I like AI tools. I'm bullish on AI tools. I'm productive with AI tools.

But...

At my job the prevailing sentiment is everything should be easy and fast with AI now so why bother doing anything that can't be done with AI.

Talking with customers can't be done with AI so we'll just ask Claude what our customers think.

Collaborating on a new product design together can't be done with AI so we'll just ask Claude to design it.

Strategy is hard so we'll just chat with Claude about what we should do and accept the output.

And so people generate a bland ticket with Claude and I'm asked to implement completely "souless" feature that is generic and boring and not important to anybody.

Oh and it should only take a few days because code is free now.

We ship it, nobody cares about it because the only thing that's put in any effort is an LLM, and move onto the next thing.

Before LLMs features had humans attached to them and working together to get them out the door meant something. Plus, a lot more effort went into to making sure it was the right feature and a good product because all the people involved wanted their name to be associated with success.

With LLMs nobody cares if the LLM was wrong, its the LLM that was wrong not Jacob or Jamie.

It's like we are producing empty shells of technology. The code is there and the feature is there, but nobody cares. Even the customers don't care because we ship a thing nobody wants and we tell people about it with bland generated marketing and announcement documentation.

And yeah. I'm super productive and shipping more and more and more and more features but I feel like I've done is ship skeletons of web apps when before I used to ship living breathing applications.

This is very similar to how I feel.

We get scolded for asking other people on our team questions sometimes, and get told "you should ask claude that", I don't even communicate with my team anymore, instead of asking someone with domain expertise about something specific I just ask claude now... I have no interest in my work whatsoever anymore, it used to be what I did night and day, happily.

Non-engineering higher ups use claude to do system design, use claude to write docs, throw together an MVP that is barely and often not at all functional. Then we have to actually make the mess work... of course, with more claude. I hate everything about it.

Damn, that's sad!

This is a habit ("you should ask Claude that") that will greatly affect the quality of software in the long run.

First, most software is already a hot mess.

Second, LLM code can be less of a hot mess than human written code if you put in the time to train/prompt/verify/review.

Generating perfect well patterned SOLID and unit tested code with no warnings or anti-patterns has never been easier.

The only people who are going to put in the time, are people who care enough to. The problem is you have people who didn’t care before who were equipped with a garden hose. Now that they have a fully pressurized fire hose they can make more of a mess faster.

This is so on point that I want to cry.

Then they should be easy to defeat. Why are you complaining?

As an author of fine literature, these million monkeys on typewriters simply upset my sense of dignity. And to imagine the impoverished prose so many readers shalt forthwith be perusing!

Defeat in what aspect?

Compete with, for jobs, customers, investment, etc.

Maybe. But it depends on the metric. It seems like orgs are focused on PR count and token usage. Issues caused by poor code are often lagging indicators so it’s asymmetrical in that aspect.

Write lots of code now and statistically look great, while the impact won’t be felt for a much larger range of time.

With the job search and whatnot then yeah, caring becomes a lot more important. That’s true.

Hard disagree. LLMs are fantastic for fixing bad architecture that's been around for a decade because nobody was willing to touch it. I can have it write tons and tons of sanity checks and then have it rewrite functionality piece by piece with far more verification than what I'd get from most engineers.

It's not immediate, it still takes weeks if you want to actually do QA and roll out to prod, but it's definitely better than the pre-LLM alternatives.

Yeah but you care which is my exact point.

How is this different from every single technological iteration?

Because there is a certain point where barrier to entry prevents meaningful competition once winner-take-all power laws start kicking in, and stability hitherto has been predisposed on having a plurality of non interrelated competitors to ensure no one man's quirks drives too much of societies theoretical output.

AI will make this dynamic worse, and it's got the extra danger of the default banal way of applying the technology in fact encourages it's application to that end.

I don't really see it that way because most software companies overestimate the importance of fantastic software vs merely adequate software, and most times good sales development, support, and negotiation skills are what helps actually sell.

I also don't think that the commodification of programming is a substitute for things like understanding your customers, having good taste for design, and designing software in a way that is maximally iterable.

>First, most software is already a hot mess.

That the industry was already routinely dealing with fires of it's own creation is not a valid reason to start cooking with gasoline.

But we aren't cooking with gas. We are cooking with a more controlled burner than ever that can download a clean code claude skill and be committing better code than you or I could write.

What would normally be considered overengineered gold plating is "free" now.

Like with a lot of things in this space, it depends where you invest your effort. If you care about quality design and good code, you can definitely get there - but that doesn't happen by default.

With the right investment, we could certainly have tooling that creates and maintains very good designs out of the box. My bet is that we'll continue chasing quick and hacky code, mostly because that's the majority of the code that it was trained on, and because the majority of people seem to be interested in a quick result vs a long-term maintainable one.

Right, but it takes one to know one. Many don’t have the ability to decipher what’s good stable output or not

What do you mean?

Organizations usually are not looking for employees who change things that work fine, just because it disagrees with the "vision" of one employee.

What's a good example of human-led design?

I'm interested to know why you think data structures are important. AI is pretty good at reasoning out data structures problems.

LLM does not "reason".

This should be clear by the fact that it can solve complex math problems without understanding how to count.

Yeah, even 2 years ago you could tell it to make a service with minimal instructions and it would usually guess the right data structure.

Often better than many developers I've worked with come up with.

Forget what AI can and cannot do. What can you do?

If you are only doing data entry into an LLM without understanding how any of this actually works then what do I need you for? I can just promote the janitor at half the cost to do your job.

You can tax reach though.

The "overwhelming majority" standard for harm seems odd when you use 15% of smokers getting harmed as an example. 15% is not an overwhelming majority.

Is there a widely used phrase which represents the 95-97% range? One did not come to my head.

If there isn't a phrase then just say the numbers...

We are way past this question now.

I kept a personal license for while because I thought Windsurf kept memories a little better than Claude.

But now since I use Claude at work I switched to keep my home and work stacks similar.

All that cleanup can be done with AI and then you can add guidance to the codebase so that the next LLM will do a better job at conforming.