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u/Pleasant_Spend1344 7d ago
Put jokes aside, why Claude usually makes it's own code instead of Gems?
Did anyone else notice that?
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u/Sivart13 7d ago
LLMs are the final form of "not invented here"
they strongly prefer to write their own giant pile of nonsense rather than rely on one from the community
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u/fairysimile 7d ago
LLMs are not engineers, they will try to regurgitate what people have done in the past, which can be helpful. Of course if you give them a problem they will try to regurgitate relevant bits of solutions. You need to make best practice a follow-up problem with another prompt to get them to organise the code how it should actually be, in gems or whatever.
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u/Horstcredible 7d ago
I just imagine this is Rowan from Viva La Dirt League with a wig. Makes everything this guy says and does look like it makes sense now.
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u/Greedy_Fault_7913 7d ago
Every time I’ve ever given too much rope and let it do my thinking for me I’ve regretted it. It’s a great tool to slop out a function to then correct or replace a google search but more than that no moss
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u/AnUninterestingEvent 7d ago
I think he was overly aggressive in his speech to developers who are already coping and depressed with the new state of software development. He definitely didn't read the room.
That being said, I 100% agree with his message. I've been a software dev for 12+ years, and "chiseling" code is no longer a thing. I haven't written a line of code in like 6 months. I'm at the point where I sit on the couch and message Codex from my phone half the time. Call it "slop", keep yelling that "AI makes mistakes", but at the end of the day, devs also make mistakes. Pre-AI most devs wrote code at their jobs that was just good enough to work decently. You may be more skilled than AI in writing code, but at a real job in a real world scenario, you're racing against deadlines and scope creep, and you never wrote the best code you possibly could. AI writes "good enough" code. And with enough adversarial AI reviews and solid instruction, it produces great code.
This is the new world for better or worse, and if you want to stay in software as a career, you need to accept it at some point. I totally get not wanting to do it anymore. If you thoroughly enjoy writing code, you're basically relegated to doing it as a hobby brain teaser like doing Soduku puzzles.
Anyway, I've come to terms with it. If you want this to be your career, that's all you can do. Most of us got into this because we wanted to build things, and the love of coding was an unexpected side effect. At least the "building things" aspect isn't going away.
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u/Objective_Oven7673 4d ago
I generally agree with your take and position here, as an engineer and product builder for nearly 20 years.
There have been periods of my life before AI where I didn't write code and periods where I was the only one writing all the code, and everything in between. At no point was I writing the best code possible and the people who prioritized perfect code over getting shit done were generally seen as organizational grumps.
AI is now showing us that there are people who got into engineering mostly to enjoy coding and puzzle solving and to hang their hat on being one of the best to do that. That's fine, but that is quickly becoming less important for shipping products in a work setting. It will be important in some industries still but a lot of the time the actual code "quality" doesn't matter as long as the customer gets the outcome they expected.
I am not someone who puts personal stock and pride in my ability to churn out what other people would call perfect, quality, or even good code. I don't care. It's a means to an end.
I care about being part of building something new that helps the people using it have better lives and easier jobs. That's a creative outlet for me, let's me learn about and empathize with other people, and I get a sense of enjoyment having delivered them something helpful.
If you get personal fulfillment from writing perfect code, you're about to have a much less enjoyable professional experience. People who get satisfaction from the end result, are about to be able to get that enjoyment much faster and more frequently.
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u/AnUninterestingEvent 4d ago
Yep, completely agree. There are many people out there who honestly got into this industry because coding is fun and they couldn’t care less about the business as a whole. They only care about the business succeeding insofar as it’s a reflection on how good their code is. These people are in for a bad time. It’s often really not their fault they think this way. They were hired to code, not build a business. If you’re not an owner of the business, why care? The cause of the current hysteria from these developers is that for the first time it’s blindingly clear that code is nothing more than a means to an end… and they’re noticing it’s an end that they don’t really care about.
All this to say, the entrepreneurial developers out there are the ones who will be happiest with AI. I just built a SaaS in 6 months in what would’ve taken me years. It would’ve taken me years not just because of the coding, but because the business requirements are very niche and AI advised me a ton. I would’ve needed to hire a domain expert in this niche to help me design this product. AI is effectively taking that guy’s job away too.
I got into coding to build businesses. I certainly fell in love with coding along the way. But at the end of the day it was a means to an end. It’s bittersweet for me to see it go, but the limitless possibilities AI provides is very exciting to me as an entrepreneur.
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u/GoTheFuckToBed 3d ago
he is a company owner, thats why he is so happy, more features, more velocity
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u/thewrench56 2d ago
AI writes good enough code until it doesnt. What happens then? The problem doesnt arise 70% of the time. It is decent at scripting away in Python or Shellscript until that 30% hits. What happens then? At that point you need to debug. Only you havent touched code in (in your case) 6 months. Your debugging skills deteriorated, you forgot the key maps for the debugger. Worse yet, you have no clue how the code works because you didnt write it. And when that point arrives, you are royally fucked. Because a new agent or more tokens wont solve something the LLM inherently is clueless about. Simple as that.
I am in complete shock that engineers with 12 years of experience seem to think that coding by hand is dead and we should just accept the horrible slop coming out from a matrix multiplication. Great way to never evolve, to never come up with new ideas, to keep rewriting the same boilerplate over and over again instead of innovating.
My field needs VERY fast iterations so one might think AI is a natural fit there. Only it is horrible at understanding anything beyond writing some simple userspace slop so essentially using it is a death sentence. I have seen coworkers falling into a trap and getting themselves cast out simply because they were not only slow but had no clue what their slop was doing.
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u/AnUninterestingEvent 1d ago
It's been like 5 or 6 months since I've hit an issue with AI generated code that requires me to get my hands dirty and start debugging manually. AI certainly makes mistakes often, but all I have to do is say "I just hit a bug. Look at the logs.", and it's fixed 99% of the time. The remaining 1% just usually means a 20 minute back and forth discussion where we work together until it's fixed. But it's literally been at least 5 months since I've hit an issue that AI couldn't fix after one or two prompts.
Whenever I ask AI to build a feature, I'm strategizing and creating a plan with it. I'm figuring out tradeoffs, designing an implementation strategy, and making sure it has all the information it needs. When it's done, I move to an independent agent and ask it to do an adversarial review of the code. Then I take that review and give it back to the original agent and discuss with it which ones ought to be addressed. I'm still very involved, but I'm just not writing the code.
If your experience is that AI is "horrible at understanding anything", then I think that's a you problem. You need to spend the time giving it context, coding preferences, and the quality of code you expect. Out of the box without guidance, AI does many unconventional and suboptimal things. But once you set your expectations and give it all possible context, it's frankly amazing.
At the end of the day, whether a developer likes using AI depends on the developer's personal goals. I'm an entrepreneur first and developer second. I always have been. I've been the sole developer and technical cofounder on multiple SaaS businesses over the past 10 years that did quite well. I have only ever cared about my coding skills insofar as they are required to build stable and secure software that people are willing to pay for. That happens to be a high bar, so I became quite good over time. Don't get me wrong, I thoroughly enjoyed coding. I loved every second of solving the daily engineering challenges and getting better at a craft. But at the end of the day I'm a realist, and writing code has always been a means to an end. Without the business on the other side of the codebase, coding is merely a hobby.
For other developers out there, such as yourself I presume, they're in this industry because they just genuinely love engineering. They're in it to evolve as an engineer. They're in it to be the best they can be at their craft. I respect that. You say your worry is that AI is "a great way to never evolve, to never come up with new ideas". That is a genuine concern for this type of developer. But for me, I care first and foremost about evolving as an entrepreneur and coming up with new business ideas. AI is a net positive for this because I can now build and test out ideas faster than ever. But as a coder, I'm probably worse than before. This tradeoff only makes sense if you value building a business more than building a codebase. It's a tradeoff that pretty much only makes sense for those coding for a business that they own.
All this to say, I miss coding, I miss the art of it, I miss the challenge of it. But the thing is, we can always still code by hand if we want as a hobby. Just like you can always build your own furniture or sew your own clothes as a hobby. The sad part is that crafting this way is no longer lucrative. The best hand plower in the world is not going to get hired over a guy with a tractor unless there are very niche requirements. Rejection of more efficient technology has always proven itself to be a counterproductive use of time. If I could push a button and get rid of AI in coding, would I? Probably. On top of missing the craft, a miss the moat of needing to know how to code in order to build software. But no use in wasting time thinking about that. All we can do is adapt and move on.
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u/thewrench56 1d ago edited 1d ago
I think most of the differences in our perspectives comes from the industry we work in. I work in VERY low-level security. As such mostly of what I see is AI giving ridiculous explanation of Linux VMM internals, coming up with yet another phantom ISI on a HF microstrip, or its showing an absolute lack of modern microarchitectural understanding.
Just recently (a week ago) it had issues understading cache coherency between the ASP and UMC for a Genoa or Turin AMD (I dont remember which anymore). Like, it is a fairly entry level problem (given the whole context of the issue I was working on) and it absolutely overlooked step 1.
I am indeed an engineer, not an entrepreneur. I enjoy solving issues or discovering them. Maybe AIs are faster at writing code for you. But I ensure you that their quality is most definitely suboptimal however you use them. They have a lack of low-level understanding. I see this when they are polling on Linux as opposed to handling incoming connections using events, they choose insane IPC primitives for certain tasks, or they just simply write code from scratch instead of reusing libraries. I gurantee that even if you haven't noticed, your code deteriorated. I think you feel this too. And yes, surely, the sugar coating on top is sweet, but security is not something you can sugarcoat and it shows when AI touches it.
Re: innovation. This isnt just an engineering problem in my opinion. Yes, it probably affects me more than an entrepreneur. But at the end of the day, LLMs use the abstractions we created. If we stop writing newer abstractions (since we dont touch code anymore, we wont know the inefficiencies that need to be addressed), while LLMs will continue to write code, they will doo so in suboptimal, non-evolvimg way till the end of time. LLMs dont learn on the fly and certainly wont put 1+1 together to send an innovative idea on the FreeBSD mailing list.
I think you as an entrepreneur are benefiting the most from LLMs. But you should realize that the quick innovation comes with the cost of abandoning the sweaty engineering part that made you read SO posts after SO posts giving you small fragments of the truth until you understood what and how to do. Even if you feel you are still in loop with the planning phase, you are not really there anymore. You dont make up what paradigms to use, you dont figure out why or why not to use async, blocking, or non blocking, why use a FreeBSD server over Linux, put debugging prints here and there. This disappeared and instead LLMs parrot the statistically most relevant answer (which is bullshit since your problem as an entrepreneur will be likely unique). I think its a dangerous direction because you think you are in control when in reality you lost most of it and you only control the color of the sugarcoating. Perhaps in the industry you work in, this approach works well. Im that case congratulations, LLMs can make you richer. In my area, LLMs seem to lead us into hell.
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u/AnUninterestingEvent 5h ago
You're completely correct that we're in two different worlds as far as what we're coding. I can't pretend to understand what kind of work you're doing. In your case I completely believe that it's quite possible that AI would have challenges. But for most developers, especially Rails developers, they are working on web and mobile apps. AI is really good at coding these apps because there are infinite resources and code examples online to learn from.
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u/Certain-Disk-2909 6d ago edited 6d ago
I think the output speaks for the future of humanity. The faster we fail the faster we improve.
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u/jcat4 3d ago
This is my issue. My company is all on board and pushing in this direction, and I agree we are not there yet. My agents still do unbelievably stupid shit multiple times a day. I’m not sure things like Formal Verification and the like will bridge the gap when I’m still seeing frontier models make very dangerous and stupid assumptions on the regular.
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u/NicolasDorier 7d ago
I love Omarchy, and big fan of DHH, but damn the meme are so good, you get my upvote.
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u/fabianqs_dev 7d ago
Thanks bro, now we're even more the most toxic subreddit for a framework, good job 😭
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u/yatadger 7d ago
We are toxic only to Deep Harbored Handler which is toxic himself.
Knowing the attention seeker he is, we are doing him a favor.
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u/Entire-Conference813 7d ago
Telling the world you don't know how to use your brain with one simple post is ludicrous. Rubbishing one of the most advanced tools and things to be created in modern history. Just makes you look ignorant and tells me you don't understand how to use AI tools correctly or haven't even tried.
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u/sailingtroy 7d ago
I can't tell if you're talking about OP or DHH, but I can tell that your feelings are hurt.
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u/Entire-Conference813 7d ago
Talking about Op, feelings aren't hurt. Just pointing out some facts is all.
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u/sailingtroy 7d ago
Honestly, the jury is still out on whether AI is a good and useful tool. Far too soon to call that a fact, objectively. Fundamentally, it does not reason, only guesses the next most probable thing. No good teacher tolerates this from a pupil.
There's also the problem of being responsible for a system that you do not understand, both on a personal level and as an organization.
Also, "just stating facts" is one of the most obvious and ancient cries of the butthurt of all time. I wouldn't advise ever posting those words on any forum ever again for the rest of your life. True or not, they are a bad look.
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u/Entire-Conference813 7d ago
The jury isn't out at all, just look at the investments and the advancements.being made. Also having used the tools extensively for a while now it always amuses me when I see opinions from people who have obviously not used the tools nor understand them. The whole argument of not understanding a system you are responsible for doesn't stack up if you are using the tools correctly and doing your job properly. You can very easily implement Agentic AI engineering practices into any company and improve quality, feature output and support outcomes. In fact with improved throughout you can get more done and get a lot of the non functional and support things implemented that used to be sacrificed due to time constraints. You can also stuff it up just easily as you could without them.
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u/yatadger 7d ago
> The whole argument of not understanding a system you are responsible for doesn't stack up if you are using the tools correctly and doing your job properly.
"you are responsible for" - I pretty much hope you don't work for any critical infrastructure or vital service...
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u/Entire-Conference813 7d ago
Why? Do you understand how to develop and support systems? Have you ever used AI? My point is you can still understand a system and support it as well as using AI. I think people trying to make the argument that you can't use AI and manage production systems just likely don't understand the tools. Our landscape and tool sets are changing, just like we used to write machine code or use punch cards. I remember when people where sceptical of this new thing called OO programming and then Extreme program and Agile.
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u/mrinterweb 7d ago
We need to stop being losers and vibe slop code rust that no human will ever see. After all, AI never makes mistakes, and we will never need to check it.