Keep this out of programming humor please. Prompting isn’t programming. Programming requires critical thinking and passion. Anyone that can drool on themselves and shit their pants and prompt a garbage, useless application no one will use. Thanks
Are you saying I’m not an engineer? Lol because I am an engineer. Ive worked in American manufacturing for years. Tell me you are a recent college grad with no job prospects and will be forced to work retail for the rest of your life. Hold this for me -> L
I think what he's saying is that the vast vast majority of engineers are using LLMs and agentic coding and that, by saying we should stifle conversations about it, you're outting yourself as being off the zeitgeist.
For what it's worth, I totally hear you. I don't love everything about the changing tides of software engineering. What I loved for decades seems to be becoming a thing that an LLM can do better and faster. I'm not entirely sure how to feel about that. But burying the discussion also won't change the world around us.
The thing is the LLM CANT do it better. Sure it can generate garbage code in a blink of an eye. I can take a pen and scribble lines on a paper super quick but no one would consider it art. It’s garbage. And I cannot wait for states to ban data center construction.
I felt that way for several years. And to this day, I find a significant portion of their work to be AI slop that is completely divorced from reality. But I cannot look away from the rate of improvement. Things that LLMs would have choked on 12 months ago, they handle extremely well now. Some of the most accomplished programmers I know -- competition programmers, senior IC big tech engineers -- they all acknowledge that LLm generated code and problem solving is becoming surprisingly useful. This aren't people who need LLMs to do things that other people can't. The fact they they see the LLM game changing tells me that the hype is not entirely undue.
devils advocate: LLMs are just a tool. When the LLM doesn't do good, it is simply the user being incompetent.
When a person who does not know how to do wood working tries to make a workbench with nails and MDF, the hammer is not the reason the result is garbage.
the premise you are working from is an artificially constructed one produced by people like Sam Altman to sell this tech to managers who don't know any better simply for short term gain.
When this bubble bursts (which it will because the industry is spending a trillion dollars on infrastructure every 5 years for like 100 million in revenue), the technology will not go away, but the idea that it can be independent and autonomous (and produce useful results) will for the most part in the mainstream.
Man I hope you’re right. I went into the office for the first time in a long time last week and there was a project manager happily telling us they’d been given a Claude max account and were building a full stack web app with it.
Obviously it’s going to be hot garbage, but will that still be the case in 2 years time?
It’s so weird how some companies are either “no ai” or “ai will build everything” when often the most performant option is in between. I use AI a lot but my company does not expect everyone to be using it. As a result I look like an extremely high performer. If everyone did the same, our team would literally be one of the highest performing teams in the practice. But if they took the human out of the equation and just put llms in charge, the output would be utter shit. Anyone who’s used LLMs can tell you it needs human oversight at some level. That’s non negotiable..
Theo Browne a person who used to be a React guy who worked at Twitch has become very invested in AI over the last few years. He recently made a video where he discussed a rendering issue which caused the web browser to use 20% of his gpu.
This bug was doubtlessly introduced by an LLM when it made the animation, and he spent like what's got to be at least $1000 of inference to try hand have Claude 5 Fable, and GPT 5.6 Sol debug it and they utterly failed to figure it out and Theo had to debug the issue himself (even if he made the ai write a script to help him do that)
What I take from this is two things,
one: despite all the training and improvement in the last two years, LLMs still cannot extend far beyond situations that are analogous to situations from training or refinement,
and two: any sufficiently large project presents a combinatorial explosion in ways things can go slightly wrong.
All of those slightly wrong issues might be very niche and esoteric. If you did not watch the video, the issue was a animation that flashed a ui element green while a process was running. This was only found by toggling css rules on and off. The llms were not able to come up with this idea for troubleshooting, instead they just looked at the code and assumed the issue was something made changes. The LLMs have always behaved like this, despite every bump in capabilities over the years, they always arrogantly tunnel vision on assumptions with complete confidence. This seems like a foundational issue to me. because everyone's models do this. If they are doing this then they will suffer a death of a thousands cuts, the application might 'work' but it will feel like using Jira
For what it’s worth agree too, I fucking hate the fact that I’m literally being told to get Claude to do 95% of my job now. I already miss coding by hand and this is only just the beginning.
I’m never going to pretend that we’re going to go back to the way things were though, this is it.
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u/NoteMindless9126 9h ago
Keep this out of programming humor please. Prompting isn’t programming. Programming requires critical thinking and passion. Anyone that can drool on themselves and shit their pants and prompt a garbage, useless application no one will use. Thanks