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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
We’re about to learn a painful lesson about delayed gratification in software engineering.
New data from China, 26,811 students tracked January 2023 through June 2025. Students using AI for homework saw their scores jump 20 percent. Completion time dropped nearly half. They aced the assignments.
Then exam season came. Those same students scored 20 to 40 percent worse when they couldn’t use the tool.
The homework phase is over. The exam phase is coming.
We’re doing this in software right now. Vibe coding feels incredible. Features ship fast. Nobody’s asking what happens in Month 18 when the original dev has left and nobody understands the codebase.
Commercial pilots fly with autopilot for most of every flight. They’re required to maintain manual flying proficiency regardless. If the system fails mid-air and the pilot can’t take over, people die.
Most teams using AI right now have forgotten how to fly manually. They’ve become passengers in their own systems. The autopilot flies, nobody checks instruments, and the first sign of trouble will be a breach notice or outage.
Three rules:
- Command the mission. Define architecture before prompting. Ambiguity kills in code and in flight. Delegate selectively. Offload mechanical work. Keep design and security reviews human. Verify everything. Audit before production.
- Never trust the automation without checking instruments.
- Quick wins feel good. Sustainable engineering feels boring. Boring keeps systems standing.
Organisations surviving the next two years won’t ship the fastest. They’ll be the ones who remember how to fly without the aids.
people insisting that you actually be skilled, independently of your tools, doesn’t make them Luddites. Rather, being unable to do so makes you a phony.
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Off-topic.
The luddites had a point.
They weren’t opposed to technology, but the use of technology to remove skilled labor to produce inferior products.
Also, the pilot/autopilot argument is, kinda not applicable. The pilots aren’t just fucking around- autopilot systems only manage some aspects of flying, the pilots are still fully engaged.
The pilots absolutely can just fuck around for most of the flight, and even during the critical moments of takeoff and landing, the plane can do a lot of it automatically these days.
Pilots need to actively practice flying without autopilot to keep those skills up in case the autopilot fails.
the plane can do a lot of it automatically these days.
It can but nobody is out there flying CAT IIIc autoland approaches because its ‘easier’.
Just install a second autopilot that can take over if the first one fails!
They do in fact have like 3 autopilots for this reason
I feel like their point was that the gains of technology were not distributed fairly, which is largely the concern today. It’s not “technology is bad”, or “technology make bad thing”; rather, “the owners of the machine undercut our labor, and we lose our jobs”, which I think was true. In the modern world, there are likely less tailors, as a percentage of the working population, certainly in first world countries. Sweatshops still exist, and it’s people’s labor competing against a production line, in terms of ROI for a business.
I get the sense we all know AI isn’t going to bring about a uptopia for all people, because the economic systems don’t incentivize that. There’s some hypothetical world where this sort of technological advance could benefit all people, but it’s not the one we live in. That’s a reality & major problem for the technology (among other issues).
I certainly think the cost of labor for tech development is going to drop significantly due to the market pressures; look at all the tech layoffs. At the same time, the upside is these tools make certain projects accessible & possible, because prior, would have needed significant funding, amazing solo skills, etc. There’s new opportunities available, but it’ll come at the cost of cratering tech position compensation & job security.
I don’t know anyone in my field right now who feels safe (game dev), and I have many talented friends out of work.
Just look at any productivity vs wage growth chart from any country. Anyone who thinks that any efficiency gain will pay off for workers is either naive or part of the grift.
They did have a point. The printing press still changed the way information works
Luddites weren’t concerned about the printing press. Their fight was over mechanized looms and knitting frames.
Their concerns were mostly about losing their jobs, as well as the absolute dog shit quality the mechanical machines produced at the time.
In 1814, printers in London did have similar conniptions over the steam press, though.
the luddites had a point… in the moment… kinda… but i think have largely been pretty conclusively proven wrong… clothing is now plentiful, and i doubt anyone would want to go back to paying taylors to make all their clothes for 10x more, even if the clothing would be much higher quality, which i even doubt: clothing quality doesn’t come down to artisan skill any more, it comes down to choices you make, and an artisan can still make cost cutting decisions on fabric, construction, etc
So…have you not heard the damage fast fashion did to the planet? Sure, it make making cloth quicker and cheaper and widely available, but in the end it’s a huge source of chemical waste, landfill waste, and microplastic. Because clothing are so much cheaper to buy new than fixing it, we lost a lot of skilled labour to automation.
The same thing happened everywhere, automation take away human agency, and that take away skill learning. In the end humanity will suffer because less and less people gonna learn how to fix the shit that they rely on. That didn’t happen on accident, that’s by design. We all thought AI gonna upskill a lot of people, but i feels like instead of making a nation of artisan it gonna make a nation of 7/11. Just look at Destin’s struggle to make a fucking bbq brush fully American, the nation of 300millions people can’t even provide parts that fully made within the nation.
Fast fashion would be the other end of an extreme. Another way is for stores to have one of each size, you try the one you want and place an order. The store delivers in batches and enough orders are placed.
That’s not how clothes work, these days you either get fast fashion or tailored. There’s basically nothing left in between because of the economics of the industry. If you’re doing readymade clothing, you gotta do it at scale (and it’s never going to fit a lot of people). This is exactly what the Luddites predicted; tailored clothes for very rich people, slop for everyone else.
Maybe. I think a sizable group of people would rather put fast fashion back in the bag.
i definitely agree, but plenty leading to waste doesn’t mean that plenty is a bad thing
having enough food to not worry about food waste is definitively a good problem to have. ideally we don’t have food waste because we don’t have enough food for everyone, but just because plenty leads to waste at least initially isn’t an argument against plenty
what are you agreeing with you dummy? you definetly agree to disagree or what? fast fashion clothes become waste because people don’t actually want to wear them after a few times, or even if they do the clothes are so bad they get damaged very soon.
its also not just about the waste products, its about the pollution and the destruction of our environment
It’s the sweatshops, man. The sweatshops suck. I would absolutely rather have one set of tailored clothes, vs. endless variety from sweatshops where Bangladeshi children work for pennies and hour.
No. They weren’t proven wrong, pauperism was the consequence and it was horrible. Luckily we shifted that back to regimes that don’t like to report much on terrible living and environmental conditions so we don’t have the filth at our doorstep.
yeah… as i said, they had a point in the moment
in 2026 we have retraining programs and social security programs… these are the solutions to industrialisation; not ignorance… the longer you fight industrialisation the harder it hits because rather than happening gradually it happens all at once and society has a harder time absorbing it
Stupid Uyghurs, should just make use of their “retraining programs and social security programs” instead of being forced to produce our cheap shit.
china having human rights abuses is not an argument against retraining people when technology starts to make jobs redundant
Their point is that the people being abused in sweatshops aren’t the same people who are benefiting from retraining and social security. Because the Luddites were basically correct about everything
I agree. A lot of blame that should be squarely laid at the feet of bad distribution of wealth via capitalism, is being put onto technological advances making things more efficient. The fact is, even in a utopian society where every person has access to any material needs they could want, we’d want to be able to produce those things more efficiently to get them into the hands of more people at a lower cost to society as a whole.
If we had a fair system - firms having to be run as worker cooperatives, wealth going into the hands of the working class instead of a few capitalists, etc - none of the Luddite-esque complaints would hold. In this example, yes, cost of clothing would go up if we fairly paid all textile workers and if they owned part of the company they work for. It would still be orders of magnitude cheaper than bespoke, hand made clothing requiring one skilled worker tens or hundreds of man hours of work.
And as hard as it is to change that system, I actually think that’s easier than trying to put the genie that is technology back in the bottle.
The one glimmer of hope is open models and especially fully open source ones like K2 Horizon. Open models and tooling for running them locally are rapidly evolving such that the tech will be democratized instead of a couple capitalists having a stranglehold on the tech.
This is probably overly pessimistic/optimistic (depending on your outlook) in terms of timing. You won’t forget how to code after 18 months of using AI to do it instead; if you decide to go cold turkey, or OpenAI turns the screws on pricing, or whatever, you’ll be back in the swing of things in no time. The lesson from schools is that junior programmers who are learning now are not going to gain the same ability we did. (Besides that they’re finding it difficult to get hired because the AI can do junior programming fairly OK, that is). So the problem won’t be in 18 months; it’ll be in a few years at least, from that point of view.
There’s the separate question of architecture and code quality; by this point we’ve probably all seen the impenetrable morass that vibe coding leads to. That, I’m guessing, will cause problems much sooner.
That’s not what we’re talking about. Knowing how to program is just one thing. Students who use AI to cheat on theory classes won’t learn the theory. Additionally in programming classes they won’t learn how to program as well as they could
I think it is what the original post is talking about - it literally says “We’re doing this in software now … Nobody’s asking what happens in month 18”!
“Software” is not just knowing how to write code. I know from firsthand experience that experience with how a program runs, and the more technical bits help a shittton.
I agree with everything except for vibe coding feeling great.
Am I the only one who gets incredibly anxious relying on AI to code? I still ask it for code when I really just want to move on from a problem but it always feels like voluntarily putting mold in my floorboards.
I try vibe coding from time to time and it’s a mixed bag. When it works it works but then there’s suddenly just code there. It’s like when a colleague implements a feature in a project with multiple devs but since it’s just your personal project you suddenly got put in the code reviewer chair.
When I write code I reason about all the small decisions but when the agent takes over I have to figure out step by step why decisions were made.
I’m still not sold on coding agents and vibecoding but it’s getting better and more usable.
The only downside is that a agent doing its thing is now seen as downtime where you could just prompt another agent and work on several projects simultaneously. If anyone ever tells you vibecoding is good because you can work in parallel RUNI try vibe coding from time to time and it’s a mixed bag. When it works it works but then there’s suddenly just code there. It’s like when a colleague implements a feature in a project with multiple devs but since it’s just your personal project you suddenly got put in the code reviewer chair.When I write code I reason about all the small decisions but when the agent takes over I have to figure out step by step why decisions were made.I’m still not sold on coding agents and vibecoding but it’s getting better and more usable.The only downside is that a agent doing its thing is now seen as downtime where you could just prompt another agent and work on several projects simultaneously.If anyone ever tells you vibecoding is goodbecause you can work in parallelRUN
I think it sounds really weird, too. I don’t like the sound of that at all. I’m not a pro though.
I’ll admit I enjoy carrying on little tutoring sessions with my GPU though. “How might I approach something like that?” “Can you explain this concept a bit differently?”
But I try to do all the solid brain work myself. Letting the machine write the code for me feels…kinda gross.
I actually think it’s awesome that it understands coding convention and codebases and stuff well enough. Saves a lot of time digging through the wreckage of search engines…
But I don’t appreciate that a lot of its “skill” is pulled from the efforts of uncompensated coders.
I only use it to solve specific problems when I can’t find the solution elsewhere. Then I spend the time to understand and rewrite the code myself.
It’s the same workflow as using Stack Overflow, etc. You can’t just copy/paste solutions.
This isn’t programmer humor… post to the right comm like [email protected]
I have a hard time telling AI authored LinkedIn thought leadership apart from formulaic LinkedIn thought leadership sometimes, but this feels AI written, which makes it fairly amusing considering the point it’s making.
(Does vibe coding feel incredible? Also, “Nobody’s asking what happens in Month 18 when the original dev has left and nobody understands the codebase” implies that the vibe coder original dev understood the codebase at any point, which isn’t an argument I’d feel comfortable making for any of the ones I’ve worked with)
Does vibe coding feel incredible?
There’s definitely a magic in watching it print code with almost no input. Like watching git history with Gource.
It’s not good code, but it is cool to see.
when the original dev leaves and nobody understands the code
In my experience at work, no one cares about this. They assume the AI will be able to get there with enough tokens/time with the help of the human at the other end. They have done this and decided it was good enough.
Meanwhile, people like me who don’t use AI coding agents and are PRing and modifying the code are having a hell of a time.
They assume the AI will be able to get there with enough tokens/time with the help of the human at the other end. They have done this and decided it was good enough.
Or if it does break, just hit it with the AI stick until it works again.
most users are also too accepting of slop work. So the MVP of yesterday is the final product of today.
Nice message, but why use the slop machine to write it? Use your own words!
I see short/choppy sentences, but not a lot of other slop writing indicators. What are you on about?
Linkedin has been writing like this for a decade
Sometimes I take screenshots of this guy’s comments bc he’s like opinionated and funny
But is he opinionated or is the LLM’s training corpus opinionated? Why should I care what an autocomplete has to say about this topic?
I know that when i started using AI i got over blocks much faster. A system from design to implementation that use to take a week now only takes a few hours with most of that is testing and reviewing the code.
I don’t use agents to test and review code btw because i still want to know what’s going on but my colleagues are definitely using agents to build test large codebases. Im sorry but the truth is AI has changed how we build products in the same way intellisense and jet brains did but on a scale i haven’t seen in my lifetime.
Agreed. If you don’t use AI in coding you are not competitive with someone who does. It really is that simple. You won’t be able to keep up, your bosses will see, you will get fired and that’s that.
Even if the quality you deliver without AI is better, quality is not everything. Time is always a factor and AI beates you ten times over. The rest is sane flows with lot’s of testing etc.
This isn’t One Hour Hot Dog. If you need a big huge fix right the hell yesterday, you fucked up last week. Possibly last year. And what’s gonna prevent that sort of company-liquidating blunder is a layer of crotchety obsessives who can spend a day reading and then commit one line. ‘Hit engine with hammer: $1. Knowing where to hit: $9,999.’
A system that’s pretty good at guessing a hundred places to try hitting has obvious value. Especially when undo is a thing. But this attitude of ‘the future is now, old man!’ is almost as off-base as the folks insisting a magic coding robot won’t help anybody.
I agree with you. I’m not even 100% anti-AI even though a lot of how it is used absolutely reeks.
Of course Big Business is gonna be all about shipping it fast and cheap to the detriment of all else as long as it “works right now.” The ridiculous farce of capitalism as we know it now is that their real goal is to sell off and bail at a profit just before all that vibe-debt comes due and things implode.
It doesn’t mean it’s the best way to create software.
It reminds me of how homes nowadays are thrown together and so ridiculously shoddy because it’s all about speed and holding together just long enough to sell.
Goodluck arguing this with the AI bros
“dude I have an agent of workflow that goes through the entire codebase. the agent is the expert and I am guiding it”
alright man you have fun with that
That’s what they’re doing for my SO’s big introductory class in the humanities. No homework, quizzes, or papers. Short answer exams done in a special testing center.
Really sucks for people who were decent at essays and turning in assignments on time but not great at exams.
yeah, but it’s great for those that hated busywork and were good at exams
I wasn’t great at exams, but I think if I re-did university today I’d still do much better because my personal learning style is best when I talk through the material with someone. Sitting in a lecture listening to someone monologue at me, reading a static textbook, those weren’t great. But with LLMs every student now has full-time access to a “live tutor” with infinite patience and no sense of social risk from asking it dumb questions. It’s absolutely my perfect learning environment.
I’m the “good at exams” type, I find paper writing (or novel writing… 😢) unpleasantly tedious. If we lose the “good at structuring complex thoughts in a way that can be coherently decoded by other humans” types, the “good at exams” types will suffer. We need people who can write good papers and people who can recall diverse facts and arrange them into simple shapes quickly.
It wouldn’t be hard to change things for essay-types to still get to shine. We’ve been moving away from actual home work anyway, for good reason imo (brief aside, I also think homework sends the wrong message for healthy separation between work and life in the working world). Give in class time for handwriting essays, either completed in one session or over the course of some days. In class books or e-readers for research.
If we’re being honest here, we all kind of acknowledged already that education has been in dire need of reform for a long time now, we were talking about the need for radical education reform over a decade ago… I think AI is highlighting these problems and making them worse more than they are really a root cause.
we were talking about the need for radical education reform over a decade ago
Education, and especially critical thinking, has been systematically gutted by conservative governments for at least 4 decades in the Western world. The goal is the absolute minimum knowledge and thinking skills (preferably without learning skills) necessary to complete the wage slavery tasks.
Absolutely agreed, though the problem goes beyond just funding… a lot of countries still have a very small c conservative, traditionalist, Prussian-style education system that focuses on things like rote memorization, date and event-based history education rather than critical historical analysis, etc. These existed before the great defunding and are also an albatross around the neck of education that needs to be reformed away.
Education really just needs a ground-up restructuring and rethinking, and boy is it going to be hard to make people shake up some of their preconceived notions on education.
But yeah, none of that means anything without funding and is counter to some political goals, very true.
Hard agree on Prussian-style education (which had similar goals of wage slavery when it was introduced). Unfortunately the pessimist in me thinks reform will likely have to wait until after this round of fascism has run its course, but it absolutely need to be a high priority when the time comes. Best time to plant a seed is twenty years ago…
And the post is written with fucking AI lmao
I guess exams in school are supposed to represent real life???
Real life is open book. Exams are horseshit.I kinda agree. Although, I think the logic is nuanced. There is value in being able to know your stuff when your advanced tools and reference materials aren’t readily available or have failed.
… But then again I’m sure most of these kids aren’t going to be needing to emergency land a spacecraft by doing complex math from their head, Apollo 13 style… so… :p
But the cynic in me agrees “exams are horseshit.” It feels like they’re often used as a filter to keep the degree/cert/whatever “valuable.”
Compilers would look the same. You give some people a tool that turns fiddly low-level repetition into relatively painless double-checking. Then you yank that tool away, and oh no, they’re not as good at the fiddly low-level repetition.
What matters is - are these students worse-off, with the tool? It’s not going away. Foreverafter, a couple gigs of linear algebra will turn your to-do list into an actual running project. We have to ask if teaching the fiddly low-level repetition is the point… or just a means to an end.
You can scoff that compilers are objectively better, but they weren’t! Sometimes they still aren’t! We were teaching kids to consider inline assembly well into the Windows Vista era. Even now, compilers with decades of active development can have bizarre corner cases, which any hardened bit-banger of machine code would never write. But they’re all good enough that plaintext assembly has become an arcane third-year topic, and hexadecimal machine code is the realm of bare-metal maniacs.
Teaching math, kids have to know what numbers are, and how base ten works, and why the calculator says 11-3=8. But as you go up to college math it matters a lot less whether people can do shit in their heads… or even remember how. Open-book and open-calculator exams are still fuckin’ hard. They’re just hard because you’re trying to apply some obscure proof to a rat’s-nest of swooping symbols, instead of because you’re worried about having enough time to write out long division to umpteen places. The latter can be sufficiently approximated with two wooden sticks. We can assume anyone doing math professionally has two sticks. Continuously! As a given, for their job. Probably at home as well.
Teaching programming, you have to break people a certain way. No gentle and charming syntax can disguise the mechanized nastiness of what code is. Whatever semi-readable text you’re looking at will be squinched through a flake of tortured sand in a bazillionth of a second. But only after getting transformed at least two times in processes you kinda have to trust will be computationally equivalent, unless you want to minor in a branch of mathematics haunted by Stephen Wolfram. Ultimately there is a shockingly small state machine designed to trick you into off-by-one errors.
But once people can knock out fizzbuzz on a paper 6502… they’ve kinda got it. They’ve been inculcated. They will soon apply arcane patterns to a rat’s-nest of obtuse variable names. Ssshould they have to do that by hand? They’re not doing the assembly by hand. They’re not even looking at the assembly. They might never need to think about assembly again. So long as they’re playing spot-the-bollocks for a flurry of pull requests, that’s arguably a more useful skill than writing clean toy code from scratch. Especially in pen and ink.
This is largely an oversimplification because it depends on how you use AI in the first place. Are you building modularly and incrementally? Or are you letting it ride on black?
ive personally found LLM coding to be pretty effective if i adhere to very strict “engineering best practices” like TDD, good documentation, thorough API design, systems design, etc.
im very afraid that the next generation of software engineers will never develop the skills needed to make the most out of it because they skipped the rudiments of good software engineering.
to me it feels like playing jazz without learning scales. it’s possible to be an incredible jazz musician without formal training if you’re a savant… but you’re probably not.
