It has become impossible to tell managers mesmerised by artificial intelligence that the tools are not, in fact, helpful. So employees just play along with the fiction to keep their jobs, writes our tech columnist
Completely disagree. The difficult part of software development was never writing code OR speed of delivery. It was understanding requirements and problem solving. LLMs still can not do either of those things and there is no evidence they ever will be able to.
An example of how harmful LLMs actually are to development can succinctly be described with an issue I had a few weeks ago. I found an issue in an open source project, code was fine if a bit hard to understand. I came up with a PR to fix the problem.
In the time from me checking out the code to submitting the PR, a little less than 24 hours, the maintainer had completely rewritten the entire project with Claude. It was complete nonsense. Incredibly difficult to understand. Abstracting things that didn’t need abstracting. My PR was useless, because the entire project was new. The maintainer definitely didn’t understand the changes either. If a bug came up there’s no way AI would be able to solve it (the bug was still there even though the code was entirely new).
LLMs don’t understand the code. They just make things that look like they will work. And then a human has to maintain it (or keep paying billions of dollars for Claude to try to fix it).
I gave one example. In fact that’s one of the least bad examples. If that was the only problem with LLMs it wouldn’t really be that bad. But the actual reality is so much worse. But I was arguing to the point that the person I replied to made, which was about development. The problems I have with AI are not fixable without literally every government on earth taking a stand, which just will not happen.
Using LLMs for development is fantastic as long as you know how to use it, which is how it is for every tool.
The difference with LLMs and other tools is that anyone can use them easily and get incredible results……as long as you don’t look under the covers. The developers that use them well are getting results and code that are indistinguishable from code they’d write themselves.
the person in your scenario is just fkin stupid. When people say that llms are helpful for coding, they aren’t talking about telling an llm to rewrite an entire codebase.
You are right, but right now we are living in a very messy reality where it’s hard to know who’s being stupid and who is using it well. One person I know that, well, I was never a huge fan of his work but at least it was somewhat serviceable is now all-in on AI and his code has been rewritten in a similar manner as the parent poster comments. He’s got no idea how it works or how it should worked, the AI decided to rewrite it in an entirely different language, and it’s a buggy mess and it never fixes the bugs without making new bugs. Then he hit his token quota 3 weeks early and basically said he was going to stop working on it because he no longer could manually work the codebase. He didn’t ask for a rewrite, but AI advised him that his language choice was a poor fit and reworked things in another language, one that none of us use to that level of seriousness. It also made it largely based on super convoluted regular expressions.
The problem is that the leadership is singing the praises of these people, they were on their ‘leaderboards’ of AI adoption and much like the craze of praising “lines of codes”, we are neck deep in the most stupid non-technical evaluation of technical work you could imagine.
I’m not a kid doing some vibe coding, of course I know what I want and basically know how to implement it, the AI is just helping me writing it, auto-complete and all.
I’m sorry but to me your comment is a bit misguided. You raise extremely valid point and are completely right in what you say, and yet all your argument fails to prove that software development hasn’t changed.
The difficult part was understanding requirements and problem solving: absolutely true. Yet most of the time of a developer was spent in writing code. Now it’s spent refining the analysis so that the LLM stops producing slop. And many programmers are doing it, even with all its downsides, because for them the fun part is understanding the requirements and problem solving, not writing code nor delivering fast. They are delegating those tasks to a machine, even with all the risks and issues.
Your second point (and the anecdote) further proves how programming changed. Before it was unthinkable that some random person, likely with no clue about what they are doing, would refactor an entire codebase in a night.
Both are massive changes. For the best? Arguably not, but I seriously doubt there will be any going back now.
Now it’s spent refining the analysis so that the LLM stops producing slop
The thing is that actually doing this isn’t faster than writing the code, robs the practitioner of learning, and more often than not doesn’t actually happen, so you have a harder to maintain codebase with more bugs and less knowledgeable developers to maintain it.
Edit: and as a fun bonus accelerates glacier melting!
This is a point that really sticks with me. Using it for the sometimes spot on cakewalk segments is a fairly productive win. By the time you stubbornly insist on driving it entirely blackbox with chat and trying to get the right results without actually touching code… Well, even when it works, it’s often more work than just doing it yourself.
Someone rebased a UI I worked on in a new version of the UI framework. As a result, there was this one odd gap in the UI in one specific place. A vibe coder spent 3 hours back and forth with the AI trying to get it to correct the gap and finally submitted their merge request. Hundreds and hundreds of lines of CSS. So I declined the merge request, open the gui, looked at the gap, hit f12, adjusted a single padding statement, and it was all good. People are struggling with defining all sorts of criteria and rigging it to let it try and try and try again and hopefully laid out every contingency, every corner case, and spent hours laying the ground work and could have done similar in a more straightforward way.
Using it for the sometimes spot on cakewalk segments is a fairly productive win.
One thing that absolutely blows my mind is how many people will say how much time it saves then with repetitive or boilerplate code. It is obvious these people have never actually tried to optimize their workflow even a little bit before. Regex replace, snippets, and keyboard macros have existed in text editors forever and are actually deterministic.
I think you’re right in general. I think juniors and those who havent yet had experience are not going to understand a goddamn thing and produce broken, insecure, unmaintainable slop.
I’ve written my share of garbage code – completely by hand! And i’m much better for it.
Once you have that experience, once you’ve written a few backends and frontends, there’s not much left to understand. Move the data from here to there. Display it, transform it, slice it up. For webdev AI is a huge force multiplier. I can make a dozen features or apps in the time it used to take me to learn one framework I was curious about. It even helps me learn faster because of how quickly I can test new patterns and ideas.
There’s certainly a right way to use it if you want to continue being edified, burning the planet down aside.
Unfortunately many people would rather spin the wheel for a chance to win magically produced functioning code, rather than doing the work themselves with sure results - even if it takes the same or more time.
And the kind of current politicians there are around the world proves that most people don’t give a fuck about the ice-caps (though I would also argue that it’s not so much the random person calling an LLM that is poisoning the waters - even though it does have a non-negligible effect -, rather it’s massive sociopaths in charge of the companies creating LLMs that are perfectly fine with destroying the environment and other people’s money in a vain dream of being the owner of some kind of “new order”)
Completely disagree. The difficult part of software development was never writing code OR speed of delivery. It was understanding requirements and problem solving. LLMs still can not do either of those things and there is no evidence they ever will be able to.
An example of how harmful LLMs actually are to development can succinctly be described with an issue I had a few weeks ago. I found an issue in an open source project, code was fine if a bit hard to understand. I came up with a PR to fix the problem.
In the time from me checking out the code to submitting the PR, a little less than 24 hours, the maintainer had completely rewritten the entire project with Claude. It was complete nonsense. Incredibly difficult to understand. Abstracting things that didn’t need abstracting. My PR was useless, because the entire project was new. The maintainer definitely didn’t understand the changes either. If a bug came up there’s no way AI would be able to solve it (the bug was still there even though the code was entirely new).
LLMs don’t understand the code. They just make things that look like they will work. And then a human has to maintain it (or keep paying billions of dollars for Claude to try to fix it).
Dumb people use their tools incorrectly. That’s all you’re describing.
I gave one example. In fact that’s one of the least bad examples. If that was the only problem with LLMs it wouldn’t really be that bad. But the actual reality is so much worse. But I was arguing to the point that the person I replied to made, which was about development. The problems I have with AI are not fixable without literally every government on earth taking a stand, which just will not happen.
Using LLMs for development is fantastic as long as you know how to use it, which is how it is for every tool.
The difference with LLMs and other tools is that anyone can use them easily and get incredible results……as long as you don’t look under the covers. The developers that use them well are getting results and code that are indistinguishable from code they’d write themselves.
the person in your scenario is just fkin stupid. When people say that llms are helpful for coding, they aren’t talking about telling an llm to rewrite an entire codebase.
You are right, but right now we are living in a very messy reality where it’s hard to know who’s being stupid and who is using it well. One person I know that, well, I was never a huge fan of his work but at least it was somewhat serviceable is now all-in on AI and his code has been rewritten in a similar manner as the parent poster comments. He’s got no idea how it works or how it should worked, the AI decided to rewrite it in an entirely different language, and it’s a buggy mess and it never fixes the bugs without making new bugs. Then he hit his token quota 3 weeks early and basically said he was going to stop working on it because he no longer could manually work the codebase. He didn’t ask for a rewrite, but AI advised him that his language choice was a poor fit and reworked things in another language, one that none of us use to that level of seriousness. It also made it largely based on super convoluted regular expressions.
The problem is that the leadership is singing the praises of these people, they were on their ‘leaderboards’ of AI adoption and much like the craze of praising “lines of codes”, we are neck deep in the most stupid non-technical evaluation of technical work you could imagine.
I’m not a kid doing some vibe coding, of course I know what I want and basically know how to implement it, the AI is just helping me writing it, auto-complete and all.
I’m sorry but to me your comment is a bit misguided. You raise extremely valid point and are completely right in what you say, and yet all your argument fails to prove that software development hasn’t changed.
The difficult part was understanding requirements and problem solving: absolutely true. Yet most of the time of a developer was spent in writing code. Now it’s spent refining the analysis so that the LLM stops producing slop. And many programmers are doing it, even with all its downsides, because for them the fun part is understanding the requirements and problem solving, not writing code nor delivering fast. They are delegating those tasks to a machine, even with all the risks and issues.
Your second point (and the anecdote) further proves how programming changed. Before it was unthinkable that some random person, likely with no clue about what they are doing, would refactor an entire codebase in a night.
Both are massive changes. For the best? Arguably not, but I seriously doubt there will be any going back now.
The thing is that actually doing this isn’t faster than writing the code, robs the practitioner of learning, and more often than not doesn’t actually happen, so you have a harder to maintain codebase with more bugs and less knowledgeable developers to maintain it.
Edit: and as a fun bonus accelerates glacier melting!
This is a point that really sticks with me. Using it for the sometimes spot on cakewalk segments is a fairly productive win. By the time you stubbornly insist on driving it entirely blackbox with chat and trying to get the right results without actually touching code… Well, even when it works, it’s often more work than just doing it yourself.
Someone rebased a UI I worked on in a new version of the UI framework. As a result, there was this one odd gap in the UI in one specific place. A vibe coder spent 3 hours back and forth with the AI trying to get it to correct the gap and finally submitted their merge request. Hundreds and hundreds of lines of CSS. So I declined the merge request, open the gui, looked at the gap, hit f12, adjusted a single padding statement, and it was all good. People are struggling with defining all sorts of criteria and rigging it to let it try and try and try again and hopefully laid out every contingency, every corner case, and spent hours laying the ground work and could have done similar in a more straightforward way.
One thing that absolutely blows my mind is how many people will say how much time it saves then with repetitive or boilerplate code. It is obvious these people have never actually tried to optimize their workflow even a little bit before. Regex replace, snippets, and keyboard macros have existed in text editors forever and are actually deterministic.
I think you’re right in general. I think juniors and those who havent yet had experience are not going to understand a goddamn thing and produce broken, insecure, unmaintainable slop.
I’ve written my share of garbage code – completely by hand! And i’m much better for it.
Once you have that experience, once you’ve written a few backends and frontends, there’s not much left to understand. Move the data from here to there. Display it, transform it, slice it up. For webdev AI is a huge force multiplier. I can make a dozen features or apps in the time it used to take me to learn one framework I was curious about. It even helps me learn faster because of how quickly I can test new patterns and ideas.
There’s certainly a right way to use it if you want to continue being edified, burning the planet down aside.
Fully agree.
Unfortunately many people would rather spin the wheel for a chance to win magically produced functioning code, rather than doing the work themselves with sure results - even if it takes the same or more time. And the kind of current politicians there are around the world proves that most people don’t give a fuck about the ice-caps (though I would also argue that it’s not so much the random person calling an LLM that is poisoning the waters - even though it does have a non-negligible effect -, rather it’s massive sociopaths in charge of the companies creating LLMs that are perfectly fine with destroying the environment and other people’s money in a vain dream of being the owner of some kind of “new order”)