A person who hasn't debugged any code thinks programmers are done for because of "AI".
Oh no. Anyways.
this post was submitted on 12 Apr 2025
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As an end user with little knowledge about programming, I've seen how hard it is for programmers to get things working well many times over the years. AI as a time saver for certain simple tasks, sure, but no way in hell they'll be replacing humans in my lifetime.
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.
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.
The way I see it, there are two types of developers we should take into consideration for this discussion:
- Software Engineers
- Code editors
Most "programmers" these days are really just code editors, they know how to search stack overflow for some useful pointers, copy that code and edit it to what they need. That is absolutely fine, this advances programming in so many ways. But the software engineers are the people that actually answer the stack overflow questions with detailed answers. These engineers have a more advanced skillset in problem solving for specific coding frameworks and languages.
When people say: programmers are cooked, I keep thinking that they mean code editors, not software engineers. Which is a similar trend in basically all industries in relation with AI. Yes, AI has the potential to make some jobs in health care obsolete (e.g. radiologist), but that doesn't mean we no longer need surgeons or domain expert doctors. Same thing applies to programming.
So if you are a developer today, ask yourself the following: Do actually know my stuff well, am I an expert? If the answer is no, and you're basically a code editor (which again, is fine), then you should seriously consider what AI means for your job.
I agree with the overall sentiment, but I'd like to add two points:
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Everyone starts off as a code editor, and through a combination of (self-)education and experience can become a software engineer.
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To the point of code editors having to worry about LLM's taking their job, I agree, but I don't think it will be as over the top as people literally being replaced by "AI agents". Rather I think it will be a combination of code editors becoming more productive through use of LLMs, decreasing the demand for code editors, and lay people (i.e. almost no code skills) being able to do more through LLMs applied in the right places, like some website builders are doing now.
If the "code editor" uses AI they will never become a software engineer.
"Oh I will just learn by asking AI to explain" that's not happening. You won't learn how to come.up with a solution. Mathematiciams know better than anyone you can't just memorize how the professor does stuff and call yourself a problem solver. Now go learn the heruistic method.
As much as people hate it, stackoverflow people rarely give the answer directly. They usually tell you easier alternative methods or how to solve a similar problem with explanation.
They way it will work is that every single college student that relies on AI and gets away with "academic dishonesty, the tool" will become terrible programmers that can't think for themselves or read a single paragraph of documentation. Similar consequences for inexperienced developers.
The day that AI can program perfectly is the day it can improve the itself perfectly and it's the day that we'll all be fucked.
I personally vote for some sort of direct brain interface (no Elmo, you're not allowed to play) that DOES allow direct recall of queries but does NOT allow ads ffs) that allows us to grow with AI in intelligence. If you can't beat em (we can't), join em.
I highly doubt some of these rich fucks would pass up an opportunity to put ads straight into people's brains.
Doubt? I'm sure they will try. That's why, fuck closed source software
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 have mixed feelings about that company. They have some interesting things "going against the flow" like ditching the cloud and going back to on prem, hating on microservices, advocating against taking money from VCs, and now hiring juniors. On the other hand, the guy is a Musk fanboy and they push some anti-DEI bullshit. Also he's a TypeScript hater for some reason...
The reason programmers are cooked isn't because AI can do the job, bit because idiots in leadership have decided that it can.
- Programmers invent AI
- Executives use AI to replace programmers
- Executives rehire programmers for thousands of dollars an hour to fix AI mistakes.
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So this. Just because it can't do the job doesn't mean they won't actually replace you with it.
Of all the desk jobs, programmers are least likely to be doing bullshit jobs that it doesn't matter if it's done by a glorified random number generator.
Like I never heard a programmer bemoan that they do all this work and it just vanishes into a void where nobody interacts with it.
The main complaint is that if they make one tiny mistake suddenly everybody is angry and it's your fault.
Some managers are going to have some rude awakenings.
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At the end of the day, they still want their shit to work. It does, however, make things very uncomfortable in the mean time.
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"Programmers are cooked," he says in reply to a post offering six figures for a programmer
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 tried out the new copilot agent in VSCode and I spent more time undoing shit and hand holding than it would have taken to do it myself
Things like asking it to make a directory matching a filename, then move the file in and append _v1 would result in files named simply "_v1" (this was a user case where we need legacy logic and new logic simultaneously for a lift and shift).
When it was done I realized instead of moving the file it rewrote all the code in the file as well, adding several bugs.
Granted I didn't check the diffs thoroughly, so I don't know when that happened and I just reset my repo back a few cookies and redid the work in a couple minutes.
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Know a guy who tried to use AI to vibe code a simple web server. He wasn't a programmer and kept insisting to me that programmers were done for.
After weeks of trying to get the thing to work, he had nothing. He showed me the code, and it was the worst I've ever seen. Dozens of empty files where the AI had apparently added and then deleted the same code. Also some utter garbage code. Tons of functions copied and pasted instead of being defined once.
I then showed him a web app I had made in that same amount of time. It worked perfectly. Never heard anything more about AI from him.
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everytime i see a twitter screenshot i just know im looking at the dumbest people imaginable
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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.
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Tinfoil hat time:
That Ace account is just an alt of the original guy and rage baiting to give his posting more reach.
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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
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Everyone's convinced their thing is special, but everyone else's is a done deal.
Meanwhile the only task where current AI seems truly competitive is porn.
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