> Code as Art

Code is code.

Code can be art, code can also be simply a tool to reach a goal.

If you want to create art, do it with your own two hands and your brain.

If you want to just Do The Thing, codegen it. No one cares. In before "Except your users having to use your vibeslop" FYI your Hand-Crafted Artisanal Code will still have bugs, so it's a moot point.

Heck, the very first thing the author does is links to another one of his own blog post where the above points are explicitly stated and explained, then restates at the end of the paragraph that there are no valid arguments for this one. So why keep beating this dead horse? Especially as the opener of the article.

This kind of mindset baffles me.

I don't like AI coding, but I can't say it's not useful. Most of the arguments in this article can be disarmed by taking the abstraction "one step up". LLM generated modules and software, microservices, whatever your level of abstraction... now need to be composited together. You go and deal with higher order problems, factories, generation, etc.

Is it a way to develop critical bits of code, depths of your business logic? Absolutely not. Can it solve a lot of boilerplate and support logic? Absolutely yes.

Seeing "AI Companies as Bad Actors"... can't fully disagree there. There's far too many far too dodgy things about these businesses, and I trust them as far as I can audit them (not very far). And the missing argument's the cognitive decline of using these things to think for us. I try to keep myself sharp by still manually doing a fair amount of things in my life. I refuse to automate _everything_ - especially the stuff I do for fun. Having an LLM manage hobby-adjacent stuff is a quick trip to burnout land, especially once fixing the thing becomes "the hobby"... and it does.

I like coding. You can take away my AWK and C, Bash and Go and Javascript (yes I even enjoy coding Javascript unironically, sue me. I like making self-contained HTML5 one-file-and-offline tools for fun) only from my cold, dead hands. But don't we get one of these articles like once a week at least? It's getting kind of tiresome.

Like, I get the idea, I really do, but is there a need to announce it to the winds so often? Is this a pride thing?

My say about this

1. I think most of us know the same thing is occurred when first compile came into the market (Most of them hated it saying 'High Quality ASM code would be only generated by humans' . Moving forward asm hasn't dead but we are only using it only at critically. I think we will do same with LLMs we use what useful and Move forward.

2. Life's isn't just always staying in front of a box and writing some code. If AI does the job of creating useful code with quality i would be more than happy since i could get start to work on more abstract things like Arts and Humanity. which for our growth is essential as you can see the current society is currently disdain.

Finally to conclude don't try to interrupt the flow just accept it and move forward.

Life is SHORT

I am not sure if I am more tired of people building with AI or people complaining about people building with AI. If you really that bothered, there is nothing stoping anybody from keep doing things the good old way... What's the big deal?

I think the employment thief point is always misstated.

We invented compilers, word processors, templated document generation, code generators, DSLs and things like that which were all labour reduction technologies for describing systems and information. These were net positives for society but wiped out full administrative and technical professions.

The issue is the impact that technology has on society. It should used to free up more time for enriching humanity with art, music, sciences, mathematics etc. But what really happens is they are used entirely for concentrating wealth by taking revenue and reducing employment, leaving functional people unemployed, destitute and in debt to the people who have the wealth concentration.

At this point it's morally objectionable on all grounds.

A second point, which should be considered an addition to the article is that AI coding shapes thinking based on its capabilities, not the user's intent. I see this a lot. If the objective is to do thing X because it aligns with a well-researched strategic analysis, it may not align with that. People are happy to be pushed to do thing Y which is a totally different thing because they are being slowly gaslit into accepting the mediocrity that the model promotes. This leads to poor business outcomes. And all this is hidden and written off because everyone needs to be seen as AI thought leaders at a high level because that's what keeps the stock going up and engineers are being rated on delivery, not on ROI.

Everthing is fucking broken.

Reads like AI generated rage bait.

Why I dislike AI code? Not because any of this reasons. I dislike bad written code. The overall quality of AI code is shit. Not becuase the AI couldn't do it better, but because the people that are using it are mostly inexperienced morons or people that don't care for any quality at all. And in the end the software they create ends up on my desk. Not only because it already infested the big players, additionally because now really EVERY simpleton can generate a shitty software and I need to filter out the garbage out of twenty applications that promise to solve the same problem.

I hated Delphi 5 at it's time for the same reason. But now the count of morons that can generate software is bigger.

Edit: The complete process of writing code with AI tools guides you to ignore quality even then when you are not a moron. Leave the last 30% of the solution like it is, although its not the best solution you would have picked, or discuss this with the AI for a time double as long as you needed for the first 70%.

I think this post's arguments are mostly flawed, but without getting into that, my problem with "AI" is that it's just fundamentally antisocial - it's built on using the work of billions of people in a way that they would not like it being used.* The defense is always "if you put it on the Internet, then you should be okay with people using it however they want", but that's just such a douchey defense, and the result is a world where fewer people want to share things on the Internet.

But that ship seems to have sailed. Anyway, it's cute that the author writes as if AI companies are only automating the "typing code" part and not the "delivering valuable software" part. They will automate everything that they can. Whatever special understanding or ability you think you have that the machine lacks, if it leads you to any amount of success, will be hoovered up into the machine for easy replication by anyone. That's why there's so much money in this - people aren't investing trillions so that you can type less/no code.

* There are valid defenses for using work against the author's wishes - e.g., a racist shouldn't be able to stop people of other races from viewing their work. I just think these particular defenses are shit.

I was curious about codeberg.org as an alternative to Github for opensource work. They had voted on an LLM policy and decided against vibe-coded repos while allowing some AI use. This got me thinking how I want to use AI and if it fit with their policy.

The best I could figure is that I like to start with requirements, use AI to discuss and settle on its high level design and specific aspects of its implementation. I may or may not read all the code, but the key thing is even if I didn't read the code in advance, doing so would not be a surprise and I'd know what it was doing and how it was doing it because those were things I decided during the up-front conversations and not left as an open exercise for the AI. And coming back to the codeberg.org vote I can guess that it was elements like these that they wanted to guard. They don't want repos whose owners don't know what the code does in a technical sense or how it's constructed etc. There's likely other things too like seeing text that doesn't read like people wrote it and I find that tiring to read (in a literal way, I get drained from reading too much of it) and endorse minimizing that.

Another thought was that my ever long search for better and better programming languages was that if I have a clear vision of what I want the language should have the least friction to write it down. Some languages that feel closer than others were Elm, Elixir, F#/OCaml, Pony, Rust, Kotlin, Go. Only a couple of these are my languages I'd regularly used but would prefer to have my AIs write in them. For web I'd probably also accept Vue, Svelte, or (simple) React. In particular using Go for mini back-ends is particularly effective as the coding style tends to be regular and boring which minimizes differences between human and machine written styles. So in a sense giving specs at multiple levels of abstraction and detail is the perfect high level language I'd been wanting.

It would be interesting to see the linked talk "Useing You're Type's Good", but it seems to have been deleted.

I don't understand the point of this article. It is written poorly. It doesn't state a purpose or line of thought, you can infer it from how he counters the dislike reasons, but then was the point of the article just to list a handful of reasons you don't believe to be true? Because he's leaving so much stuff behind

It seems like a very lazy attempt to rebut the reasons. In particular:

"In this situation it isn’t the technology that takes the job, it’s the mode of production. And given that programming is intellectual work, the means of production is literally our heads, we ought to be able to seize those."

The word 'ought' is doing so much heavy lifting here...

First, if someone's profession has been vastly transformed, and not necessarily in pleasant ways, they're allowed to have feelings about that. If nothing else, I find talking to AIs to be exhausting.

But more importantly, sure, we were always paid for results. And yes, sometimes professions transform or die. The buggy whip manufacturers aren't doing that great these days. But people are also allowed to have feelings about losing their professions.

My real concern is that the stated goal of the AI companies is to do this to every human job. They want to replace programmers and artists and movie-makers and—as soon as they get robotics figured out—physical laborers. They measure the ability of their models to run entire retail businesses with Vending Bench, so management isn't safe, either. They sell their AIs to the military for use in weapons. No job is safe, anywhere: They want everything, if they can figure out how to take it.

If the current rate of AI advance stops really soon, then eventually we'll figure out some kind of liveable future. Probably one with fewer programmers. But the labs have zero intention of stopping. Anthropic is a cult, and they hope to build a machine god that will have power over humanity forever. So I'm not going to them for answers. OpenAI used to have non-profit oversight that encouraged them to serve society, and Sam Altman gutted it like a fish. So I don't think I trust them to design a machine that replaces all human jobs, either.

Personally, I don't mind current coding models, at least not the local-sized ones that exist now. They make nice sounding-boards and can be trusted with the grunt work. We could adapt to these, given time.

But so far, AI technology shows no sign of stopping. And the labs are focused heavily on coding and math, because the next step in their plan is to let their models do AI research so that they can advance their technology even faster into new fields.

We could, like, decide that we don't need to do this. There is no need to try to replace every single human job with a superhuman machine. Because if you thought the enshittification of the Internet was bad, wait until you see the enshittification of a machine that can do almost every human job. No thanks.

I like AI coding. I was talking about this with a writer friend: what I get paid for is my judgement. Which goals are worth pursuing and which aren't? We always knew tech is all tradeoffs all the way down, so how are they to be evaluated? My writer friend faces similar challenges. AI doesn't have an order of values within which to weigh judgements, except for whichever one is implicitly ir explicitly imposed upon it. I also don't think that LLM context works the same way my reflective process works, as far as I can tell. It's much better at the activity of coding than I am and that's great, I'm happy to let it do that. I've never found it capable of independently making the kinds of judgements that are the meat of my writer friend's and my professions.

There are a lot of similar articles to this recently, and there will be many more. There will also be many articles with the opposite view. Both are interesting and offer different viewpoints to what is the biggest software engineers' existential crisis.

I don't agree with this article but equally I respect their opinion. My primary reason I use AI is that a lot of coding is boring and has often made me wonder what I am doing with my life. At least now I am able to focus more on the parts of software development that interest me, shifting more of my time to the left of the development lifecycle: innovation and design

Insisting that software be created without AI is becoming like insisting that a photograph be hand painted instead of printed.

Not to mention stolen/copyrighted code now being in your stuff. That alone should be a reason to never use AI.

I never understand why nobody here thinks of stuff like this.

I wonder how the author feels about the fact that the code powering his blog (making it accessible to readers) was very likely written by AI.

> AI Companies as Bad Actors > If you believe that the big AI companies is [sic] run by people who don’t have humanity’s best interests at heart

I believe that AI companies (much like any other company) are primarily driven by financial motivations (note that this might not extend to the individual people working there). Now often this manifests in ways that serve humans or even humanity, but other times it doesn't. This isn't unique to AI companies, and if you tried to only support companies that put humanity over finances, you'd be hard pressed to find many.

> Motivated by Bertrand Meyer’s AI for Smarties, if you believe that software engineering is the careful application of the mysterious knowledge of software engineers, encapsulated in rules like the SOLID principles, “prefer composition over inheritance”, “use you’re type’s good“, the Law of Demeter and so on, then AI can’t possibly write software because it doesn’t apply those rules, it just generates text that happens to compile.

... is this the "LLMs don't truly understand what they are saying" of software engineering? I'd also say there is a case for re-evaluating some of the established engineering principles, considering that they were built on assumptions that are no longer true.

2 cents.

Me - an avid vibe coder (with 20 years of software development experience). Opinion - this is next evolution. It will not go away. It bumped productivity 6x. Engineering does not go anywhere. SDLC is still a thing. Its just that C-suite can actively participate in development. Everything happens faster. We deliver more features.

Art is gone. Passion is gone. Its all just "work". I used to sit in a friday evening with a bottle(s) of beer and "develop for fun". write code, read new stuff.

Now it feels more like steering a ship. there are some guys throwing coal in the engine. I dont know them in face, but the ship goes forward, thats the main thing.

M.Twain "The report of my death was an exaggeration."

> Except that the job was never to type code, it was to deliver valuable software. People who can still do that can still get paid by organisations that need that to be done.

It's still the case that fewer people are required so I'm not sure this argument holds up. In the UK at least, entry-level software engineer roles down roughly 27% year-on-year after gpt was launched according to one article I saw.

> Except that the job was never to type code, it was to deliver valuable software.

It all boils down to this really. How you get there is kind of irrelevant, unless it isn't because of privacy and copyright concerns and such.

There is a disappointing lack of revolutionary spirit, to value labour directly instead of for the things it provides us.

Demand food, shelter, leisure, purpose. Jobs are one (honestly pretty bad) implementation of that

Amen!

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