Idk about that. I work for myself and I cannot stand coding with LLMs. Even if it were faster (I have only noticed slowdowns long term when using them), the experience of arguing with a slot machine is far more stressful and soul-sucking than even the gnarliest bug.

Yes coorporate “ship as fast as possible” is draining, but that doesn’t mean LLC coding isn’t also to blame.

Having worked in/with multiple agencies over the years - working with humans who don't care/are pressured to just ship was exactly what he describes.

For example, I collaborated together with an agency that was working on a popular regional banking app. I was on another project with them and at one point decided to check out what they were doing.

It was a clusterfuck, to say the least. Four developers, four different architectures in the same codebase. One doesn't really understand the others, so he just sticks to his part.

The seams between the ownership parts are full of hacks. Concurrency issues are dealt with via hacks, just make things global and poll to check them. Navigation issues were solved by basically just reseting the app back to homescreen. Testing wasn't really a thing, and the tests that were there were mostly broken ages ago, and nobody cared enough to fix them.

Product didn't care much, designers would prototype a feature, then devs would implement it and wait until the backend is done, then fix things because they never really aligned on the specs. Sometimes, there would be no design review or QA and they would just ship, while sometimes the product person would jump in and test something because it's "an important feature".

Then I got asked to collab with them on another project. Huge customer, huge project, existing codebase. The codebase was so bad I just wrote it from scratch. It was Java written like it's C++. Backend was python code, not updated in years, quadratic scaling everywhere. At one point, the inital GET request was taking over 3 minutes. I took a look and ofc, they didn't even use indexes in the DB.

For these environments, AI coding will just scale up the shit they have, but also allow the small amount of people who might care to deal with this mess and fix it up much much faster than they could before.

Yeah, body shops existed before AI came around and your job in one of those is literally just to churn through tickets and get them across the board as fast as possible. Pure production line stuff. AI comes in and turns that to 11.

If you're looking for a decent job with even an ounce of creativity then an agency/consultancy shop is rarely the place you want to be and I can't see it getting any better.

We went heavy on AI at my place of work, like many did, but not really to the level of being AI-pilled and orchestrating dozens of agents and shit like that. It's still a force multiplier if you just use AI to walk through something one task at a time and use the spare time in between to collaborate on bigger picture stuff and think a bit beyond the code alone.

It is crazy in agency work now.

Before you used to sometimes having more tech savy customers put out a VB or Delphi click demo over an weekend kind of effort, and then complain why is the delivery so expensive.

Now they do the same with AI agents.

And then people still think their developer jobs are safe.

Pace doesn't matter. Making things customers want does.

This is all going to end very badly--or very well, if you understand this basic rule of markets, which many managerial types don't.

This is very much about Claude Code and agentic coding. OP at Reddit describes their situation as a soul-sucking "pressing enter" existence. Not using any human traits. Not even communicating with other humans. That is vastly different to the hustling culture before LLMs. Company culture is orthogonal to the effect AI usage can have on mental health.

> if you work at a company whose culture is to deliver as fast as possible

'Move fast and break things' is the ultimate Silicon Valley motto.

The enthusiasts are founders, executives and investors who don’t actually have to use AI to build products and therefore have a somewhat distant opinion about its real capabilities but will capture all gains from AI. They only build prototypes and rough drafts and don’t understand that AI makes the first 80% easier and the last 20% harder, and makes maintainability a nightmare where a codebase that’s gone through vibe coding for 3 months is like the equivalent of a 10 year old legacy codebase.

The burnouts are employees who are being asked to produce 10x the output, do their own project management, design, QA, devops, customer development, work long hours to make up for the gap in how much executives think AI boosts productivity and how much it actually does, and for 0.05% equity at best.

> On one hand you have AI enthusiasts who are shipping more than they ever have, they are super excited about being able to use the models and build everything they've ever wanted to. Utopia, amazing.

You can't ship faster than you can comprehend, unless you stop caring about comprehension.

Up until the last year the best developers were generally those who valued comprehension and wanted to really understand the libraries, code and infrastructure of their projects because that comprehension was what led to quality software.

Those who didn't care tended to ship buggy crap and weren't great devs.

In my experience those who didn't really care about deeply understanding the systems they were working on are loving AI. But those who did care are now literally unable comprehend the state of the codebase and are being forced to work in a way that's extremely unnatural to them.

I say this because I've personally struggled with this over the last year as I've was one of those people who spent a lot of time building comprehensive mental models for the systems I worked on. Now I just assume the AI understands and just do what I need to do to get whatever functionality I'm working on over the line. I don't like it and I've lost all technical interest in coding at this point, but it is what it is ultimately. Coding is no longer about comprehension, it's just about asking Claude to do something.

I can't find a very good comment from HN from a few months ago with this churn of AI posts, but the idea was quite right: there were tinkerers, who loved a problem solving process, and entrepreneurs, who don't care about the problem itself and beauty of a neat solution, but only the end products to sell.

Entrepreneurs currently are in heaven, and tinkerers are in hell.

The way I see it LLMs are accelerating trends that have been at play for a decade or two now.

I think we are seeing bloat accelerating and the boom will eventually go bust.

My hope is that from the ashes of the current boom/bust cycle we might actually get "software engineering" once the dust settles and society catches up with technology in terms of culture, regulations, education etc.

I think there is a middle ground too. Well organised Engineering and Product teams using AI efficiently whilst actually talking together and making decisions. Neither AI zealots, nor doom and gloom.

The dichotomy was inevitable. So-called AI offers to alleviate the requirement for programming competance. Hence it divides people into the incompetant, which it empowers, and the competants, which it disempowers.

The real tragedy is the offer is false.

Most power tools have a dichotomy like this.

If you don't have a clear mission to pursue with your tools, dissatisfaction is the next mandatory stop on your journey. You can change your tools as often as you want. If the mission is wrong it won't matter.

AI might be unique in that it can force a business into an inevitable failure state much faster than it would have experienced otherwise. From the perspective of long term economic activity, this might actually be a good thing. Most businesses will never be successful and this technology seems to be quite good at eliminating any ambiguity regarding that fact.

The real thing that is being tested here is the competence, discipline and focus of leadership. Executing well on AI in a team setting takes a lot of diplomacy and mentorship to get the nervous energy dealt with properly. Many failure modes with AI look like one lunatic employee going mad with a codex/claude subscription and slowly dragging everyone else into the cartoon fight dustball.

I had a meeting yesterday regarding deploying custom enterprise chatbot for a client wherein everyone was practically yelling over each other. We unanimously considered it an extremely productive call despite the chaos. I cannot imagine what is happening elsewhere. I like to believe the team I am working with is one of the better ones.

I swing between both, daily it seems.

I think the people who are into it are the people who before AI would throw up a pull request that was complete shit, expect everyone else to tell them what to fix, and somehow still keep their job.

Agree, I don’t buy the doom and gloom that coding is dead and all our jobs are going away (some will).

But the damage that LLMs have done to the social aspect of work is horrible. Beyond horrible.

The top comment, yes, but not determined by user votes but rather by reddit deciding to shove more AI down its users' throats

Yesterday I got an anthropic Claude advert on that thread, so dark I screenshot it... Text:

  Never get sidelined by your tools again

  Here for the 3am deploy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literate_programming

The irony is, this would be a pretty trivial one shot project for a modern LLM to create that interfaces with the source control repository of your choice. It's basically an advanced note-taking app, which LLMs have been trained to death on. I bet you could get it to write it as a VS Code extension as well (or emacs macro, or... etc.)

I agree. There is a lot of accumulated bloat and a lot of newly accreted bloat from the tools built to accelerate on the recent trends.

It seems to me that a big bust is about to follow the 15 year boom that started out as "web 2.0" and saw the rise of web app framework, "front end" development, "x as a service", start ups "pivoting" to software tooling creating bloat to tackle problems created by bloat etc.

A lot of jobs will be removed from the tech industry, I think. But the work in software development will be more interesting 5/10 years from now than it is now. Paid more in line with the rest of the economy and thus not attracting so many uninterested actors, and more aligned with market demand instead of driven by a labor oligopsony, held more to account once regulation catches up with technology etc. I think we might actually get "software engineering" after this.

The world is still massively under-digitized, even after decades of it being mainstream.

So there will always be value to be made and markets to serve.

I don’t think the point of the submission is the top post, but the whole thread of agreement.

yeah the big tech companies approached our company to buy our private codebases and data for training purposes. I advised we do not sell anything to them because their goal isn't just to try to replace our workers with bots, the real goal is to replace our entire business. There will be one mega corp to rule them all.

Just think, if they can sell your a virtual worker that can compete with human employees in your industry/niche, they would be a few steps away from being your DIRECT competitor or at the very least selling those same workers to someone else.

FWIW I still think that future is likely, but at least three things hold this back (and I say as someone doing low-budget local LLM experiments)

1) the typical (non-Mac) PC architecture beige box isn't really ready for this; it's starting to change a bit, the new Nvidia laptop RTX chips might change it a little, and maybe the Ryzen AI/Strix Halo stuff will catch up, but I suspect the lack of unified VRAM in boring corporate machines is holding back routine corporate experimentation (since most corporate machines also have bare minimum GPUs)

2) frankly, the Apple Silicon architecture isn't truly ready for it either! Even with unified VRAM, memory bandwidth is limiting, and the processing power of the GPU holds back prompt processing for things like document analysis. So far the MoE models and the really small footprint dense models are lacking somewhat, though you can use them for some things (and the Mac is a much better pre-existing-machine playground for early experiments).

3) perhaps more importantly, the apparent progress of the cloud LLMs has persuaded corporate customers that what they are aiming for is increasing delegation rather than increasing developer capability (the former does not automatically lead to the latter)

The first two will be fixed.

I'm mediocre but it's not that I fear for my job being taken by someone better at AI than me (honestly I hate my job so much now I wouldn't care being forced into working in a grocery store). It's that the job has become absurd and anxiety inducing as I am not given the time to understand and build a mental picture of the code that AI is generating, and as the original post says "everyone is spending all day hitting enter" which is fucking true.

Oddly enough, I met a newly qualified dentist last year who said his parents had advised him not to get into software because AI was going to take all the jobs.

It's a significantly harder career, but less automatable.

"...former-would-be-dentists of the world"

so.. What do you call a doctor who failed out of med school? A software dev?

If I could get rid of AI I would be okay with salaries deflating still.

> and finding the best solution for every problem

Genuinely: how? Share some insights. So far I have seen anything exceeding about 2k lines of text in the context diverge. Meaning, throwing more LLM at it rapidly baloons the size at the expense of internal coherence. Things become stale, hallucinated, duplicated and outright faked. Only thing that works is constant manual intervention and pruning of the generated slop.

Not only these things are unable to find "best solution", they are unable to find any solution. Instead (especially for Opus) they seem optimized to convince user that the task is accomplished.

HR and the lawyers would tell you that it is all company property. Make any of it at work? Company property. Bring it into work to do company work, company property.

Whatever miracle maker you're talking about, if it exists, should be making you money so, it's either doing that, is a weird train hobby, or a delusion.

bro agent scripts doesn't matter at all imo

For pure design space exploration that can be a victory, equivalent to sketching a UI on paper being faster than making it in HTML, but is that the work you're actually doing most of the time? Maybe for some people it is.

Because there's people who care about the craft, and there's people who don't.

I don't see any kind of AI-assisted coding as making anything. You didn't build that iOS app, Claude did. Maybe you can delude yourself into feeling some kind of pride or contentment in it and somehow think you built it but a lot of us who actually have a passion for the domain can't.

Imagine you're a carpenter. You've spent decades honing your skills, countless incomplete or borked projects that were recycled for newer better ones, the skin on your fingers and hands have become tougher and rough like sand paper due to how the majority of your waking hours are spent manipulating wood. Now, someone gives that carpenter a machine that you can tell it your idea for any wood object and it just spits it out in a couple minutes and charges you a few bucks. The carpenter says, out of curiosity, "make me the roof in the Chapel of San Idelfonso", and after a little while, it spits out a nearly perfect copy of that magnum opus. Any real carpenter would probably be disgusted, or at least feel a deep void inside them and nothing but disinterest in the machine. They'd just go back to their workshop and leave the machine outside. But that's probably because nobody becomes a carpenter to chase the current hype thing and to make money; they have passion, just like our engineers used to.

> I'm not a team player or something. It's ridiculous.

This. In the past, when you could challenge a sloppy and rushed feature, done wrongly. You could steer people into better designs without adding much overhead. These days, if you try to challenge those no-reviews, ship-50k PRs daily, you instantly get labeled as AI-sceptic, someone who is afraid of change, afraid of loosing your job. I don't see a way out from this.

> They thought I should be able to do it with 1 engineer.

Imagine a world where they only employ 1 engineer instead of 5, and so the 4 unemployed engineers just build 4 competitors by Q1 next year.

> Some people are taking longer than others to realize that the job has changed. That's all that I see in these rants.

Some people are too quick to drink whatever kool-aid they’re served. That’s all I see in these tired excuses.

> It shouldn't be surprising that if you swim against the tide by doing things the old way, you are going to feel more burnt out because of it.

Better to swim against the tide than letting yourself get swept up in the current and drowning.

It no longer surprises me, but the profound lack of empathy shown by AI (or any other popular hype du jour) proponents is worrying. A large numbers of fellow humans are saying “this thing is negatively impacting my life” and the response is “lol, and you should be thankful”.

I think we'd all be surprised how bad most software is within businesses, and they somehow still run.

If it’s B2B, the finance side (seller/customer) of the relationship can be totally different from the product side (developer/user). Evolution of the contract is often measured in quarters.

mmm, but software products _have been_ commoditized. Especially the bloated ones that are just a fluffy bunny attached to a CRUD.

We're watching in real time the conditions that created the Luddites.

Building frontier LLMs and coding agents isn't easy either

Alternative nitter frontend: https://xcopy.uk/v0xium/status/2101526107128529120

https://xxcancel.com/v0xium/status/2101526107128529120

Ironically, my first thought was how quickly this might be able to be re-written, in a sane way, …with the help of an LLM.

I find that if you pay a lot of human-in-the-loop attention to the design phase, LLMs can produce perfectly decent stuff.

They’re also good at writing tests. Lock in the (non-broken) behavior of the old app with tests. Then use those tests to re-create the app, except with a talented engineer (you) guiding the design this time.

What's to stop you from rebuilding it yourself to improve the structure? Why couldn't you vibe code it better?

It is like inheriting Assembly codebase written by a compiler.

You will not edit Assembly in this.

Claude will have to edit it and Claude will not whine.

What domain is it may I ask you?

That's a default bot in that subreddit, it's there for all posts. I get your criticism but I don't think this was done deliberately.

Not going to lie, I thought that was the point.

I was taken immediately here https://safereddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1wm5c21/i_am_done...

I use https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/libredirect/

What we really need is people building houses. Unfortunately the economy will collapse if we make housing affordable.

The question: “what is your purpose?”

Valid answer, I guess, though some might wish for a deeper connection to life than a mechanical, subservient existence.

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