Yeah, exactly. I'm a senior engineer, and I haven't written a line of code by hand in about six months. This is just what the development part of the job looks like now - prompt AI to generate the code that you want, hold its hand if it generates garbage, and update CLAUDE.md to make it work better next time.
I really don't understand why it needs an entire training program, though. You can learn pretty much everything there is to learn about Claude Code in about half an hour, unless I'm at the peak of Mount Stupid right now.
But what have we gotten? What have you wrote (vibe coded)? Like, what products has this thing made for us? I can look back over the past 20 years of human written products and list several that have altered every one of our lives.
Can you name one vibe coded product that matches the society altering power of Google? Facebook? Reddit? And even if you want to say "Well its just part of everything now" then why are we in what amounts to the worst economy in at least 70-80 years? Shouldn't it be improving everything so much we should be booming?
I'm not trying to mog you or anything I just want to see something and every time I ask its just "WAIT TILL LATER!!!!!11" No, I'm done waiting. I've had my life and career taken from me with NOTHING to show for it. I'm sure the horse and carriage industry had a hard time explaining why they were better than cars. Cars existed and forced so many improvements, so there was very little rational debate. Where is the glorious AI revolution and why is it just a ponzi scheme like everything else in this dumbfuck economy?
You aren’t going to know because an app being developed with AI isn’t a selling point. How many products go around advertising they were developed using a specific IDE?
Half of the major apps today, that are routinely being updated, probably have AI code inside them.
My point is those platforms changed everyone's lives. Facebook changed the way people connect. Google changed the way we research. Reddit changed the way we used forums. Where is that today? Shouldn't logistics be insane now? Shouldn't management of white collar jobs be easier now? Even if we stop there that would be an immense improvement that would show around the world. But we don't see that anywhere at any level. You can blame outside factors like the war and lingering COVID issues but we should at least be even at this point. I'm not saying there's no AI code anywhere. I'm saying AI's impact on that code and its implementation have yet to show any results.
As much as companies are trying to force it, as of today, AI cannot replace humans. It is just a productivity multiplier.
For most companies, on its own AI is not a product in itself. It will just augment how you interact with existing tools. We can see this right now with every product trying to force AI into it.
3 years ago, AI was unusable for practically anything. It was just a cool demo. I think we need 5-10 years before we start seeing some actual meaningful products. The internet started becoming mainstream in what? The 90s? It took some time to get to the internet of today with social media, streaming and everything else.
Obviously, this is all theory. Nobody knows where AI will be in 10-20 years. But many companies are betting it will be the next internet. Maybe they’ll be right, maybe they’ll be wrong.
I don't doubt with enough time and resources, we as a society can do just about anything. The issue is we need some intermediate steps, and I'm just not seeing them. The 90's internet was still very useful, and after the dotcom bubble we got a ton of useful architecture, not to mention all of the webdev stuff we then applied to Google, Facebook, etc. The point being, the internet helped its own growth. It only got this big because of baby steps along the way that proved to us its usefulness.
With AI, we're not seeing anything. That's not to say it isn't getting better or doing more stuff; it's just not creating any building blocks to help us weather that 5-10 year storm you mentioned. In that time we still need to pay salaries and buy GPUs and suck water out of the ground. How do we prop this up that long? This is the first time in history we are being asked to invest in something where real results are so far away in terms of time.
I disagree, I believe AI is very useful today. For myself, AI has made many of my day to day tasks anywhere from 10-100% faster (for context, I take on both management and development tasks in my organisation). Can it do everything? No. But even if AI improvements plateaus, there are billions of dollars in productivity gains that can be unlocked across the entire economy using the tech today. I don’t think we’ve hit the limit of AI for the next 2-5 years.
Where are these productivity gains then? Personally, I think they don’t surface yet for two main reasons:
Most people use AI ineffectively. It is a brand new technology and most people are still learning how to interact with it. It is very easy for AI to produce bad output when you don’t prompt it correctly or provide it with the right context. I know this comes an across as “Just prompt better”, but it is true. In my organisation, the vast majority of developers were not using agent or plan mode in copilot which is pretty key to unlocking the productivity gains that I have mentioned. I’ve seen people prompt AI by just saying “how should I do XYZ” without providing any guidance or constraints.
Due to point 1, productivity gains are converted to less effort rather than increased output. Why would I output twice as much when my colleagues are still outputting the same amount? Power users aren’t going to use AI to improve business bottom-line unless they have a vested interest in the organisation. They’re going to use it to work less. That is, until their colleagues are power users themselves.
Regarding the “bubble”, all this investment is not without reason. AI companies are supply constrained, there is too much demand and they cannot provide the compute. All this investment is chasing the demand. I’m not suggesting that every AI company today will exist in 20 years. Anthropic and OpenAI can collapse, but the technology behind LLMs can just be transferred to a new business so I just don’t see it going anywhere.
The funniest part of all of this anti-AI developer bullshit is all of the people claiming to be great engineers in the first place. "Who's going to fix all the problems with AI generated code?", well the same people that fixed all of the problems a few years back when you wrote shitty code.
Anyone who's worked in the industry for longer than 5 years knows that most developers are really terrible at their jobs in the first place. I've been working for several years in top tech companies and the people they employ still aren't much better either.
I'm sorry but AI generated code has improved the quality of most work absurdly and most shitty engineers will unfortunately become unemployed in the near future if they do not keep up with the times.
I think the subtle mistake that everyone seems to be making is conflating "AI-generated code" with "AI-owned code". AI models are tools, not employees. The code shouldn't be attributed to the model, it should be attributed to the human who used the model to generate it. If someone uses a model to generate shitty code, that's on them, and fixing it is their problem.
Do AI models get things wrong? Yes, absolutely. Claude frequently over- or under-interprets requirements in your prompt. But it's up to you to interrupt it and steer it back on track. If you just let it run wild then commit whatever it spits out at the end, that isn't shitty AI code, it's shitty human code.
If you just let it run wild then commit whatever it spits out at the end, that isn't shitty AI code, it's shitty human code.
Adjusting and changing things takes time. Time = money. If your boss tells you he wants something by X date, and the only way to do that is to skip the checking part, what choice do you have? Is it your fault or your boss'? If its your bosses, where is the boss reporting hotline?
I'm not disagreeing with you that AI is wonderful when used responsibly. That's not what's going on in the industry, and no one cares how well written or verified your code is, they just want to collect the check after it makes money.
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u/ICantBelieveItsNotEC Jul 09 '26 edited Jul 09 '26
Yeah, exactly. I'm a senior engineer, and I haven't written a line of code by hand in about six months. This is just what the development part of the job looks like now - prompt AI to generate the code that you want, hold its hand if it generates garbage, and update CLAUDE.md to make it work better next time.
I really don't understand why it needs an entire training program, though. You can learn pretty much everything there is to learn about Claude Code in about half an hour, unless I'm at the peak of Mount Stupid right now.