Comment by PUSH_AX 2 days ago
I think there are still lots of code “artisans” who are completely dogmatic about what code should look like, once the tunnel vision goes and you realise the code just enables the business it all of a sudden becomes a velocity God send.
There was this recent post about a Cloudflare OAuth client where the author checked in all the AI prompts, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44159166.
The author of the library (kentonv) comments in the HN thread that he said it took him a few days to write the library with AI help, while he thinks it would have taken weeks or months to write manually.
Also, while it may be technically true we're "two years in", I don't think this is a fair assessment. I've been trying AI tools for a while, and the first time I felt "OK, now this is really starting to enhance my velocity" was with the release of Claude 4 in May of this year.
But that example is of writing a green field library that deals with an extremely well documented spec. While impressive, this isn’t what 99% of software engineering is. I’m generally a believer/user but this is a poor example to point at and say “look, gains”.
Do you have some magical insight into every codebase in existence? No? Ok then…
The issue is not with how code looks. It's with what it does, and how it does it. You don't have to be an "artisan" to notice the issues moi2388 mentioned.
The actual difference is between people who care about the quality of the end result, and the experience of users of the software, and those who care about "shipping quickly" no matter the state of what they're producing.
This difference has always existed, but ML tools empower the latter group much more than the former. The inevitable outcome of this will be a stark decline of average software quality, and broad user dissatisfaction. While also making scammers and grifters much more productive, and their scams more lucrative.
There are very good reason that code should look a certain way and it comes from years of experience and the fact that code is written once but read and modified much more.
When the first bugs come up you see that the velocity was not god sent and you end up hiring one of the many "LLM code fixer" companies that are poping up like mushrooms.
No, they're not. It's critically important if you're part of an engineering team.
If everyone does their own thing, the codebase rapidly turns to mush and is unreadable.
And you need humans to be able to read it the moment the code actually matters and needs to stand up to adversaries. If you work with money or personal information, someone will want to steal that. Or you may have legal requirements you have to meet.
It matters.
You’ve made a sweeping statement there, there are swathes of teams working in startups still trying to find product market fit. Focusing on quality in these situations is folly, but that’s not even the point. My point is you can ship quality to any standard using an llm, even your standards. If you can’t that’s a skill issue on your part.
I'm not a code "artisan", but I do believe companies should be financially responsible when they have security breaches.
Two years in and we are waiting to see all you people (who are free of our tunnel vision) fly high with your velocity. I don't see anyone, am I doing something wrong?
Your words predict an explosion of unimaginary magnitude for new code and for new buisnesses. Where is it? Nowhere.
Edit: And dont start about how you vibed a SaaS service, show income numbers from paying customers (not buyouts)