Jonathan Blow: AI Didn't Fix Coding Because Coding Was Never the Bottleneck
Jonathan Blow – If AI Solved Coding, Why Is My Software Still the Same? [video]
In a talk that answers its own provocative question, Jonathan Blow argues that AI tools haven't transformed software because organizations and people haven't changed what they optimize for or how they work. Commenters on Hacker News largely agree: many teams are discovering that coding was never their real bottleneck, and that communication and coordination — not code output — remain the hard part. A few note exceptions, like personalized software replacing subscriptions.
A lot of people are discovering that coding was never the bottleneck in their orgs and don't know what to do differently.
- barbariangrunge
Blow argues software development hasn't advanced much since the early 2000s. As a game developer, I want to offer a counter point.
In the last 3 years, there have been a lot more indie games of far higher quality than we used to get. I'm thinking of the RTS space right now. The Scouring for example. We went from having nobody but Blizzard able to make something that complex to several games with outstanding performance and complexity, often with their own custom game engines that are not only working but working better than I remember wc3/sc2 working at launch.
I don't know how much of a role AI is playing in those games, but I think the performance and complexity of indie games is shooting up and we are seeing very, very small teams make things that large teams struggled with in the past. Honestly, I think indie studios are outperforming AAA in most ways besides spend and length and art budget --and yet, it's the indies who are making their own game engines these days, isn't it?
(btw, we have to also admit that many of these game engine builders look to blow for inspiration (to carmack too), and their architectures are not what you'll find at typical saas companies. Game coding is complicated in a really fun way I didn't get doing plumbing on web projects, speaking for myself)
- _aavaa_
The video does actually answer its own title, which is refreshing.
And I agree, it’s because organizations and people haven’t changed (yet, if you’re being positive) what it is they’re optimizing for and how they do work. AI gives you more of what you want and gives it faster, that doesn’t on its own change the culture or goals of a company.
- tracerbulletx
Good supporting evidence for this is that it is changing your software dramatically if you're making your own personalized software to replace subscription software. That works incredibly well. Also there are some examples of companies doing huge swings they wouldn't have done without it like the AWS emulator that just came out.
- rafaelRiv
It is not the same, it is worst. Nothing seems functional nowadays
- dandersch
This is now the second or third time that he retells his experiences with AI tools being 1) an excel script thing to export a csv or something and 2) predicting sales numbers of his game. I don't mean to discredit him based on that, but it would be much more interesting to hear about him throwing the most ambitious thing he could think of at a frontier model and how that turned out, rather than these ~2023 toy examples.
- CrimsonCape
Chatgpt dropped in 2022, which means LLM based AI is like 4 years old. I think it's undeniably improving constantly, in some cases noticeably so. Sure there is argument to be made over the improvement velocity (is improvement slowing?).
So what argument is there to be bearish on it when it is in infancy? If you just want to go with "the quality sucks" well, sure, but it sucked a lot more two years ago, which means it sucks a lot less today, and in 2 more years, it will suck even less. I'd use different adjectives personally, cause I find it's pretty decent now (opus 5.5) and i'm pretty optimistic about what comes next.
- fuussssip
Jonathan Blow is one guy. He made a couple pretty good games. He's not particularly visionary when it comes to software development. Or perhaps he is visionary but it remains to be seen if his vision for technology is really material.
He regularly denies the use of new technology that is genuinely useful, and is a fairly conservative dude (I mean in the non-political sense. I do not know his politics. He may be a conservative politically as well, but that would be independent of the point I'm making.)
I've worked with many engineers at many different scopes. Big companies, indie darlings, web services, games. Games is always the last to adapt, always the last to think that anything they didn't invent is worth their time. Blow has experience in that domain, and is colored by working in it, but I don't think he knows what's happening on the bleeding edge very well.
- brainzap
He sometimes has no clue what he talks about, he spoke against Docker and other technology that makes my everyday life easier