I can understand skepticism to a degree, and even fundamentally believing that AI is bad for all sorts of reasons, but I am becoming more and more perplexed at the certainty behind statements like this one. How are you so certain that AI development is this doomed? It just hasn't matched my experience at all, and I wonder what your experience is that has driven you to this level of certainty about the certain doom of AI coding?

Is it just a philosophical belief that AI is morally bad? Or have you actually used AI to build things and feel confident that you have explored the space enough to come to such a strong conclusion?

I have been writing code every day for over 30 years, and have been doing it professionally for over 20. I have seen fads come and go, and I have seen real developments that have changed the way I do what I do numerous times. The more experience and the more projects I create with AI, the more certain I am that this is a lasting and fundamental change to how we produce software, and how we use computers generally. I have seen AI get better, and I have seen myself get more proficient at using it to get real work done, work that has already been tested with real world, production, workloads.

You can hate that it is happening, and hate the way working with AI feels, but that doesn't mean it is not providing real value for people and doing real work.

I’m a bit curious with these takes. Arguing in good faith - is the general assumption that people who use AI/agents/harnesses don’t ship features? We’ve been all in Claude Code since ~Septemberish, and have been able to successfully track the boost. Like the features that we ship that get used in production. Both from infrastructure side, and business logic implementations. Frontend and backend.

I don’t think people are wasting too much time. Although, I do agree most of these posts are just bs, including this one. But AI-development has been a thing across a lot of companies in the world.

Right, just like all the productivity lost when people stopped using paper ledgers to mess around with these so-called 'databases'

if i wanted to find out the answer to my question, i would need to:

- open the browser

- google "john repo"

- find the website

- copy the repo name

- open the terminal

- cd

- git clone

- try to find the file i want

- read the whole file to find the answer

= answer

i now do:

- "john repo question" = answer

I work on projects where we measure the output. There's nothing "pseudo" about it.

i treat it like Minecraft automation - it's just for funsies and to pass the time haha

I don't think agentic workflows are there yet, but implementing skills to manually call and use while working side by side with an AI is definitely nice - our company is focused a lot on sandboxing right now and having safe skills

I don't think we've gotten feature development well yet, but the review skills + grafana skills they wrote have been pretty solid

Trick is to not burn too much time worrying about the perfect skills and this and that. See a lot of people filling skills with LLM junk, or overdoing rules that start confusing the LLM. Just try Vanilla, see something you don't like? Then you make a skill and funnel the LLM to use it for the style of task it's working on. E.g. database work is a mixed bag with LLMs, they tend to do work in totally different styles if you leave them unconstrained.

Agents are unbelievably useful at helping takeover and refactor messy codebases though. I just started taking over this monstrous nightmare of a codebase, truly ancient code the bulk of it written over 10+ years ago in PHP. With the use of Claude / Codex I was able to port over the vast majority of the existing legacy storefront and laid the groundwork for centralizing the 10-20k LOC mega-controller logic over to reusable repo/service patterns.

Just shit that would've taking years previously, is achievable in under a month.

I'm sure lots of people felt this way about steam power too.

I couldn't agree more, just because I know I already wasted months and pulled the plug :D

This will be another Microservices moment in our industry.

You haven’t made money from their use yet?

They will lie to themselves and deny it.

You’ll get downvoted for this hearsay!