I've worked for CEOs and managers that would insist on ridiculous ideas. Like that time a CEO (let's call him Cedric) came in with a printed powerpoint slide that had a screenshot of the website with a "login form" drawn on top of it.

Cedric: "I need you guys to put this onto that scrunt board thing and make this before friday".

Me (tech lead at that time): "But what features would users need login for? Where or whom needs the profile data? We'd need to work this out in detail and plan it. Certainly not even this month".

Cedric: "I don't know, it's for you to figure out". and then "It can't be hard, it's just two squares one for a username one for a password" (he forgot about the submit-button, the third "square", he didn't even fathom the idea that something has to lie "behind" the "squares").

I recall this anecdote whenever I feel anxious about whether soon "stakeholders" can just chat to an AI agent and have it build features, rather than hire me to do so. Sure, a lot of them will be able to. But there's always Cedrics. Those who not only fail to communicate their ideas in a way that even an AI agent would understand, they lack any understanding of what tradeoffs of their requested features are.

The Cedric's would be happy with an AI agent that complies and starts churning away. An agent that blindly accepts any request and builds feature upon feature. Making their product worse in every sense: unusable, unmaintainable, debt-ridden, security-nightmares.

Their agent will build features that are plain illegal. Or features that users hate, or confuse them. It will oblige requests that drive users away, or changes parts that users/integrations rely on. Their AI agent will gladly add a "form" to extract all PII from their database, but on request, will remove the authorization from it. Because "you are absolutely right. If we don't link to the page from the menu, no-one can reach it".

I'm not making the last one up. Another "Cedric" alike recently hired me to look at his vibe-coded app because his go-to developer gave up and dropped the project. It had loads of such extractors, dashboards and overviews. Online. Unauthenticated. His claude, however, did add the pages to the sitemap, so a customer found their private data on google and contacted "Cedric", after which he asked me.

No, AI is getting smarter, but as long as the "Cedrics" remain as stupid as ever, I don't fear for my job.

“Find the issues in this code” vs “write this feature” are different problems.

The first one is easier because the feedback loop is llm to code/test and trivially scalable.

The second one is llm to human which is going to be slower because it can’t read your mind.

The tighter and more deterministic the loop the more llms excel.

make a bunch of "build the feature" vs "heres a detailed spec" prompts, and see which one does better.

if you take out the AI boogieman, and instead go with "next token prediction" then "people are doing it wrong" is much more reasonable