AI Can Make You Suck Faster Too
The promise of AI-driven development speed hasn't delivered the wave of revolutionary startups we expected. Instead, it's flooded the internet with low-quality content and insecure apps, while leaders mistakenly believe LLMs have eliminated the need for technical expertise. The author, an experienced engineer, experiments with AI coding tools and finds them dangerously inadequate, arguing that blind trust in AI without domain knowledge leads to catastrophic results.
AI will make you faster at shoveling shit if you only know how to shovel shit.
- orwin
I now started to us AI to help review my juniors PRs, because I couldn't keep up with the amount of code they ship. It started poorly, but now I have my method: I first read the code and flag the lines I'm not sure about, then ask any frontier model (I like Claude here for analysis, even if I don't use it for the rest) to explain the PR and to put effort on the parts I flagged (basically explain in detail the code, not only the PR), and to search through the libraries. Sometimes it notices something I would have missed (like missing an 'order_by' or off by one errors, because the underlying lib wasn't coded like the original AI pretended it was).
I also changed the way I do review because it has been more than a year and the juniors/new hire are still lost, wether on domain knowledge for the older new hire, or just capabilities for the juniors, and discussing with other departments, it's the same for like 95% of them. Now, rather than correcting the PR or adding a request for change, I add a whole unit/functional test to the PR and let that as an exercise to pass the test. They can use AI but I tell them to try to find what part of the code doesn't work before generating the fix, hopefully they'll take ownership of the code if I keep doing that.
- sriniwasx
The code smell in my repos are at an all time high and I'm a senior dev, can't image how worse vibe coders have it.
- Zakis1
> Uses only DeepSeek and comes to the conclusion that LLM's are bad at coding?
Why not use actual frontier models, and you know do some real research, before writing a blog post?
- padolsey
Bit of a humbling/jarring moment when I realized that people are doing real paid work using LLMs that they could not otherwise do. I mean, it's quite obvious I suppose. But up until now I just assumed it was only a (massive) catalyst for things people would already be able to do with enough time. But nope -- it seems people are right now employed in roles that they would not be able to fulfil the tasks within if AI wasn't there telling them what to write/say/produce. Nobody is really going to come out and say that ... it's not something the less-AI-literate superiors would take kindly to.
- MrScruff
In general, the frontier models are not capable of reliably authoring non-trivial code without careful oversight yet. They are great at producing code that can pass tests, but not neccessarily a code review. This means if you care about code quality you still need a human in a loop understanding what has been done, and that becomes the bottleneck. And less disciplined folks will indeed become increasingly dependent.
However, over time the complexity of problems where you can get away with less/no oversight is increasing. And the models are already great at solving certain classes of problems where one doesn't really care that much about code quality, that wouldn't have even been attempted in a pre-LLM world. Over the weekend I was using Claude to add features to the compiled (no source available) firmware of one of my audio devices, adding workflow features by patching assembly and custom DSP code.
In coding, as with other areas, what's emerging is jagged intelligence.
- dr_dshiv
“I wanted to see if I can get in on this 10x magic. I decided to put my money where my mouth was and I bought $10 worth of DeepSeek credits to use with a project I was working on.“
Wow. I guess that’s the punchline!
- Lapalux
Pre-AI, the limiter on my bad code was how much code I could type in a day.....
Now with AI I can 10x my output and 10x my bad code!
- _superposition_
I think my 10x comes elsewhere than writing code. For ex llms are much better at bash than me. So good I don't have to leave my shell. Jira? ServiceNow? Ha! Claude you go update that ticket. Go check my history and git commits and write me my standup. I'm not leaving the terminal.