the messy real world?
Perhaps a bit like architects can only model things so far eventually you need to build the thing and deal with the surprises and imperfection of dirt
> LLM coding will split up engineers based on those who primarily liked coding and those who primarily liked building. I’ve always said I’m a builder even though I’ve also enjoyed programming (but for an outcome, never for the sake of the code) This perfectly sums up what I’ve been observing between people like me (builders) who are ecstatic about this new world and programmers who talk about the craft of programming…
I’ve always considered myself a “process” person, I would even get hung-up on certain projects because I enjoyed crafting them so much.
LLM’s have taken a bit of that “process” enjoyment from me, but I think have also forced some more “outcome” thinking into my head, which I’m taking as a positive.
This is true to an extent for sure and they will go much longer than most engineers without getting "tired", but I've def seen both sonnet and opus give up multiple times. They've updated code to skip tests they couldn't get to pass, given up on bugs they couldn't track down, etc. I literally had it ask "could we work on something else and come back to this"
I worry about the "brain atrophy" part, as I've felt this too. And not just atrophy, but even moreso I think it's evolving into "complacency". Like there have been multiple times now where I wanted the code to look a certain way, but it kept pulling back to the way it wanted to do things. Like if I had stated certain design goals recently it would adhere to them, but after a few iterations it would forget again and g…
I worry about the "brain atrophy" part, as I've felt this too. And not just atrophy, but even moreso I think it's evolving into "complacency". Like there have been multiple times now where I wanted the code to look a certain way, but it kept pulling back to the way it wanted to do things. Like if I had stated certain design goals recently it would adhere to them, but after a few iterations it would forget again and g…
I ran into a new problem today: "reading atrophy". As in if the LLM doesn't know about it, some devs are basically giving up and not even going to RTFM. I literally had to explain to someone today how something works by...reading through the docs and linking them the docs with screenshots and highlighted paragraphs of text. Still got push back along the lines of "not sure if this will work". It's. Literally. In. The.…
You can have as many extremely detailed and easy to parse gudies, references, etc. there will always be a portion of customers who refuse to read them.
Never could figure out why because they aren't stupid or anything.