It's strange to me when articles like this describe the 'pain of writing code'. I've always found that the easy part.
Anyway, this stuff makes me think of what it would be like if you had Tolkein around today using AI to assist him in his writing.
'Claude, generate me a paragraph describing Frodo and Sam having an argument over the trustworthiness of Gollum. Frodo should be defending Gollum and Sam should be on his side.'
'Revise that so that Sam is Harsher and Frodo more stubborn.'
Sooner or later I look at that and think he'd be better off just writing the damned book instead of wasting so much time writing prompts.
Your last sentence describes my thoughts exactly. I try to incorporate Claude into my workflow, just to see what it can do, and the best I’ve ended up with is - if I had written it completely by myself from the start, I would have finished the project in the same amount of time but I’d understand the details far better.
Even just some AI-assisted development in the trickier parts of my code bases completely robs me of understanding. And those are the parts that need my understanding the most!
I dont really understand how this is possible. I've built some very large applications, and even a full LLM data curation,tokenizer, pretrain, posttrain SFT/DPO pipeline with LLM's and it most certainly took far less time than if i had done it manually. Sure it isnt all optimal...but it most certainly isnt subpar, and it is fully functional
> if I had written it completely by myself from the start, I would have finished the project in the same amount of time but I’d understand the details far better.
I believe the argument from the other camp is that you don't need to understand the code anymore, just like you don't need to understand the assembly language.
People who really care about performance still do look at the assembly. Very few people write assembly anymore, a larger number do look at assembly every so often. It’s still a minority of people though.
I guess it would be similar here: a small few people will hand write key parts of code, a larger group will inspect the code that’s generated, and a far larger group won’t do either. At least if AI goes the way that the “other side” says.
Of all the points the other side makes, this one seems the most incoherent. Code is deterministic, AI isn’t. We don’t have to look at assembly, because a compiler produces the same result every time.
If you only understand the code by talking to AI, you would’ve been able to ask AI “how do we do a business feature” and ai would spit out a detailed answer, for a codebase that just says “pretend there is a codebase here”. This is of course an extreme example, and you would probably notice that, but this applies at all levels.
Any detail, anywhere cannot be fully trusted. I believe everyone’s goal should be to prompt ai such that code is the source of truth, and keep the code super readable.
If ai is so capable, it’s also capable of producing clean readable code. And we should be reading all of it.
At least for me, the game-changer was realizing I could (with the help of AI) write a detailed plan up front for exactly what the code would be, and then have the AI implement it in incremental steps.
Gave me way more control/understanding over what the AI would do, and the ability to iterate on it before actually implementing.
People are different. Some are painters and some are sculptors. Andy Warhol was a master draftsman but he didn't get famous off of his drawings. He got famous off of screen printing other people's art that he often didn't own. He just pioneered the technique and because it was new, people got excited, and today he's widely considered to be a generational artistic genius.
I tend to believe that, in all things, the quality of the output and how it is received is what matters and not the process that leads to producing the output.
If you use an LLM assisted workflow to write something that a lot of people love, then you have created art and you are a great artist. It's probable that if Tolkien was born in our time instead of his, he'd be using modern tools while still creating great art, because his creative mind and his work ethic are the most important factors in the creative process.
I'm not of the opinion that any LLM will ever provide quality that comes close to a master work by itself, but I do think they will be valuable tools for a lot of creative people in the grueling and unrewarding "just make it exist first" stage of the creative process, while genius will still shine as it always has in the "you can make it good later" stage.
I tend to believe that, in all things, the quality of the output and how it is received is what matters and not the process that leads to producing the output.
If the ends justifies the means is a well-worn disagreement/debate, and I think the only solid conclusion we've come to as a society is that it depends.
> It's strange to me when articles like this describe the 'pain of writing code'.
I find it strange to compare the comment sections for AI articles with those about vim/emacs etc.
In the vim/emacs comments, people always state that typing in code hardly takes any time, and thinking hard is where they spend their time, so it's not worth learning to type fast. Then in the AI comments, they say that with AI writing the code, they are free'd up to spend more time thinking and less time coding. If writing the code was the easy part in the first place, and wasn't even worth learning to type faster, then how much value can AI be adding?
Now, these might be disjoint sets of people, but I suspect (with no evidence of course) there's a fairly large overlap between them.
What I never understand is that people seem to think the conception of the idea and the syntactical nitty gritty of the code are completely independent domains. When I think about “how software works” I am at some level thinking about how the code works too, not just high level architecture. So if I no longer concern myself with the code, I really lose a lot of understanding about how the software works too.
Writing the code is where I discover the complexity I missed while planning. I don't truly understand my creation until I've gone through a few iterations of this. Maybe I'm just bad at planning.
Tolkien's book is an art, programs are supposed to do something.
Now, some program may be considered art (e.g. codegolf) or considered art by their creator. I consider my programs and code are only the means to get the computer to do what it wants, and there are also easy way to ensure that they do what we want.
> Frodo and Sam having an argument over the trustworthiness of Gollum. Frodo should be defending Gollum and Sam should be on his side.'
Is exactly what programs are. Not the minutiae of the language within.
I was talking to a coworker that really likes AI tooling and it came up that they feel stronger reading unfamiliar code than writing code.
I wonder how much it comes down to that divide. I also wonder how true that is, or if they’re just more trusting that the function does what its name implies the way they think it should.
I suspect you, like me, feel more comfortable with code we’ve written than having to review totally foreign code. The rate limit is in the high level design, not in how fast I can throw code at a file.
It might be a difference in cognition, or maybe we just have a greater need to know precisely how something works instead of accepting a hand wavey “it appears to work, which is good enough”.
I agree with your point. My concern is more about the tedious aspects. You could argue that tedium is part of what makes the craft valuable, and there's truth to that. But it comes down to trade-offs, what could I accomplish with that saved time, and would I get more value from those other pursuits?
I honestly think the stuff AI is really good at is the stuff around the programming that keeps you from the actual programming.
Take a tool like Gradle. Bigger pain in the ass using an actual cactus as a desk chair. It has a staggering rate of syntax and feature churn with every version upgrade, sprawling documentation that is clearly written by space aliens, every problem is completely ungoogleable as every single release does things differently and no advice stays valid for more than 25 minutes.
It's a comically torturous DevEx.
You can literally spend days trying to get your code to compile again, and not a second of that time will be put toward anything productive. Sheer frustration. Just tears. Mad laughter. Rocking back and forth.
"Hey Claude, I've upgraded to this week's Gradle and now I'm getting this error I wasn't getting with last week's version, what could be going wrong?" makes all that go away in 10 minutes.
If you're gonna take this track, at least be honest with yourself. Does your boss get more value out of you? You aren't going to get a kickback from being more productive, but your boss sure will.
I had this moment recently with implementing facebook oauth. I don’t need to spend mental cycles figuring that out, doing the back and forth with their API, pulling my hair out at their docs, etc. I just want it to work and build my app. AI just did that part for me and could move on.
One thing I’ve noticed is that effort may be saved but not as much time. The agent can certainly type faster than me but I have to sit there and watch it work and then check its work when done. There’s certainly some time savings but not what you think.
Another thing I've noticed is that using AI, I'm less likely to give existing code another look to see if there's already something in it that does what I need. It's so simple to get the AI to spin up a new class / method that gets close to what I want, so sometimes I end up "giving orders first, asking questions later" and only later realizing that I've duplicated functionality.
I can only speak for myself but for me, it's all about the syntax. I am terrible at recalling the exact name of all the functions in a library or parameters in an API, which really slows me down when writing code. I've also explored all kinds of programming languages in different paradigms, which makes it hard to recall the exact syntax of operators (is comparison '=' or '==' in this language? Comments are // or /*? How many parameters does this function take, and in what order...) or control structures. But I'm good at high level programming concepts, so it's easy to say what I want in technical language and let the LLM find the exact syntax and command names for me.
I guess if you specialise in maintaining a code base with a single language and a fixed set of libraries then it becomes easier to remember all the details, but for me it will always be less effort to just search the names for whatever tools I want to include in a program at any point.
I agree with a bunch of this (I'm almost exclusively doing python and bash; bash is the one I can never remember more than the basics of). I will give the caveat that I historically haven't made use of fancy IDEs with easy lookup of function names, so would semi-often be fixing "ugh I got the function name wrong" mistakes.
Similar to how you outlined multi-language vs specialist, I wonder if "full stack" vs "niche" work unspokenly underlies some of the camps of "I just trust the AI" vs "it's not saving me any time".
There's a joke that's not entirely a joke that the job of a Google SWE is converting from one protobuf to another. That's generally not very fun code, IMO (which may differ from your opinion and that's why they're opinions!). Otoh, figuring out and writing some interesting logic catches my brain in a way that dealing with formats and interoperability stuff doesn't usually.
We're all did but we all probably have things we like more than others.
I mean, I agree if it's really just "machine translate this code to use the approved method of doing this thing". That seems like a perfect use case for AI. Though one would think Google would already have extensive code mod infrastructure for that kind of thing.
But those aren't the stories you hear about with people coding with AI, which is what prompted my response.
They do and I think a lot of that is LLM'd these days, though that's just what I hear third-hand.
I do agree that this:
> What’s gone is the tearing, exhausting manual labour of typing every single line of code.
seems more than a little overblown. But I do sympathize with not feeling motivated to write a lot of glue and boilerplate, and that "meh" often derails me on personal projects where it's just my internal motivation competing against my internal de-motivation. LLMs have been really good there, especially since many of those are cases where only I will run or deal with the code and it won't be exposed to the innertubes.
Maybe the author can't touch type, but that's a separate problem with its own solution. :)
“He’s a liar and a sneak, Mr. Frodo, and I’ll say it plain — he’d slit our throats in our sleep if he thought he could get away with it,” Sam spat, glaring at the hunched figure scrabbling over the stones ahead. “Every word out of that foul mouth is poison dressed up as helpfulness, and I’m sick of pretending otherwise.” Frodo stopped walking and turned sharply, his eyes flashing with an intensity that made Sam take half a step back. “Enough, Sam. I won’t hear it again. I have decided. Sméagol is our guide and he is under my protection — that is the end of it.” Sam’s face reddened. “Protection! You’re protecting the very thing that wants to destroy you! He doesn’t care about you, Mr. Frodo. You’re nothing to him but the hand that carries what he wants!” But Frodo’s expression had hardened into something almost unrecognizable, a cold certainty that brooked no argument. “You don’t understand what this Ring does to a soul, Sam. You can’t understand it. I feel it every moment of every day, and if I say there is still something worth saving in that creature, then you will trust my judgment or you will walk behind me in silence. Those are your choices.” Sam opened his mouth, then closed it, stung as if he’d been struck. He fell back a pace, blinking hard, and said nothing more — though the look he fixed on Gollum’s retreating back was one of pure, undisguised loathing.
Claude already knows who the characters Frodo, Sam, and Gollumn are, what their character traits are, and how they interacted with each other. This isn't the same as writing something new.
Please forgive me for being blunt, I want to emphasize how much this strikes me.
Your post feels like the last generation lamenting the new generation. Why can't we just use radios and slide rules?
If you've ever enjoyed the sci-fi genre, do you think the people in those stories are writing C and JavaScript?
There's so much plumbing and refactoring bullshit in writing code. I've written years of five nines high SLA code that moves billions of dollars daily. I've had my excitement setting up dev tools and configuring vim a million ways. I want starships now.
I want to see the future unfold during my career, not just have it be incrementalism until I retire.
I want robots walking around in my house, doing my chores. I want a holodeck. I want to be able to make art and music and movies and games. I will not be content with twenty more years of cellphone upgrades.
God, just the thought of another ten years of the same is killing me. It's so fucking mundane.
I think my take on the matter comes from being a games developer. I work on a lot of code for which agentic programming is less than ideal - code which solves novel problems and sometimes requires a lot of precise performance tuning, and/or often has other architectural constraints.
I don't see agentic programming coming to take my lunch any time soon.
What I do see it threatening is repetitive quasi carbon copy development work of the kind you've mentioned - like building web applications.
Nothing wrong with using these tools to deal with that, but I do think that a lot of the folks from those domains lack experience with heavier work, and falsely extrapolate the impact it's having within their domain to be applicable across the board.
> Your post feels like the last generation lamenting the new generation.
> The future is exciting.
Not the GP, but I honestly wanted to be excited about LLMs. And they do have good uses. But you quickly start to see the cracks in them, and they just aren't nearly as exciting as I thought they'd be. And a lot of the coding workflows people are using just don't seem that productive or valuable to me. AI just isn't solving the hard problems in software development. Maybe it will some day.
> Your post feels like the last generation lamenting the new generation [...] There's so much plumbing and refactoring bullshit in writing code [...] I've had my excitement
I don't read the OP as saying that: to me they're saying you're still going to have plumbing and bullshit, it's just your plumbing and bullshit is now going to be in prompt engineering and/or specifications, rather than the code itself.
I want to live forever and set foot on distant planets in other galaxies.
Got a prescription for that too?
I've made films for fifteen years. I hate the process.
Every one of my friends and colleagues that went to film school found out quickly that their dreams would wither and die on the vine due to the pyramid nature of studio capital allocation and expenditure. Not a lot of high autonomy in that world. Much of it comes with nepotism.
There are so many things I wish to do with technology that I can't because of how much time and effort and energy and money are required.
I wish I could magic together a P2P protocol that replaced centralized social media. I wish I could build a completely open source GPU driver stack. I wish I could make Rust compile faster or create an open alternative to AWS or GCP. I wish for so many things, but I'm not Fabrice Bellard.
I don't want to constrain people to the shitty status quo. Because the status quo is shitty. I want the next generation to have better than the bullshit we put up with. If they have to suffer like we suffered, we failed.
I want the future to climb out of the pit we're in and touch the stars.
The author seems to mistake having to update Node.js for a security patch to be a curse rather than a blessing.
The alternative is that your bespoke solution has undiscovered security vulnerabilities, probably no security community, and no easy fix for either of those.
You get the privilege of patching Node.js.
Similarly, as a hiring manager, you can hire a React developer. You can't hire a "proprietary AI coded integrated project" developer.
This piece seems to say more about React than it says about a general shift in software engineering.
Don't like React? Easiest it's ever been not to use it.
Don't like libraries, abstractions and code reuse in general? Avoid them at your peril. You will quickly reach the frontier of your domain knowledge and resourcing, and start producing bespoke square wheels without a maintenance plan.
Yeah, I really don't get it. So instead of using someone else's framework, you're using an AI to write a (probably inferior and less thoroughly tested and considered) framework. And your robot employee is probably pulling a bunch of stuff (not quite verbatim, of course) from existing relevant open source frameworks anyway. Big whoop?
It's quite easy to make things without react, it's not our fault that business leaders don't let devs choose how to solve problems but hey who am I to complain? React projects allow me to pay my bills! I've never seen a good "react" project yet and I've been working professionally with react since before class components were a thing.
Every react code base has their own unique failures due to npm ecosystem, this will never change. In fact, the best way to anticipate what kind patterns are in a given react project is to look at their package.json.
I fail to see the obvious wisdom in having AI re-implement chunks of existing frameworks without the real-world battle testing, without the supporting ecosystem, and without the common parlance and patterns -- all of which are huge wins if you ever expand development beyond a single person.
It's worth repeating too, that not everything needs to be a react project. I understand the author enjoys the "vibe", but that doesn't make it a ground truth. AI can be a great accelerator, but we should be very cognizant of what we abdicate to it.
In fact I would argue that the post reads as though the developer is used to mostly working alone, and often choosing the wrong tool for the job. It certainly doesn't support the claim of the title
AI has a lot of "leaders" currently working through a somewhat ignorant discovery of existing domain knowledge (ask me how being a designer has felt in the last 15 years of UX Leadership™ slowly realizing there's depth to the craft).
In recent months, we have MCPs, helping lots of people realize that huh, when services have usable APIs, you can connect them together!
In the current case: AI can do the tedious things for me -> Huh, discarding vast dependency trees (because I previously wanted the tedious stuff done for me too) lessens my risk surface!
They really are discovered truths, but no one's forcing them to come with an understanding of the tradeoffs happening.
> the supporting ecosystem, ... the common parlance and patterns
Which are often the top reason to use a framework at all.
I could re-implement a web frame work in python if I needed to but then I would lose all the testing, documentation, middle-ware and worst of all the next person would have to show up and re learn everything I did and understand my choices.
> In my mind, besides the self declared objectives, frameworks solve three problems .. “Simplification” .. Automation .. Labour cost.
I think you are missing Consistency, unless you don't count frameworks that you write as frameworks? There are 100 different ways of solving the same problem, and using a framework--- off the shelf or home made--- creates consistency in the way problems are solved.
This seems even more important with AI, since you lose context on each task, so you need it to live within guardrails and best practices or it will make spaghetti.
My biggest concern with AI is that I'm not sure how a software engineer can build up this sort of high-level intuition:
> I still have to deeply think about every important aspect of what I want to build. The architecture, the trade offs, the product decisions, the edge cases that will bite you at 3am.
Without a significant development period of this:
> What’s gone is the tearing, exhausting manual labour of typing every single line of code.
A professional mathematician should use every computer aid at their disposal if it's appropriate. But a freshman math major who isn't spending most of their time with just a notebook or chalk board is probably getting in the way of their own progress.
Granted, this was already an issue, to a lesser extent, with the frameworks that the author scorns. It's orders of magnitude worse with generative AI.
I'm not sure. I don't know about deep expertise and mastery, but I can attest that my fluency skyrocketed as the result of AI in several languages, simply because the friction involved in writing them went own by orders of magnitude. So I am writing way more code now in domains that I previously avoided, and I noticed that I am now much more capable there even without the AI.
What I don't know is what state I'd be in right now, if I'd had AI from the start. There are definitely a ton of brain circuits I wouldn't have right now.
Counterpoint: I've actually noticed them holding me back. I have 20 years of intuition built up now for what is hard and what is easy, and most of it became wrong overnight, and is now limiting me for no real reason.
The hardest part to staying current isn't learning, but unlearning. You must first empty your cup, and all that.
I have been using Cursor w/ Opus 4.x to do extensive embedded development work over the past six months in particular. My own take on this topic is that for all of the chatter about LLMs in software engineering, I think a lot of folks are missing the opportunity to pull back and talk about LLMs in the context of engineering writ large. [I'm not capitalizing engineering because I'm using the HN lens of product development, not building bridges or nuclear reactors.]
LLMs have been a critical tool not just in my application but in my circuit design, enclosure design (CAD, CNC) and I am the conductor where these three worlds meet. The degree to which LLMs can help with EE is extraordinary.
A few weeks ago I brought up a new IPS display panel that I've had custom made for my next product. It's a variant of the ST7789. I gave Opus 4.5 the registers and it produced wrapper functions that I could pass to LVGL in a few minutes, requiring three prompts.
This is just one of countless examples where I've basically stopped using libraries for anything that isn't LVGL, TinyUSB, compression or cryptography. The purpose built wrappers Opus can make are much smaller, often a bit faster, and perhaps most significantly not encumbered with the mental model of another developer's assumptions about how people should use their library. Instead of a kitchen sink API, I/we/it created concise functions that map 1:1 to what I need them to do.
Where I agree with the author of this post is that I feel like perhaps it's time for a lot of libraries to sunset. I don't think replacing frameworks is the correct abstraction at all but I do think that it no longer makes sense to spend time integrating libraries when what you really need are purpose-built functions that do exactly what you want instead of what some library author thought you should want.
Using a framework gives you some assurance that the underlying methods are well designed. If you don't know how to spot issues in auth design, then using an LLM instead of a library is a bad idea.
I agree though there's many non-critical libraries that could be replaced with helper methods. It also coincides with more awareness of supply chain risks.
Frameworks are the reasons why AI can learn patterns and repeat, without frameworks you will be burning credits just to do what that already been optimized and completed. Unless you are Anthropic investor, thats not the way to improve your coding.
I disagree about ditching abstractions. Programmatic abstractions aren't just a way to reduce the amount of code you write, they're also a common language to understand large systems more easily, and a way to make sure systems that get built are predictable.
I share that notion, but I think the abstractions are the foundational tech stack we have had for decades, like the Web Standard or even bash. You need constraints, but not the unnecessary complexity that comes with many modern tech stacks (react/next) that were build around SV's hyper-scalability monopoly mentality. Reach for simple tools if the task is simple: KISS.
Not only that, but a way to factor systems so you can make changes to them without spooky action at a distance. Of course, you have to put in a lot of effort to make that happen, but that's why it doesn't seem to me that LLM's are solving the hard part of software development in the first place.
Even with a perfect coding agent, we code to discover what correct even is.
Team decides on vague requirements, then you actually have to implement something. Well that 'implementing' means iterating until you discover the correct thing. Usually in lots of finicky decisions.
Sometimes you might not care about those decisions, so you one shot one big change. But in my experience, the day-to-day on a production app you can 100% write all the code with Claude, but you're still trying to translate high level requirements into "low"-level decisions.
But in the end its nice not to care about the code monkey work going all over a codebase, adding a lot of trivial changes by hand, etc.
> We can finally get rid of all that middle work. That adapting layer of garbage we blindly accepted during these years. A huge amount of frameworks and libraries and tooling that has completely polluted software engineering, especially in web, mobile and desktop development. Layers upon layers of abstractions that abstract nothing meaningful, that solve problems we shouldn’t have had in the first place, that create ten new problems for every one they claim to fix.
I disagree. At least for a little while until models improve to truly superhuman reasoning*, frameworks and libraries providing abstractions are more valuable than ever. The risk/reward for custom work vs library has just changed in unforeseen ways that are orthogonal to time and effort spent.
Not only do LLMs make customization of forks and the resulting maintenance a lot easier, but the abstractions are now the most valuable place for humans to work because it creates a solid foundation for LLMs to build on. By building abstractions that we validate as engineers, we’re encoding human in the loop input without the end-developer having to constantly hand hold the agent.
What we need now is better abstractions for building verification/test suites and linting so that agents can start to automatically self improve their harness. Skills/MCP/tools in general have had the highest impact short of model improvements and there’s so much more work to be done there.
* whether this requires full AGI or not, I don’t know.
So the suggestion here is that instead of using battle tested libraries/frameworks, everyone should now build their own versions, each with an unique set of silent bugs?
There was a time around 2016 where you weren't allowed to write a React application without also writing a "Getting Started with React" blog post. Having trained on all of that, the AI probably thinks React is web development.
I guess juniors are different these days. In my generation a lot of people's first contact with code was doing basic (html, css, bits of js) web development. That was how I got started at like 12 or 13.
Few months ago I did exactly this. But over time I threw away all the generated js,css and html. It was unmaintenable mess. I finally chose Svelte and stuck with it. Now I have a codebase which makes sense to me.
I did asked AI to generate landing page. This gave me the initial headers, footers and styles that I used for my webapp but I threw away everything else.
The pendulum swing described here is real but I think the underlying issue is subtler than "AI vs. no AI."
The actual problem most teams have isn't writing code — it's understanding what the code they already depend on is doing. You can vibe-code a whole app in a weekend, but when one of your 200 transitive dependencies ships a breaking change in a patch release, no amount of AI is going to help you debug why your auth flow suddenly broke.
The skill that's actually becoming more valuable isn't "writing code from scratch" — it's maintaining awareness of the ecosystem you're building on. Knowing when Node ships a security fix that affects your HTTP handling, or when a React minor changes the reconciliation behavior, or when Postgres deprecates a function you use in 50 queries.
That's the boring, unsexy part of engineering that AI doesn't solve and most developers skip until something catches fire.
> no amount of AI is going to help you debug why your auth flow suddenly broke.
What? Coding agents are very capable at helping fix bugs in specific domains. Your examples are like, the exact place where AI can add value.
You do an update, things randomly break: tell Claude to figure it out and it can go look up the breaking changes in the new versions, read your code and tell you what happened and fix it for you.
That took the strangest turn. It started with empowerment to do much more (and that I reallY agree with) — to then use it to... build everything from scratch? What? Why?
What a framework gives me is mostly other people having done precisely the architectural work, that is a prequisite to my actual work. It's fantastic, for the same reason that automatic coding is. I want to solve unsolved problems asap.
I am so confused by the disconnect that I feel like I must be missing something.
Strange how many people are comparing code to art. Software engineering has never been about the code written, it’s about solving problems with software. With AI we can solve more problems with software. I have been writing code for 25 years, I love using AI. It allows me to get to the point faster.
The author is right, eliminating all this framework cruft will be a boon for building great software. I was a skeptic but it seems obvious now its largely going to be an improvement.
Pretty much completely disagree with the OP. Software Engineering never left, maybe the author moved away from it instead.
> Stop wrapping broken legs in silk. Start building things that are yours.
This however is deeply wrong for me. Anyone who writes and reviews code regularly knows very well that reading code doesn't lead to the same deep intuitive understanding of the codebase as writing same code.
So, no, with AI you are not building things which are yours. You might call them yours, but you lose deeper understanding of what you built.
> Layers upon layers of abstractions that abstract nothing meaningful, that solve problems we shouldn’t have had in the first place, that create ten new problems for every one they claim to fix.
LLM generated code is the ultimate abstraction. A mess of code with no trusted origin that nobody has ever understood. It's worse than even the worst maintained libraries and frameworks in every way.
You're right, clearly I've tried to be a bit provocative to pass the message, but I'm not religious in this sense. Minimal frameworks that really solve a problem cleanly and are adopted with intention are welcome.
There is yet another issue: the end-users are fickle fashion minded people, and will literally refuse to use an application if it does not look like the latest React-style. They do not want to be seen using "old" software, like wearing the wrong outfit or some such nonsense. This is real, and baffling.
In big corporations that's how it is. Developers are told to only implement what is in the specs and if they have any objection, they need to raise it to PM who will then forward it to the system architect etc.
So that creates the notion as if the design was something out of reach. I met developers now who cannot develop anything on their own if it doesn't have a ticket that explains everything and hand holds them. If something is not clear they are stuck and need help of senior engineers.
I feel the same way, but I’m not a traditional software engineer. Just an old-school Webmaster who’s been trying to keep up with things, but I’ve had to hire developers all along.
I’m an idea’s guy, and in the past month or so my eyes have also fully opened to what’s coming.
But there’s a big caveat. While the actual grunt work and development is going away, there’s no telling when the software engineering part is going to go away as well. Even the ideas guy part. What happens when a simple prompt from someone who doesn’t even know what they’re doing results in an app that you couldn’t have done as well with whatever software engineering skills you have?
Nah. Nothing has changed. To offload the work to an agent and make it a productivity gain it is exactly the same as using a framework, it's a black box portion of your system, written by someone else, that you don't understand.
Unless you are quite literally spending almost the same amount of time you'd spend yourself to deeply understand each component, at which point, you could write it yourself anyway, nothing has changed when it comes to the dynamics of actually authoring systems.
There are exceptions, but generally speaking untempered enthusiasm for agents correlates pretty well with lack of understanding about what engineering software actually entails (it's about relational and conceptual comprehension, communication, developing shared knowledge, and modeling, not about writing code or using particular frameworks!)
EDIT: And to be clear, the danger of "agentizing" software engineering is precisely that it promotes a tendency to obscure information about the system, turn engineers into personal self-llm silos, and generally discard all the second-order concerns that make for good systems, resilience, modifiability, intelligibility, performance.
Anyway, this stuff makes me think of what it would be like if you had Tolkein around today using AI to assist him in his writing.
'Claude, generate me a paragraph describing Frodo and Sam having an argument over the trustworthiness of Gollum. Frodo should be defending Gollum and Sam should be on his side.'
'Revise that so that Sam is Harsher and Frodo more stubborn.'
Sooner or later I look at that and think he'd be better off just writing the damned book instead of wasting so much time writing prompts.
Even just some AI-assisted development in the trickier parts of my code bases completely robs me of understanding. And those are the parts that need my understanding the most!
Probably less time, because you understood the details better.
I believe the argument from the other camp is that you don't need to understand the code anymore, just like you don't need to understand the assembly language.
I guess it would be similar here: a small few people will hand write key parts of code, a larger group will inspect the code that’s generated, and a far larger group won’t do either. At least if AI goes the way that the “other side” says.
If you only understand the code by talking to AI, you would’ve been able to ask AI “how do we do a business feature” and ai would spit out a detailed answer, for a codebase that just says “pretend there is a codebase here”. This is of course an extreme example, and you would probably notice that, but this applies at all levels.
Any detail, anywhere cannot be fully trusted. I believe everyone’s goal should be to prompt ai such that code is the source of truth, and keep the code super readable.
If ai is so capable, it’s also capable of producing clean readable code. And we should be reading all of it.
Gave me way more control/understanding over what the AI would do, and the ability to iterate on it before actually implementing.
I tend to believe that, in all things, the quality of the output and how it is received is what matters and not the process that leads to producing the output.
If you use an LLM assisted workflow to write something that a lot of people love, then you have created art and you are a great artist. It's probable that if Tolkien was born in our time instead of his, he'd be using modern tools while still creating great art, because his creative mind and his work ethic are the most important factors in the creative process.
I'm not of the opinion that any LLM will ever provide quality that comes close to a master work by itself, but I do think they will be valuable tools for a lot of creative people in the grueling and unrewarding "just make it exist first" stage of the creative process, while genius will still shine as it always has in the "you can make it good later" stage.
If the ends justifies the means is a well-worn disagreement/debate, and I think the only solid conclusion we've come to as a society is that it depends.
I find it strange to compare the comment sections for AI articles with those about vim/emacs etc.
In the vim/emacs comments, people always state that typing in code hardly takes any time, and thinking hard is where they spend their time, so it's not worth learning to type fast. Then in the AI comments, they say that with AI writing the code, they are free'd up to spend more time thinking and less time coding. If writing the code was the easy part in the first place, and wasn't even worth learning to type faster, then how much value can AI be adding?
Now, these might be disjoint sets of people, but I suspect (with no evidence of course) there's a fairly large overlap between them.
Now, some program may be considered art (e.g. codegolf) or considered art by their creator. I consider my programs and code are only the means to get the computer to do what it wants, and there are also easy way to ensure that they do what we want.
> Frodo and Sam having an argument over the trustworthiness of Gollum. Frodo should be defending Gollum and Sam should be on his side.'
Is exactly what programs are. Not the minutiae of the language within.
I wonder how much it comes down to that divide. I also wonder how true that is, or if they’re just more trusting that the function does what its name implies the way they think it should.
I suspect you, like me, feel more comfortable with code we’ve written than having to review totally foreign code. The rate limit is in the high level design, not in how fast I can throw code at a file.
It might be a difference in cognition, or maybe we just have a greater need to know precisely how something works instead of accepting a hand wavey “it appears to work, which is good enough”.
Take a tool like Gradle. Bigger pain in the ass using an actual cactus as a desk chair. It has a staggering rate of syntax and feature churn with every version upgrade, sprawling documentation that is clearly written by space aliens, every problem is completely ungoogleable as every single release does things differently and no advice stays valid for more than 25 minutes.
It's a comically torturous DevEx.
You can literally spend days trying to get your code to compile again, and not a second of that time will be put toward anything productive. Sheer frustration. Just tears. Mad laughter. Rocking back and forth.
"Hey Claude, I've upgraded to this week's Gradle and now I'm getting this error I wasn't getting with last week's version, what could be going wrong?" makes all that go away in 10 minutes.
Yeah, this was always the easy part.
I guess if you specialise in maintaining a code base with a single language and a fixed set of libraries then it becomes easier to remember all the details, but for me it will always be less effort to just search the names for whatever tools I want to include in a program at any point.
Similar to how you outlined multi-language vs specialist, I wonder if "full stack" vs "niche" work unspokenly underlies some of the camps of "I just trust the AI" vs "it's not saving me any time".
There's a joke that's not entirely a joke that the job of a Google SWE is converting from one protobuf to another. That's generally not very fun code, IMO (which may differ from your opinion and that's why they're opinions!). Otoh, figuring out and writing some interesting logic catches my brain in a way that dealing with formats and interoperability stuff doesn't usually.
We're all did but we all probably have things we like more than others.
But those aren't the stories you hear about with people coding with AI, which is what prompted my response.
I do agree that this:
> What’s gone is the tearing, exhausting manual labour of typing every single line of code.
seems more than a little overblown. But I do sympathize with not feeling motivated to write a lot of glue and boilerplate, and that "meh" often derails me on personal projects where it's just my internal motivation competing against my internal de-motivation. LLMs have been really good there, especially since many of those are cases where only I will run or deal with the code and it won't be exposed to the innertubes.
Maybe the author can't touch type, but that's a separate problem with its own solution. :)
“He’s a liar and a sneak, Mr. Frodo, and I’ll say it plain — he’d slit our throats in our sleep if he thought he could get away with it,” Sam spat, glaring at the hunched figure scrabbling over the stones ahead. “Every word out of that foul mouth is poison dressed up as helpfulness, and I’m sick of pretending otherwise.” Frodo stopped walking and turned sharply, his eyes flashing with an intensity that made Sam take half a step back. “Enough, Sam. I won’t hear it again. I have decided. Sméagol is our guide and he is under my protection — that is the end of it.” Sam’s face reddened. “Protection! You’re protecting the very thing that wants to destroy you! He doesn’t care about you, Mr. Frodo. You’re nothing to him but the hand that carries what he wants!” But Frodo’s expression had hardened into something almost unrecognizable, a cold certainty that brooked no argument. “You don’t understand what this Ring does to a soul, Sam. You can’t understand it. I feel it every moment of every day, and if I say there is still something worth saving in that creature, then you will trust my judgment or you will walk behind me in silence. Those are your choices.” Sam opened his mouth, then closed it, stung as if he’d been struck. He fell back a pace, blinking hard, and said nothing more — though the look he fixed on Gollum’s retreating back was one of pure, undisguised loathing.
Your post feels like the last generation lamenting the new generation. Why can't we just use radios and slide rules?
If you've ever enjoyed the sci-fi genre, do you think the people in those stories are writing C and JavaScript?
There's so much plumbing and refactoring bullshit in writing code. I've written years of five nines high SLA code that moves billions of dollars daily. I've had my excitement setting up dev tools and configuring vim a million ways. I want starships now.
I want to see the future unfold during my career, not just have it be incrementalism until I retire.
I want robots walking around in my house, doing my chores. I want a holodeck. I want to be able to make art and music and movies and games. I will not be content with twenty more years of cellphone upgrades.
God, just the thought of another ten years of the same is killing me. It's so fucking mundane.
The future is exciting.
Bring it.
I don't see agentic programming coming to take my lunch any time soon.
What I do see it threatening is repetitive quasi carbon copy development work of the kind you've mentioned - like building web applications.
Nothing wrong with using these tools to deal with that, but I do think that a lot of the folks from those domains lack experience with heavier work, and falsely extrapolate the impact it's having within their domain to be applicable across the board.
> The future is exciting.
Not the GP, but I honestly wanted to be excited about LLMs. And they do have good uses. But you quickly start to see the cracks in them, and they just aren't nearly as exciting as I thought they'd be. And a lot of the coding workflows people are using just don't seem that productive or valuable to me. AI just isn't solving the hard problems in software development. Maybe it will some day.
I don't read the OP as saying that: to me they're saying you're still going to have plumbing and bullshit, it's just your plumbing and bullshit is now going to be in prompt engineering and/or specifications, rather than the code itself.
Then make them. What's stopping you?
Got a prescription for that too?
I've made films for fifteen years. I hate the process.
Every one of my friends and colleagues that went to film school found out quickly that their dreams would wither and die on the vine due to the pyramid nature of studio capital allocation and expenditure. Not a lot of high autonomy in that world. Much of it comes with nepotism.
There are so many things I wish to do with technology that I can't because of how much time and effort and energy and money are required.
I wish I could magic together a P2P protocol that replaced centralized social media. I wish I could build a completely open source GPU driver stack. I wish I could make Rust compile faster or create an open alternative to AWS or GCP. I wish for so many things, but I'm not Fabrice Bellard.
I don't want to constrain people to the shitty status quo. Because the status quo is shitty. I want the next generation to have better than the bullshit we put up with. If they have to suffer like we suffered, we failed.
I want the future to climb out of the pit we're in and touch the stars.
People on Reddit posting AI art are getting death threats. It's absurd.
The alternative is that your bespoke solution has undiscovered security vulnerabilities, probably no security community, and no easy fix for either of those.
You get the privilege of patching Node.js.
Similarly, as a hiring manager, you can hire a React developer. You can't hire a "proprietary AI coded integrated project" developer.
This piece seems to say more about React than it says about a general shift in software engineering.
Don't like React? Easiest it's ever been not to use it.
Don't like libraries, abstractions and code reuse in general? Avoid them at your peril. You will quickly reach the frontier of your domain knowledge and resourcing, and start producing bespoke square wheels without a maintenance plan.
It's quite easy to make things without react, it's not our fault that business leaders don't let devs choose how to solve problems but hey who am I to complain? React projects allow me to pay my bills! I've never seen a good "react" project yet and I've been working professionally with react since before class components were a thing.
Every react code base has their own unique failures due to npm ecosystem, this will never change. In fact, the best way to anticipate what kind patterns are in a given react project is to look at their package.json.
It's worth repeating too, that not everything needs to be a react project. I understand the author enjoys the "vibe", but that doesn't make it a ground truth. AI can be a great accelerator, but we should be very cognizant of what we abdicate to it.
In fact I would argue that the post reads as though the developer is used to mostly working alone, and often choosing the wrong tool for the job. It certainly doesn't support the claim of the title
The trend of copying code from StackOverflow has just evolved to the AI era now.
I also expect people will attempt complete rewrites of systems without fully understanding the implications or putting safeguards in place.
AI simply becomes another tool that is misused, like many others, by unexperienced developers.
I feel like nothing has changed on the human side of this equation.
In recent months, we have MCPs, helping lots of people realize that huh, when services have usable APIs, you can connect them together!
In the current case: AI can do the tedious things for me -> Huh, discarding vast dependency trees (because I previously wanted the tedious stuff done for me too) lessens my risk surface!
They really are discovered truths, but no one's forcing them to come with an understanding of the tradeoffs happening.
Which are often the top reason to use a framework at all.
I could re-implement a web frame work in python if I needed to but then I would lose all the testing, documentation, middle-ware and worst of all the next person would have to show up and re learn everything I did and understand my choices.
I think you are missing Consistency, unless you don't count frameworks that you write as frameworks? There are 100 different ways of solving the same problem, and using a framework--- off the shelf or home made--- creates consistency in the way problems are solved.
This seems even more important with AI, since you lose context on each task, so you need it to live within guardrails and best practices or it will make spaghetti.
> I still have to deeply think about every important aspect of what I want to build. The architecture, the trade offs, the product decisions, the edge cases that will bite you at 3am.
Without a significant development period of this:
> What’s gone is the tearing, exhausting manual labour of typing every single line of code.
A professional mathematician should use every computer aid at their disposal if it's appropriate. But a freshman math major who isn't spending most of their time with just a notebook or chalk board is probably getting in the way of their own progress.
Granted, this was already an issue, to a lesser extent, with the frameworks that the author scorns. It's orders of magnitude worse with generative AI.
What I don't know is what state I'd be in right now, if I'd had AI from the start. There are definitely a ton of brain circuits I wouldn't have right now.
Counterpoint: I've actually noticed them holding me back. I have 20 years of intuition built up now for what is hard and what is easy, and most of it became wrong overnight, and is now limiting me for no real reason.
The hardest part to staying current isn't learning, but unlearning. You must first empty your cup, and all that.
LLMs have been a critical tool not just in my application but in my circuit design, enclosure design (CAD, CNC) and I am the conductor where these three worlds meet. The degree to which LLMs can help with EE is extraordinary.
A few weeks ago I brought up a new IPS display panel that I've had custom made for my next product. It's a variant of the ST7789. I gave Opus 4.5 the registers and it produced wrapper functions that I could pass to LVGL in a few minutes, requiring three prompts.
This is just one of countless examples where I've basically stopped using libraries for anything that isn't LVGL, TinyUSB, compression or cryptography. The purpose built wrappers Opus can make are much smaller, often a bit faster, and perhaps most significantly not encumbered with the mental model of another developer's assumptions about how people should use their library. Instead of a kitchen sink API, I/we/it created concise functions that map 1:1 to what I need them to do.
Where I agree with the author of this post is that I feel like perhaps it's time for a lot of libraries to sunset. I don't think replacing frameworks is the correct abstraction at all but I do think that it no longer makes sense to spend time integrating libraries when what you really need are purpose-built functions that do exactly what you want instead of what some library author thought you should want.
I agree though there's many non-critical libraries that could be replaced with helper methods. It also coincides with more awareness of supply chain risks.
Team decides on vague requirements, then you actually have to implement something. Well that 'implementing' means iterating until you discover the correct thing. Usually in lots of finicky decisions.
Sometimes you might not care about those decisions, so you one shot one big change. But in my experience, the day-to-day on a production app you can 100% write all the code with Claude, but you're still trying to translate high level requirements into "low"-level decisions.
But in the end its nice not to care about the code monkey work going all over a codebase, adding a lot of trivial changes by hand, etc.
I disagree. At least for a little while until models improve to truly superhuman reasoning*, frameworks and libraries providing abstractions are more valuable than ever. The risk/reward for custom work vs library has just changed in unforeseen ways that are orthogonal to time and effort spent.
Not only do LLMs make customization of forks and the resulting maintenance a lot easier, but the abstractions are now the most valuable place for humans to work because it creates a solid foundation for LLMs to build on. By building abstractions that we validate as engineers, we’re encoding human in the loop input without the end-developer having to constantly hand hold the agent.
What we need now is better abstractions for building verification/test suites and linting so that agents can start to automatically self improve their harness. Skills/MCP/tools in general have had the highest impact short of model improvements and there’s so much more work to be done there.
* whether this requires full AGI or not, I don’t know.
Like the vibe coded solution won't be flawed and vulnerable
https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/209652/why-is-i...
I did asked AI to generate landing page. This gave me the initial headers, footers and styles that I used for my webapp but I threw away everything else.
The actual problem most teams have isn't writing code — it's understanding what the code they already depend on is doing. You can vibe-code a whole app in a weekend, but when one of your 200 transitive dependencies ships a breaking change in a patch release, no amount of AI is going to help you debug why your auth flow suddenly broke.
The skill that's actually becoming more valuable isn't "writing code from scratch" — it's maintaining awareness of the ecosystem you're building on. Knowing when Node ships a security fix that affects your HTTP handling, or when a React minor changes the reconciliation behavior, or when Postgres deprecates a function you use in 50 queries.
That's the boring, unsexy part of engineering that AI doesn't solve and most developers skip until something catches fire.
What? Coding agents are very capable at helping fix bugs in specific domains. Your examples are like, the exact place where AI can add value.
You do an update, things randomly break: tell Claude to figure it out and it can go look up the breaking changes in the new versions, read your code and tell you what happened and fix it for you.
What a framework gives me is mostly other people having done precisely the architectural work, that is a prequisite to my actual work. It's fantastic, for the same reason that automatic coding is. I want to solve unsolved problems asap.
I am so confused by the disconnect that I feel like I must be missing something.
The author is right, eliminating all this framework cruft will be a boon for building great software. I was a skeptic but it seems obvious now its largely going to be an improvement.
> Stop wrapping broken legs in silk. Start building things that are yours.
This however is deeply wrong for me. Anyone who writes and reviews code regularly knows very well that reading code doesn't lead to the same deep intuitive understanding of the codebase as writing same code.
So, no, with AI you are not building things which are yours. You might call them yours, but you lose deeper understanding of what you built.
LLM generated code is the ultimate abstraction. A mess of code with no trusted origin that nobody has ever understood. It's worse than even the worst maintained libraries and frameworks in every way.
what?
So that creates the notion as if the design was something out of reach. I met developers now who cannot develop anything on their own if it doesn't have a ticket that explains everything and hand holds them. If something is not clear they are stuck and need help of senior engineers.
I’m an idea’s guy, and in the past month or so my eyes have also fully opened to what’s coming.
But there’s a big caveat. While the actual grunt work and development is going away, there’s no telling when the software engineering part is going to go away as well. Even the ideas guy part. What happens when a simple prompt from someone who doesn’t even know what they’re doing results in an app that you couldn’t have done as well with whatever software engineering skills you have?
Unless you are quite literally spending almost the same amount of time you'd spend yourself to deeply understand each component, at which point, you could write it yourself anyway, nothing has changed when it comes to the dynamics of actually authoring systems.
There are exceptions, but generally speaking untempered enthusiasm for agents correlates pretty well with lack of understanding about what engineering software actually entails (it's about relational and conceptual comprehension, communication, developing shared knowledge, and modeling, not about writing code or using particular frameworks!)
EDIT: And to be clear, the danger of "agentizing" software engineering is precisely that it promotes a tendency to obscure information about the system, turn engineers into personal self-llm silos, and generally discard all the second-order concerns that make for good systems, resilience, modifiability, intelligibility, performance.