I’m always seeing this claim:
AI can code better than most humans.
Yet literally every formal study on this says exactly the opposite.
You don’t even need to be an experienced developer to see how bad AI created code is. AI just hallucinates too much. I tried asking ChatGPT to write a fairly simple shell script script for me a few times and it added non-existent commands or references EACH times.
Honestly I think AI has other fields of application. It’s good when you do something yourself but need an approximation about something. However trying to replace humans with it is just a sign of misunderstanding of the technology. AI shouldn’t be called Artificial Intelligence in the first place (damn good marketing tho). It’s more like a way of automating statistics.
Most humans can’t code though, so I think this is technically true (and a weird flex). No way is AI better than human coders.
“AI can code better than most humans.”
They actually mean: After burning millions of tokens and using up the energy of multiple households (for a year) it can code better than an intern.
State of the art AI can indeed code better than most programmers. I can get weeks of work done in a day with $100. I’ve been programming in multiple areas for 30 years.
I’m not saying that a noob can ask an AI to build Google and it will be done; But you’d better believe that an experienced programmer using AI will deliver weeks of high-quality work in a single day.
In this scenario, people with no experience are simply dead in the water. Things that took an experienced team months to build can now be done by a single guy in a few days, and there’s no way that won’t mess with employment.
If I was a young person I would be getting as far from software development as possible. Coding as a job is basically obsolete, people like you will just take time to accept it.
I keep asking, and have never seen one:
Someone find me a recording of writing a real application – not a “vibe coding demo” – using one of these magic tools. Let’s ignore the complexities of scale or data integrity, or even error handling. Write a simple asteroids clone or calculator app. Something that doesn’t need to reach outside its tiny box.
Build that in only an AI coding tool and see how long it takes to get a real product. (I get stuck here. So far, all demos end up halting before they are MVP, though they tend to get something faster than I could)
Afterwards, get a code review and fix any findings without breaking anything.
And here’s a catch: If you want to say AI codes better than humans, then a human is never allowed to modify the code directly. They can only prompt.
Show me that, and I might change my tune, but we’re nowhere close to it AFAIK, and I don’t see it ever happening. Until then, “AI coding” is at-best a way to reduce time spent writing small atomic functions that can be easily verified by a human, or maybe starting a function that a human fixes.
Things that took an experienced team months to build can now be done by a single guy in a few days…
I have yet to see this materialize outside of CEO townhalls or industry self-aggrandizement. If you’re an experienced programmer, can you go make me the demo I want and then review the code with a critical eye?
I’m not saying that a noob can ask an AI to build Google and it will be done; But you’d better believe that an experienced programmer using AI will deliver weeks of high-quality work in a single day.
And, I wonder, how does an intern or novice programmer become this experienced programmer if they never have to touch code‽ We’re headed to Idiocracy here, where the people who knew how to get shit done and why it worked eventually died off and there was no pipeline to replace them.
Until then… “vibe coding” is just smoke and will result in terrible things happening in a few years as banks and companies start inflicting terrible, cheap, AI code on us all.
Want to make tons of money? Go learn to be a security researcher. I’d be happy to be proved wrong.
I honestly don’t get what your asking. There already are loads of “vibe coded” software out there. The fact you don’t notice it, only makes my argument stronger.
For the last six months I have personally been working on pretty complex software project involving multiple user-facing frontends, a managing backoffice for admins and a backend/API in which not a single line of code has been written by a human. I can guarantee you that, in my 30 years of professionally developing software, this is the most rational, documented and test-covered codebase I have had the pleasure of working with.
You need to understand that most developers are, honestly, not very good. You can ask any dev who has ever worked consulting if they ever saw a good codebase, and most likely people will tell you that all they ever saw was spaggheti. You talk of “cheap and terrible AI code” as if the current “human code” was great, but you’d be surprised. Code, when all is said and done, is just a mean to an end. Users and stakeholders don’t give a fuck about how nice the code is, what they want is working features.
You also need to understand that I’m talking about agentic state of the art AIs that are not cheap, not copy/pasting from chatGPT. The company I work at has spent dozens of thousands on Cursor tokens for Claude Opus 4.5, GPT-5.2, etc. in just the last few months.
Regarding “how will new devs become experienced”, yeah, I have no idea. The truth is that, right now, an experienced dev + a budget for AI tokens can be more productive than a room full of juniors. Those juniors also don’t learn shit, because they just go to chatGPT to get code and understand mostly nothing of what they’re doing. I don’t know how this will evolve.
Software will still be a thing, obviously; People will still be building software. But in the same way that you code without needing to know anything about the electronics of the machine, future programmers won’t need to know nothing about the syntax and rules of programming languages, that much seems obvious to me.
Programmers will turn into project managers, with AI doing the coding itself.
No, it won’t. Programming was and still is a professional job. If somehow corporations are able to throw resources at it to make this profession obsolete, this will be one of the last jobs which get replaced by machines. Hundreds of other jobs would be replaced before it. Corporations would have all the money with nothing to spend on.
If there isn’t a revolution to overthrow this “infinite growth” model now, there will be. It’s either the end of corporations, or humanity.
Even though we live in an utopia, burning all that energy to program isn’t sustainable on this earth. It’s a dead end for this so-called AI.
One of the last jobs to be replaced
How can you see what’s going on and say this? Did you read the article?
Have you heard of Claude Code, Cursor, Windsurf, etc? Where is the equivalent to those tools for those other jobs that will be replaced first?
After plain text, code is probably the biggest share of training data. Github alone hosts billions of lines of open source code. Where is the same type of data for those other jobs?
AI can code better than most humans? BS. Only takes a few features to end up with spaghetti.
In my experience it doesn’t even take a few features, a medium-size non-trivial script by Claude would not pass review by me without human cleanup.
I wonder if some bolognese would make it a little bit better… I’ll see myself out
It doesn’t have to be better, just cheaper.
It won’t be cheaper for long. It creates a ton of bugs and outright removed features. Without real devs to fix it, companies who replace devs with AI will be left with products that simply don’t work in a matter of months.
Absolutely, but cheaper now is all that matters to the Dunning-Kruger c-suit that runs every business. Besides, they might have already moved on to a different company by the time it becomes a problem, so why should they care?
Pretty much this. The business model now is create your killer app with AI, get it to where it JUST works, then sell the whole company to a bigger fish that has devs that can fix things. Rinse and repeat.
Do you know why software gets expensive?
You tried adding stuff to a spaghetti code base or tried fixing bugs? Half the time you need to rewrite it. It’s not cheaper, you just pay more later.
If it’s cheaper this financial quarter then they don’t care if they have to pay for it the next financial quarter. That’s a future problem!
The same is true of most software built by humans, and AI is able to refactor, if you ask it to.
Not in my experience.
Skill issue :shrug:
They can’t get a job because they do not possess any skills that are marketable… I hate to break it to you, but going to computer Science school doesn’t make you a coder, and doesn’t make you good at anything.
Tbh I feel like computer science was the most overrated major this past decade and way too many students picked it.
Basically ever since the late 90s. The late 90s enshrined comp sci next to lawyer and doctor as the get rich jobs, except with super low education requirements.
I remember tons of folks when I was in college who didn’t want to do any of this “nerdy crap”, but they saw dollar signs.
Actually about 1997-2015
Most of the 90s was renegades and hobbyists. The gravy boat for lazy incompetants didn’t start, really, until the post dot-bomb bubble pop settled around 2003ish
Exactly, as hard as it is to swallow for people, there was a time when coding was a cushy job that you could land after drinking through college. Those days are gone, and it’s back to what it was when I was a dev: you made your own way; You made something awesome and you force companies to look at you and say holy fuck let’s get this person they’ve got something going on.
I thought most corporations just used the free software made by people who’ve “got something going on” without paying. I keep seeing complaints about that crossing my feed in Mastodon.
What does this have to do with anything.
No it can’t.
I think the conclusion that a software engineer can’t find a job due to LLMs is a load of bullshit. I work as one, we are always hiring, just not rubbish candidates…
To be fair. I’ve worked with companies that would hire rubbish developers, because “more is better” and also they have no idea what they are doing.
One such company just shuttetered an entire offshored part of the company “because AI”. No transition, because “AI can handle it without a transition”
The leadership are idiots that have no idea what they are doing, but thanks to them, rubbish candidates had a career path.
Apart from that, the AI companies are taking a lot of oxygen out of the industry. Not much money left for other companies to hire even if they wanted to.
But the problem is that fresh out of college candidates are generally going to be rubbish, especially when competing against candidates in CA with skills and candidates in lower cost of living areas with a near equivalent education.
Why hire a junior programmer from Stanford at the lower half of their class when you can hire two junior programmers from the University of Warsaw?
This is what killed my love of learning programming. An llm is years beyond me since I’m a noob and it would take 5 years of learning for me to surpass it vs someone typing into it and telling it to code an entire game. Id have to look up every syntax.
Id like to get away from computers since ai has ruined it for the most part and it’d be a lot smarter to learn metal work or woodworking. But I just enjoy computing and its interesting.
Keep going on it. We’ll need programmers when the bubble pops or Claude/Copilot/whoever pull a Broadcom and locks everyone into predatory contracts.
And, really, AI is not good at code. It’s good at mimicking stuff it’s seen before. That’s why most of the use-cases the AI heads at my company point to are things like REST servers or configuration files. You know, stuff that fucking everyone has in their 21st century codebase. Once you get into the weeds and start solving novel problems, AI just hallucinates a solution.
I started my career back when everyone said that Visual Basic would make most programming jobs obsolete. Spend your time building your craft. Spend a little longer learning why and how. Worst-case scenario, you can find the flaws in AI code instead of just shrugging and committing.
Not fresh grads. My company is hiring but we demand experience.
There’s no jobs!
Lands “technical lead” in LA after four months
I’m not in California but I have a CS degree and am going on 15 months of unemployment.
