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Is it all just vapourware?

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Re: Is it all just vapourware?

#91

Post by ethin »

skrebbel wrote: post #36
badlibrarian wrote: post #17

It's August 9, 2026 and if you're a software engineer who hasn't had multiple "holy shit, I can't believe it just did that" moments, it's time to consider a new trade.

I did but it was followed by "holy shit now I gotta review this +3000 -500 LOC PR full of subtly wrong abstractions, needless diversions and incorrect assumptions". People keep repeating your sentiment here but I simply can't follow, are we even on the same planet? Or did everyone switch to just not caring about maintainability and code quality anymore? Or are your work tasks simply so mindnumbingly, stupidly simple…

I've had a similar experience on huge codebases written entirely by an aI. It works for very very specific cases (e.g., Opus 5 has helped me with SIMD optimizations) but I wouldn't trust it to do a 10000 LoC project even with agents just because of the complexity problem and the shear amount of code I have to review. Or I'll have to change a bunch of things because the LLM made assumpts I didn't specify and it didn't ask about (e.g.: I have had to repeatedly tell these models to use std::atomic_flag and not std::atomic for a project I maintain because for some reason I cannot fathom, they love, love using the generic std::atomic template, and they love using std::atomic where an std::atomic_flag would be better). Just little things add up, and before you know it I'm spending more time fixing it's issues than I am making progress.

Re: Is it all just vapourware?

#92

Post by neuralkoi »

AI is good at building "disposable" software. I think this category will grow specially for regular joes.

There's no such thing as a free lunch, and anyone trying to build software without significant guardrails and insights into the process will have to give up control of their codebase.

Ray Myers does a good job of exploring this topic in a recent Software Should Work talk, trying to answer: "Is code for people or AI?" [0]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZgglPK8Rg0

Re: Is it all just vapourware?

#94

Post by andy99 »

pixelesque wrote: post #45
uncivilized wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not everyone is a web developer bub

I had DeepSeek 4 Pro do a very good job yesterday of loop-unrolling and SIMD-ifying (both SSE/AVX and ARM Neon versions) some very old scalar Col3f image processing and resampling/resizing C++ code I hadn't touched in 12 years or so. It also wrote some unit tests that validated the kernel sampling weights, and wrote some Jupyter notebooks to go along with the kernel algorithms as comparisons. It's not just web dev...…

> image processing and resampling/resizing C++ code I hadn't touched in 12 years or so.

So an unimportant, personal project. People seem to extrapolate being able to do something cool into being able to do useful work, which is what this whole discussion is about.

Re: Is it all just vapourware?

#95

Post by 20k »

satvikpendem wrote: post #62
20k wrote: post #39

>If agentic development actually worked the way any of them say it does I think its fascinating just how much of a gap there is between what's being claimed, and the verifiable observable data of the open source world. Major open source projects are by and large starting to ban LLMs now, because the contributions made by LLM users have been universally terrible and unhelpful. There doesn't appear to be a single major…

We have a greenfield project at our company, yes proprietary, now taking us months where previously it'd have taken weeks for even a single feature. We definitely see the (whatever)x performance boost with our own eyes.

Its always been possible to trade long term productivity for short term gains with technical debt. This is why the bar I'm interested in is long term projects, which have proven to have long term success, instead of a small disposable project where the code quality doesn't matter

Re: Is it all just vapourware?

#96

Post by mark242 »

20k wrote: post #82
mark242 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why do only the poor quality LLM code generation users make PRs to open source projects, and never the engineers that know how to really use it correctly? It could be that the engineers who are extremely productive with LLMs are landing PRs that look indistinguishable from good, hand-written PRs.

If that were true, we'd expect to see massively accelerated velocity of open source projects by these engineers. They should be creating new open source projects at a truly astounding rate, with new tooling springing up every day that dwarfs the existing open source space as their productivity completely eclipses traditional development Instead, software is plodding along exactly the same as it did prior to LLM code…

Github's Octoverse report kind of gives you that evidence, no? Pull requests landed in 2025 were up 30% over 2024. This year it's going to be much higher.

Re: Is it all just vapourware?

#97

Post by lubujackson »

skrebbel wrote: post #36
badlibrarian wrote: post #17

It's August 9, 2026 and if you're a software engineer who hasn't had multiple "holy shit, I can't believe it just did that" moments, it's time to consider a new trade.

I did but it was followed by "holy shit now I gotta review this +3000 -500 LOC PR full of subtly wrong abstractions, needless diversions and incorrect assumptions". People keep repeating your sentiment here but I simply can't follow, are we even on the same planet? Or did everyone switch to just not caring about maintainability and code quality anymore? Or are your work tasks simply so mindnumbingly, stupidly simple…

I think to effectively use LLMs in a controlled way, they can help with three things: - Help you pump out boilerplate, or otherwise "obvious" code, that you can review at a glance - Help you gain understanding, either through rapid plan writing/revision or code quality/architectural/security analysis. The gotcha is that it can only help along one axis at a time, or at least can only communicate information sensibly to humans this way - Cross-cutting or fuzzy matching across a codebase. This is the hugest win, like "replace this pattern with the new approach everywhere". This used to be the scariest sort of task, and now it is one of the more stable things LLMs get right.

Where things go off the rail is when you want it to plan AND implement features. The blind spots of LLMs are not where they are for humans and way more work to anticipate. You have to stay on top of the bucking bronco, but you CAN move much faster if you can architect your system so more tasks fall in the "obvious" bucket - that is where the art of engineering still lives. Human understanding remains the goal.

Re: Is it all just vapourware?

#98

Post by pixelesque »

andy99 wrote: post #94
pixelesque wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had DeepSeek 4 Pro do a very good job yesterday of loop-unrolling and SIMD-ifying (both SSE/AVX and ARM Neon versions) some very old scalar Col3f image processing and resampling/resizing C++ code I hadn't touched in 12 years or so. It also wrote some unit tests that validated the kernel sampling weights, and wrote some Jupyter notebooks to go along with the kernel algorithms as comparisons. It's not just web dev...…

> image processing and resampling/resizing C++ code I hadn't touched in 12 years or so. So an unimportant, personal project. People seem to extrapolate being able to do something cool into being able to do useful work, which is what this whole discussion is about.

It's an example of useful work. 11 years ago, I would have been able to use that code in production for the company I worked at at the time, and the conversion would have been very useful.

I'm also using Github Copilot at work, but I can't as easily talk about what I'm doing there.

Re: Is it all just vapourware?

#99

Post by zbentley »

vatsachak wrote: post #74
20k wrote: post #39

>If agentic development actually worked the way any of them say it does I think its fascinating just how much of a gap there is between what's being claimed, and the verifiable observable data of the open source world. Major open source projects are by and large starting to ban LLMs now, because the contributions made by LLM users have been universally terrible and unhelpful. There doesn't appear to be a single major…

Nah this take is wrong. I used Claude code with my custom skill and I wrote a more performant scheduler than the default Linux one in Rust. It's not just productivity, it's life changing.

I'm choosing to interpret this as very dry sarcasm.

Re: Is it all just vapourware?

#100

Post by vatsachak »

20k wrote: post #87
vatsachak wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah this take is wrong. I used Claude code with my custom skill and I wrote a more performant scheduler than the default Linux one in Rust. It's not just productivity, it's life changing.

Sure, it just seems a little odd that no LLMgineer ever contributes their incredible more performant scheduler back though right? After all if you can do it with claude, anyone can, all it'd take is to ask claude to rewrite it. Linux accepts LLM generated PRs, all the code has to do is meet the review bar and one of the most critical pieces of software engineering on the planet gets better for everyone

I would submit it but the pr was too long to fit on GitHub
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