The reason programmers are cooked isn’t because AI can do the job, bit because idiots in leadership have decided that it can.
- Programmers invent AI
- Executives use AI to replace programmers
- Executives rehire programmers for thousands of dollars an hour to fix AI mistakes.
Bro you can’t say that out loud, don’t give away the long game
So this. Just because it can’t do the job doesn’t mean they won’t actually replace you with it.
AI is fucking so useless when it comes to programming right now.
They can’t even fucking do math. Go make an AI do math right now, go see how it goes lol. Make it a, real world problem and give it lots of variables.
everytime i see a twitter screenshot i just know im looking at the dumbest people imaginable
Except for those comedy accounts. Some of those takes are sheer genius lol.
It’s even funnier because the guy is mocking DHH. You know, the creator of Ruby on Rails. Which 37signals obviously uses.
I know from experience that a) Rails is a very junior developer friendly framework, yet incredibly powerful, and b) all Rails apps are colossal machines with a lot of moving parts. So when the scared juniors look at the apps for the first time, the senior Rails devs are like “Eh, don’t worry about it, most of the complex stuff is happening on the background, the only way to break it if you genuinely have no idea what you’re doing and screw things up on purpose.” Which leads to point c) using AI coding with Rails codebases is usually like pulling open the side door of this gargantuan machine and dropping in a sack of wrenches in the gears.
English isn’t my first language, so I often use translation services. I feel like using them is a lot like vibe coding — very useful, but still something that needs to be checked by a human.
Yeah DHH is a problematic person to root for.
Everyone’s convinced their thing is special, but everyone else’s is a done deal.
Meanwhile the only task where current AI seems truly competitive is porn.
I’d suggest that if you think AI porn is anywhere near the real thing, that’s probably because you think porn is already slop in the same way that these AI bros think of code or creative writing or whatever other information-based thing you already know AI can’t do well.
Porn isn’t slop, people aren’t just interestingly-shaped slabs of meat. Sex is fundamentally about interpersonal connection. It might be one of the things that LLMs and robots are the worst at.
Most porn is definitely slop.
My mate is applying to Amazon as warehouse worker. He has an IT degree.
My coworker in the bookkeeping department has two degrees. Accountancy and IT. She can’t find an IT job.
At the other side though, my brother, an experienced software developer, is earning quite a lot of money now.
Basically, the industry is not investing in new blood.
Basically, the industry is not investing in new blood.
Yeah I think it makes sense out of an economic motivation. Often the code-quality of a junior is worse than that of an AI, and a senior has to review either, so they could just directly prompt the junior task into the AI.
The experience and skill to quickly grasp code and intention (and having a good initial idea where it should be going architecturally) is what is asked, which is obviously something that seniors are good at.
It’s kinda sad that our profession/art is slowly dying out because juniors are slowly replaced by AI.
Know a guy who tried to use AI to vibe code a simple web server. He wasn’t a programmer and kept insisting to me that programmers were done for.
After weeks of trying to get the thing to work, he had nothing. He showed me the code, and it was the worst I’ve ever seen. Dozens of empty files where the AI had apparently added and then deleted the same code. Also some utter garbage code. Tons of functions copied and pasted instead of being defined once.
I then showed him a web app I had made in that same amount of time. It worked perfectly. Never heard anything more about AI from him.
AI is very very neat but like it has clear obvious limitations. I’m not a programmer and I could tell you tons of ways I tripped Ollama up already.
But it’s a tool, and the people who can use it properly will succeed.
I’m not saying ita a tool for programmers, but it has uses
I think its most useful as an (often wrong) line completer than anything else. It can take in an entire file and just try and figure out the rest of what you are currently writing. Its context window simply isn’t big enough to understand an entire project.
That and unit tests. Since unit tests are by design isolated, small, and unconcerned with the larger project AI has at least a fighting change of competently producing them. That still takes significant hand holding though.
AI is certainly a very handy tool and has helped me out a lot but anybody who thinks “vibe programming” (i.e. programming from ignorance) is a good idea or will save money is woefully misinformed. Hire good programmers, let them use AI if they like, but trust the programmer’s judgement over some AI.
That’s because you NEED that experience to notice the AI is outputting garbage. Otherwise it looks superficially okay but the code is terrible, or fragile, or not even doing what you asked it properly. e.g. if I asked Gemini to generate a web server with Jetty it might output something correct or an unholy mess of Jetty 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 with annotations and/or programmatic styles, or the correct / incorrect pom dependencies.
AI is great for learning a language, partly because it’s the right combination of useful and stupid.
It’s familiar with the language in a way that would take some serious time to attain, but it also hallucinates things that don’t exist and its solution to debugging something often ends up being literally just changing variable names or doing the same wrong things in different ways. But seeing what works and what doesn’t and catching it when it’s spiraling is a pretty good learning experience. You can get a project rolling while you’re learning how to implement what you want to do without spending weeks or months wondering how. It’s great for filling gaps and giving enough context to start understanding how a language works by sheer immersion, especially if the application of that language comes robust debugging built in.
I’ve been using it to help me learn and implement GDscript while I’m working on my game and it’s been incredibly helpful. Stuff that would have taken weeks of wading through YouTube tutorials and banging my head against complex concepts and math that I just don’t have I can instead work my way through in days or even hours.
Gradually I’m getting more and more familiar with how the language works by doing the thing, and when it screws up and doesn’t know what it’s talking about I can see that in Godot’s debugging and in the actual execution of the code in-game. For a solo indie dev who’s doing all the art, writing, and music myself, having a tool to help me move my codebase forward while I learn has been pretty great. It also means that I can put systems in place that are relevant to the project so my modding partner who doesn’t know GDScript yet has something relevant to look at and learn from by looking through the project’s git.
But if I knew nothing about programming? If I wasn’t learning enough to fix its mistakes and sometimes abandon it entirely to find solutions to things it can’t figure out? I’d be making no progress or completely changing the scope of the game to make it a cookie cutter copy of the tutorials the AI is trained on.
Vibe coding is complete nonsense. You still need a competent designer who’s at least in the process of learning the context of the language they’re working with or your output is going to be complete garbage. And if you’re working in a medium that doesn’t have robust built-in debugging? Good luck even identifying what it’s doing wrong if you’re not familiar with the language yourself. Hell, good luck getting it to make anything complex if you have multiple systems to consider and can’t bridge the gaps yourself.
Corpo idiots going all in on “vibe coding” are literally just going to do indies a favor by churning out unworkable garbage that anyone who puts the effort in will be able to easily shine in comparison to.
It’s a good teacher, though, and a decent assistant.
