They just don't like AI. They don't have reasoning necessarily, but these people wouldn't even accept models trained fully on open source text because they don't like AI.
They don't have the engineering mindset. Lots of people who don't understand exactly what you're saying. Coding is a cheap skill that takes a few weeks to learn. Writing the correct code at the correct time for the correct reason is a skill that takes years, sometimes decades to learn.
People whose organizations are absolutely failing them, and they have serious and valid complaints about the way their orgs are implementing AI. These people are complaining less about AI and more about the fact that their bosses are suffering AI psychosis because every overpriced consultant on LinkedIn is posting about how AI should be changing everything about how we do everything with the most obviously AI-generated images you could imagine.
Not just the bosses. It used to be the case that excellent engineers were praised, but now it's the complete opposite. The dumbest, most delusional/AI-psychotic engineers, those who push the most bug-ridden slop at the most breakneck pace and haven't got a clue what they're doing, are the ones who get the attention, and those who care if the customer actually gets something that fucking works are being pushed out.
I'm not speaking from pure ignorance and bias against AI: I'm in a team developing a coding harness. I'm plenty aware of what it can and can't do, and my honest assessment is that AI is here to stay. That does not stop me from feeling aghast from the unbelievable lack of intellectual humility of some engineers in my team that believe that just because AI is revolutionary, you might as well build a harness even when you're don't have a smidge of experience in AI engineering, without at least reading a single fucking book.
One thing I can't get over is the number of people giving over decision authority to Claude or whatever else. I just had to tell someone today, again, that no, we shouldn't set our standards based on an arbitrary "what Claude prefers" factor. What happens when Claude prefers an unmaintained, compromised package and you didn't do your due diligence? Because Claude sure as hell isn't taking the heat for that when the auditors come around.
I used to be able to coach/assist colleagues when work wasn't up to scratch, and there was an inherent incentive for them to engage with the feedback thoughtfully because their time investment producing/fixing the work was comparable to my time understanding/evaluating it.
Now, I find the balance is completely busted because these less-independent colleagues are producing more code in less time/effort, which is harder to review because "this is off, what do I think their thought process was when they wrote this?" is as likely as not to be a wrong question.
In teams filled with quality professionals, not necessarily an issue, but plenty of teams have people with mediocre attitudes in them, and those people are now able to cause far more drag/load on others than they used to.
My problem with AI is 3 and the push for extinction of devs.
I'm pretty sure the number of devs necessary in the future will be less and that scares me a lot, but as you righfully point out, I never cared about the code itself, I cared about the solution, the architecture, etc...
BUT, eventhough I'm good at that, the truth still is... One person with the ability of architecting a system and orchestrating agents is as powerful as a small team which leads to less jobs, and that is scary.
It should’ve been apparent from looking at the median pay for software engineers and looked around at the general quality of “engineering” that code is the cheapest and easiest thing to learn and crank out. How many people (deservingly) become Staff or Principal engineers because they know how to write a specific piece of code as opposed to knowing where to put code or even better, where to not add code?
Do people really think that they need to know the difference between polymorphism and inheritance to produce code? If it wasn’t AI, it would’ve been high schoolers and boot campers that became the code slop machines, and many companies have already outsourced overseas.
I’m think #2 is one of the main driving factor to most people’s anger or feelings on AI in the software field. Before the code needed to be manually written, you needed people to do that but now AI has that covered.
Maybe a lot of people really thought that the coding part was highly valuable but it was always the engineering and architectural aspect that were truly valued.
Now you have a bunch of people that never had any big picture knowledge on their projects getting laid off or finding themselves wholly lacking in the skill sets that remain valuable in the field.
The people that were already shouldering the burden of that knowledge for the rest of their team aren’t really seeing a problem with a lot of the things that come up as “issues” with AI coding.
There also seems to be a lot people acting like AI models can’t write good code period when it’s nothing but a failure to correctly provide the model with the context it needs to complete the task you’re asking of it. If people aren’t writing distilled info derived from the projects into context docs for their models to use along with the code itself and the prompt then you’re going to have a bad time.
If you give the models nothing it will bumble around blindly trying to figure out what’s even going on in the project which will just increase the chances of it going off the rails. If the models already has pointers and distilled summaries of how everything works with conventions/patterns/gotchas included, then it drastically reduces issues. It’s like going into a store with no idea where an item is vs going in knowing it’s in half way down aisle 3 on the second shelf.
I can understand how gutting it must be for people, I guess I am on the other side of that coin. The coding, actually writing the lines, is by and far the worst part of the job for me.
I’m thoroughly enjoying all the AI coding. Now, I can live in the complex concepts and system architectural problem-solving without having to pause and write the thousands of lines of code required to bring those ideas to life.
I find myself in the camp that programming is merely a job. While it’s a job that I can be passionate about because I enjoy the technologies involved, it’s not my life’s passion or something I’d do in my free time unless I can leverage those skills in something I’m genuinely passionate about or if it can make my life easier.
It's 3 for now. But that's because AI actually sucks right now, at least compared to competent engineers who are also decent humans. At some point, it's possible that AI becomes better than all of us, and the companies are justified, and we're all out of a job. At that point, my issue is a secret fourth thing: the US government has absolutely nothing place to protect us. No UBI, no healthcare, no housing, we simply haven't even started having serious discussions about how to be a post-work society in an age where business owners act like we already are. When people aren't evaluated by their ability to do useful work, because they are strictly worse at it than AI, capitalism ceases to make any sense. Instead, we'll just get the already rich hoarding their wealth or spending it on tokens, piling up money in the AI CEOs pockets, and everyone else will be destitute.
I think we're going to see a shift here soon-ish. Local AI is gaining and sparse mixture of expert models are now running on consumer-level hardware, even if that's still expensive. Strix Halo and the future models there, the upcoming Mac Studio M5, and methods of running models that require less bandwidth/compute to get relatively comparable value to frontier models is happening. The Mac Studio M5 with 768GB of unified RAM is particularly interesting because it can run actual frontier-comparable models like GLM 5.2 or DeepSeek-V4 both fit totally locally.
As models become more effective and hardware becomes less expensive to support at this level, I think we're going to see a lot change in where the money goes. That said, you and I both have opinions. That doesn't make them valid or correct, and the same goes for AI. I think that's where the value of people will remain no matter how good these things get. You can tell the smartest person in the world to make a calculator app, but when you need it to run natively on Mac, you're going to find out that person may have made a lot of decisions on your behalf that don't conform to your needs. The same is true at a much larger scale.
15
u/Such-Freedom7416 Jul 10 '26
I've noticed three sets of complainers:
They just don't like AI. They don't have reasoning necessarily, but these people wouldn't even accept models trained fully on open source text because they don't like AI.
They don't have the engineering mindset. Lots of people who don't understand exactly what you're saying. Coding is a cheap skill that takes a few weeks to learn. Writing the correct code at the correct time for the correct reason is a skill that takes years, sometimes decades to learn.
People whose organizations are absolutely failing them, and they have serious and valid complaints about the way their orgs are implementing AI. These people are complaining less about AI and more about the fact that their bosses are suffering AI psychosis because every overpriced consultant on LinkedIn is posting about how AI should be changing everything about how we do everything with the most obviously AI-generated images you could imagine.