A person who hasn’t debugged any code thinks programmers are done for because of “AI”.
Oh no. Anyways.
It’s even funnier because the guy is mocking DHH. You know, the creator of Ruby on Rails. Which 37signals obviously uses.
I know from experience that a) Rails is a very junior developer friendly framework, yet incredibly powerful, and b) all Rails apps are colossal machines with a lot of moving parts. So when the scared juniors look at the apps for the first time, the senior Rails devs are like “Eh, don’t worry about it, most of the complex stuff is happening on the background, the only way to break it if you genuinely have no idea what you’re doing and screw things up on purpose.” Which leads to point c) using AI coding with Rails codebases is usually like pulling open the side door of this gargantuan machine and dropping in a sack of wrenches in the gears.
Yeah DHH is a problematic person to root for.
THAT is the message you took from all this? What you’re going to root for the smug ignorant asshole?
I’m a software engineer, and I hate AI. DHH is a smug ignorant asshole, but I will always root against AI.
AI is certainly a very handy tool and has helped me out a lot but anybody who thinks “vibe programming” (i.e. programming from ignorance) is a good idea or will save money is woefully misinformed. Hire good programmers, let them use AI if they like, but trust the programmer’s judgement over some AI.
That’s because you NEED that experience to notice the AI is outputting garbage. Otherwise it looks superficially okay but the code is terrible, or fragile, or not even doing what you asked it properly. e.g. if I asked Gemini to generate a web server with Jetty it might output something correct or an unholy mess of Jetty 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 with annotations and/or programmatic styles, or the correct / incorrect pom dependencies.
AI is great for learning a language, partly because it’s the right combination of useful and stupid.
It’s familiar with the language in a way that would take some serious time to attain, but it also hallucinates things that don’t exist and its solution to debugging something often ends up being literally just changing variable names or doing the same wrong things in different ways. But seeing what works and what doesn’t and catching it when it’s spiraling is a pretty good learning experience. You can get a project rolling while you’re learning how to implement what you want to do without spending weeks or months wondering how. It’s great for filling gaps and giving enough context to start understanding how a language works by sheer immersion, especially if the application of that language comes robust debugging built in.
I’ve been using it to help me learn and implement GDscript while I’m working on my game and it’s been incredibly helpful. Stuff that would have taken weeks of wading through YouTube tutorials and banging my head against complex concepts and math that I just don’t have I can instead work my way through in days or even hours.
Gradually I’m getting more and more familiar with how the language works by doing the thing, and when it screws up and doesn’t know what it’s talking about I can see that in Godot’s debugging and in the actual execution of the code in-game. For a solo indie dev who’s doing all the art, writing, and music myself, having a tool to help me move my codebase forward while I learn has been pretty great. It also means that I can put systems in place that are relevant to the project so my modding partner who doesn’t know GDScript yet has something relevant to look at and learn from by looking through the project’s git.
But if I knew nothing about programming? If I wasn’t learning enough to fix its mistakes and sometimes abandon it entirely to find solutions to things it can’t figure out? I’d be making no progress or completely changing the scope of the game to make it a cookie cutter copy of the tutorials the AI is trained on.
Vibe coding is complete nonsense. You still need a competent designer who’s at least in the process of learning the context of the language they’re working with or your output is going to be complete garbage. And if you’re working in a medium that doesn’t have robust built-in debugging? Good luck even identifying what it’s doing wrong if you’re not familiar with the language yourself. Hell, good luck getting it to make anything complex if you have multiple systems to consider and can’t bridge the gaps yourself.
Corpo idiots going all in on “vibe coding” are literally just going to do indies a favor by churning out unworkable garbage that anyone who puts the effort in will be able to easily shine in comparison to.
It’s a good teacher, though, and a decent assistant.
AI isn’t ready to replace just about anybody’s job, and probably never will be technically, economically or legally viable.
That said, the c-suit class are certainly going to try. Not only do they dream of optimizing all human workers out of every workforce, they also desperately need to recoup as much of the sunk cost that they’ve collectively dumped into the technology.
Take OpenAI for example, they lost something like $5,000,000,000 last year and are probably going to lose even more this year. Their entire business plan relies on at least selling people on the idea that AI will be able to replace human workers. The minute people realize that OpenAI isn’t going to conquer the world, and instead end up as just one of many players in the slop space, the entire bottom will fall out of the company and the AI bubble will burst.
People who think AI will replace X job either don’t understand X job or don’t understand AI.
It’s both.
This is the correct answer.
everytime i see a twitter screenshot i just know im looking at the dumbest people imaginable
Except for those comedy accounts. Some of those takes are sheer genius lol.
If you want to see stupider, look at Redditors. Fucking cesspool with less than zero redeeming value.
Not sure about the communities you’re visiting, the subreddits I seldom visit (because enshitification) have rather smart people.
I’m just gonna say I love your username!
Tinfoil hat time:
That Ace account is just an alt of the original guy and rage baiting to give his posting more reach.
Counter-tinfoil hat time:
That Ace account is an AI.
AI is fucking so useless when it comes to programming right now.
They can’t even fucking do math. Go make an AI do math right now, go see how it goes lol. Make it a, real world problem and give it lots of variables.
I have Visual Studio and decided to see what copilot could do. It added 7 new functions to my game with no calls or feedback to the player. When I tested what it did …it used 24 lines of code on a 150 line .CS to increase the difficulty of the game every time I take an action.
The context here is missing but just imagine someone going to Viridian forest and being met with level 70s in pokemon.
In all seriousness though I do worry for the future of juniors. All the things that people criticise LLMs for, juniors do too. But if nobody hires juniors they will never become senior
This is completely tangential but I think juniors will always be capable of things that LLMs aren’t. There’s a human component to software that I don’t think can be replaced without human experience. The entire purpose of software is for humans to use it. So since the LLM has never experienced using software while being a human, there will always be a divide. Therefore, juniors will be capable of things that LLMs aren’t.
Idk, I might be missing a counterpoint, but it makes sense to me.
Co"worker" spent 7 weeks building a simple C# MVC app with ChatGPT
I think I don’t have to tell you how it went. Lets just say I spent more time debugging “his” code than mine.
I will give it this. It’s been actually pretty helpful in me learning a new language because what I’ll do is that I’ll grab an example of something in working code that’s kind of what I want, I’ll say “This, but do X” then when the output doesn’t work, I study the differences between the chatGPT output & the example code to learn why it doesn’t work.
It’s a weird learning tool but it works for me.
It’s great for explaining snippets of code.
The reason programmers are cooked isn’t because AI can do the job, bit because idiots in leadership have decided that it can.
This is exactly what rips at me, being a low-level artist right now. I know Ai will only be able to imitate, and it lacks a “human quality.” I don’t think it can “replace artists.”
…But bean-counters and executives, who have no grasp of art, marketing to people who also don’t understand art, can say it’s “good enough” and they can replace artists. And society seems to sway with “The Market”, which serves the desires of the wealthy.
I point to how graphic design departments have been replaced by interns with a Canva subscription.
I’m not going to give up art or coding, of course. I’m stubborn and driven by passion and now sheer spite. But it’s a constant, daily struggle, getting bombarded with propaganda and shit-takes that the disciplines you’ve been training your whole life to do “won’t be viable jobs.”
And yet the work that “isn’t going anywhere” is either back-breaking in adverse conditions (hey, power to people that dig that lol) and/or can’t afford you a one-bedroom.
