Sure, we're all more productive now, but how much of that is because we leverage AI on top of the intelligence we gained from all of that manual work? Who is to say that in 36 months you're not a worse developer over all because that systems knowledge starts to atrophy too?
This isn't me saying you shouldn't use AI. I use it all of the time to do useful side tasks like to setup GitHub Workflows while I write a feature, or with my agent on a VPS to do internet tasks for me. It's nice to have a little synthesized intelligence.
What isn't nice is to supplement your own intelligence. I think the gains are in the work there--similar to how you can be absolutely ripped from taking steroids while destroying your body. Often it's the shortcuts that are the most treacherous path.
I’ve been trying to ask people a different question: sure, we’re more productive now but to me, the AI era is only serving to plunge us deeper than ever into producing more, more, more, faster, faster, faster. And for what? What’s it all for? I became a software engineer because I have a lot of fun writing code, thinking through and solving complicated problems, and experiencing the reward of seeing what I’ve built by hand working for the first time.
Do people really have fun managing a fleet of agents that generate the code instead? Or is it just the rush of producing something extremely quickly, much more quickly than you might be able to alone, regardless of how well (or poorly) it might work? For me, being able to move quickly was never the fun part.
It’s one thing to utilize AI to lessen the drudgework, the boilerplate, but I look at people who have gone all in on agentic development and it just really makes me wonder.
Many devs here have stated that the fun part for them is seeing the end product, not the act of creating it. Using AI is an act of need satisfaction.
Unfortunately, cloning a GitHub repository or downloading a Squarespace template doesn't hit the spot, because you can see exactly where the code came from, so your brain knows you were not the one responsible. AI's greatest feature is that it obfuscates provenance. You can now happily clone that repository or download that template without the feeling that you're cloning someone else's repository or downloading someone else's template.
maybe because people see AI not just as a clever packet manager, but also, to some degree, as a problem solving engine. Similar to humans.
People who use coding as a means to an end, producing a product
People who enjoy process over product and coding is the enjoyable part, not the end product
Company executives fall into bucket 1. Even if you love your cushy air-conditioned job, doesn’t mean the people above you don’t see you as a means to an end, a better product.
Solo founders and small startups are in bucket 1 as well but that doesn’t mean that don’t enjoy coding, just the product being made is much more satisfying.
I also use Ai to be more ambitious. Online evaluation for our in app flows instead of offline.
So for us the entire quality of the product has been increased a lot.
If you wanted a literal answer, it is to accelerate revenue as much as possible to make the very rich people who own most of the company even unfathomably richer. No benefit to you for making more faster. Other than the burnout, that's all for you to enjoy.
- they require specific roads being paved for them. for example, if your tooling is proprietary and not accessible from the CLI, your agent is pretty much fucked. if your tool is not represented in training data (think, `jj` VCS or your proprietary/tailor-made tooling), you require duct tapes such as "skills" and "memories". a bicycle (that is, your own mind + computer) handles such off-roads much better.
- they get you from A to B faster, sure, but along the way you may encounter something curious - a different road to take, an interesting vista. not to mention, bicycles are actually good for your health, and professional drivers suffer from all the sedentary job diseases we programmers do, unless they actively counter it. with LLMs, we get a "sedentary job disease" of skill atrophy, on top of all the other atrophies us coders should counter with a proper exercise set at least three times a week.
- finally, when you crash in a car (Opus/Sonnet, GPT-5.5) or, worse, on a motorcycle (smaller Qwens, DeepSeek, Haiku/GPT-5.4-nano), you crash very loudly and with a high chance of irrecoverable casualties.
I have been drawn to coding from the first day I took a course at college learning Pascal and assembly on an IBM PC. Hell I even wrote an IEEE/488 driver for an Osborne 1.
As an experimental physicist, coding was always central to my work. I always felt guilty because I had more pleasure coding than tackling the physics itself.
This is a new age we are entering. AI changes how we do things, but I believe that the human passion to be creative and do intellectual work will always be part of it. It's in our nature.
So I'm not worried that we'll all dry up and turn into zombies.
One of the canonical references of Jobs’ use of “bicycle for the mind” also compared the efficiency of locomotion to the California Condor which was (I’m working from memory, here) 17X more efficient than a human walking.
A human on a bicycle, according to Jobs then, is more efficient than the most efficient animal locomotion known to humankind. The comparison included animals moving through non-terrestrial environments.
Just one more ~~lane~~ datacenter, bro. That'll fix it; trust. Please. One more ~~lane~~ datacenter. It'll be so good.
I feel like I am learning a whole new branch of the programming skill tree. LLMs and their harnesses are like a mew set of constraints to work around when designing systems, but if you get them right you can build bigger, better things than ever before.
I say all of this as someone who spent the last two days rebuilding RBAC for my application after Claude royally messed it up.
This year I'm building and IoT data management platform and I've already built two demos of the product and am adding a bunch of features for a third. Nothing is vaporware about it. All in about 4 months.
The big wins have been system config, debugging, and exploration. I was able to build an Arrow Flight SQL backend to use as an interface and try it out with some use cases, decide it wasn't going to work, and replace it with something else, all in about two weeks. Would have taken far longer before, if I would have been able to do it at all. I knew nothing about Flight SQL before trying it out.
Needless to say I have been looking for a way out of this job (and likely career) ever since.
What's going to happen is people who give a shit are going to get filtered and self-select out of the job, and then the entire field is going to be dominated by dunning kruger AI maximalists. The "AI will replace engineers" is true, but for an entirely different reason and entirely different way than most people making that argument think.
[0] https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/05/pop-that-bubble/#u-washin...
True.
> Who is to say that in 36 months you're not a worse developer over all because that systems knowledge starts to atrophy too?
I think that would be the best case scenario for a lot of developers. It’s not going to make anybody’s life easier. The labor market and job expectations are morphing to absorb any increase in productivity already, and we will all be forced to produce more and more and more to keep our jobs. Demand can’t instantly dramatically increase to meet the productivity, so it’s not like companies can just sell more— people will get laid off. More and more people will be fighting over fewer and fewer jobs, so the people who are still employed will get paid shit. It’s a basic supply and demand equation.
I wonder how many fewer people that told me “well my job isn’t going to be affected because it’s too complex/specialized/etc” in 2024 would say that today?
Companies must either double down on increasingly exorbitant per-token pricing and reduce payroll to compensate, or decide the tradeoffs aren’t worth it, and double down on human intelligence. I think the economics of the industry are going to decide for us in the coming months.
