[lowsong]

> With my newly-acquired superpowers I could knock out the last two pieces in a few days’ work

From the linked post:[0]

> I left an employer that is years behind adopting AI to one actively supporting and encouraging it. As of March, in my professional capacity I no longer write code myself. My current situation was unimaginable to me only a year ago. Like it or not, this is the future of software engineering. Turns out I like it, and having tasted the future I don’t want to go back to the old ways.

It's deeply distressing to watch people fall into AI psychosis. Being smart, accomplished, or experienced is no defence.

After the bubble pops and the industry realises the damage these tools can do to people, folks like the author will have to confront that they were taken in by a lie. Many won't be able to confront that.

[0]: https://nullprogram.com/blog/2026/03/29/

[rirze]

It's not AI psychosis, you're interpreting what he said to the extreme.

Anyone who has actual corporate team lead or management experience understand AI as effectively a junior dev who doesn't have great persistent memory. These devs using AI are reviewing, guiding, and validating the work given to them by AI just as they would from a junior dev.

The inverse of your statement is more apt; it's distressing to see people so angsty about AI usage. There are going to be skilless vibecoders and then there are going to be experienced devs (like OP) who figured out their AI workflow to multiply their productivity 2-5x.

What the future holds for AI model pricing-- that is a valid concern. But I don't think that's what you intended.

[teo_zero]

> There are going to be skilless vibecoders and then there are going to be experienced devs (like OP) who figured out their AI workflow to multiply their productivity 2-5x.

Are you sure OP belongs in the second group? He explicitly said he doesn't read all the code generated by his AI:

> I have not read most of the code, and instead focused on results, so you might say this was “vibe-coded.”

[rirze]

It might surprise you to know that most (senior) engineers who review don't read every line of code. They have visual pattern-matching from years of experience and depend on that. A good question is, is that enough? I don't know, but the point is that this is already a established practice.

Also, I will not doubt OP's experience. He has published a good set of Emacs packages that are very capable for the niches they occupy. Certain packages are even foundational dependencies in the Emacs ecosystem.

If OP "vibecoded" a critical package, I'm sure he would take it upon himself to ensure it high quality.

[em-bee]

I no longer write code myself

this is just like being promoted from developer to manager. some people like it some don't. with AI there is another dimenstion: some people like managing machines instead of people, some don't.

it's not for me. i don't want to stop writing code. i don't mind to manage people but i don't want to manage machines (at least not with an unprecise interface/outcome as AI provides). consequently AI may be fine for this person, but it is not for me.

[computably]

> It's deeply distressing to watch people fall into AI psychosis.

It's unclear what you're saying here... Yes, AI-induced psychosis is a real problem and the frontier labs' mitigations are ineffective, to put it mildly. But using AI as a coding tool doesn't have anything to do with psychosis.

[jesse_dot_id]

AI psychosis is to have a toxic relationship with a chatbot as if though it was a real person. It has nothing to do with engineering. You're muddying your own point by conflating all LLM use with some kind of delusion. There is a lot of nuance in this space and you're not doing yourself any favors by ignoring it if you're an engineer. There is no bubble pop, other than a straight up apocalypse, that is going to put this genie back in the bottle. Models are trained. Tools are built. There isn't a single industry that cares about artistry more than efficiency. It's here to stay, it's getting better, and if you don't know how to use it, you're going to have trouble finding work.

[koolala]

I just wonder how jobs like that won't replace their employees. Seems too good to last. In a few years OpenAI will just sell $1,000 per month Human-free Agent Coding for businesses.

Saying they have psychosis is a rude exaggeration.

[iLemming]

> Being smart, accomplished, or experienced is no defence.

Perhaps you're confusing "not using AI" with "not being dependent on AI", those are very different things.

The edge isn't from avoidance, it's from using AI as leverage on top of real skill. A strong developer + AI beats a strong developer alone, and massively beats a weak developer + AI. The edge doesn't come from avoiding a tool - it comes from being the kind of person who doesn't need it but uses it anyway. That's leverage. Refusing to use it is just leaving leverage on the table to make a philosophical point.

> After the bubble pops

People like Chris (who is enormously capable engineer) would just move onto different tools, different techniques and paradigms. That is the essence of being a software developer - many of us choose this path specifically because it forces you to learn something new, every single day. That is (I suspect) also another reason why Wellons decided to migrate away from Emacs - he just learned it so deeply, perhaps it's no longer giving him the satisfaction of learning. Which to be honest is hard to believe - Emacs is a boundless playground, there's always something new to learn there.

[tmtvl]

Also from that post:

> Models you can run yourself are toys.

Now I may be old, but whenever we put a lot of faith in unaccountable megacorps it sure seems to have backfired a lot (remember when Amazon removed 1984 from people's libraries?). As long as a model running locally on a regular laptop bought from the supermarket isn't good enough I'm gonna remain sceptical about current AI.

There's also ethical and environmental considerations, but let's see if we can walk before we try to run.

[anthk]

A line? Enjoy the papers telling you otherwise. Not just the cognition it's down, LLM's degrade themselves on every iteration.

[pessimizer]

Not writing code isn't the same as vibe-coding. You can stay on top of AI, make it rewrite the things that look bad, make it refactor until you're happy with how things look, etc....

Maybe a lot of people who are doing that aren't admitting that they've stopped writing code, but when all you're ever doing is manually fixing a few lines, or moving blocks of code to more sensible places, fixing jumbled parameters in a call and such, you're not really writing code anymore. You're now a chef in a kitchen yelling at assistants and just touching things when dealing with communicating a correction to one of those dimwits is more frustrating than just doing it yourself.

You still have to be a cook to be a chef, though. But the reason I say that AI is dumb is because I tell it to do things, it does them in a dumb way, and I complain at it and tell it to write it in a sensible way. It screws that up, and I tell it to do it again, and not to screw it up. I'm still not coding. If it goes into a loop of nonsense, I touch things with the intention of doing just enough to knock it out of that loop (or rather keep the new context from falling into it.)

"After the bubble pops" we might see that a lot of new chefs can't actually afford assistants. But just as likely, the overbuilt (government-subsidized directly and through policy) capacity might end up getting written off, and at the cost of electricity and maintenance costs could stay reasonably good. Or algos improve. Or training methods improve.

[em-bee]

AI is dumb is because I tell it to do things, it does them in a dumb way, and I complain at it and tell it to write it in a sensible way. It screws that up, and I tell it to do it again, and not to screw it up. I'm still not coding. If it goes into a loop of nonsense, I touch things with the intention of doing just enough to knock it out of that loop (or rather keep the new context from falling into it.)

it is inconceivable to me how anyone could ever enjoy working like that. but whatever floats their boat.

[bitwize]

No. AI is a must for software development. It's non-negotiable. The productivity gains are too great. The era of 100% human-written code is over. People will still do it as an idle curiosity, for personal projects only they intend to use. But even those open source projects with significant user bases that forbid the use of AI (like, afaik, NetBSD) will be eclipsed by those that support it in terms of features, capability, and security. And the commercial world? Forget it. You cannot keep pace with your employer's expectations unless you learn to use these tools well. This is not up for debate. It's reality.

Plenty of accomplished devs are getting good results and accomplishing tasks with unheard-of speed using AI, so if you're still not, that's a PEBKAC. You are not using the tools correctly. Figure it out before you complain.

[spankibalt]

> "No. AI is a must for software development. It's non-negotiable."

Absolutist rubbish.

> "But even those open source projects with significant user bases that forbid the use of AI [...] will be eclipsed by those that support it in terms of features, capability, and security."

As is this. If a language model is relevant to a project, open source or otherwise, is of course heavily dependent on its nature (ethics, use case, deployment, working environment/culture, et cetera).

[mrhottakes]

LLMs may be a must for programming, but not for engineering. Writing code is the easy part once you figure out what actually needs to be built in the first place.

[bitwize]

Indeed. But figuring out what actually needs to be built is the systems analyst's job, not the programmer's. It takes people skills and holistic thought, something programmers are generally poor at (and AI certainly is no good at, at least not today).

[wiseowise]

> You cannot keep pace with your employer's expectations unless you learn to use these tools well. This is not up for debate. It's reality.

So the issue isn’t LLM productivity but unrealistic expectations that skyrocketed in the last years? Makes sense.

> Plenty of accomplished devs are getting good results and accomplishing tasks with unheard-of speed using AI

I don’t see any major business impact.

[vor_]

> No. AI is a must for software development. It's non-negotiable.

???

[anthk]

https://smsk.dev/2026/04/26/ai-cannot-self-improve-and-math-...

>You are not using the tools correctly.

Stop being deluded, man.

When this crap collapses into itself you will be in tears back asking for the knowledge you failed to get without the fancy Clippys.

Now, stop that fancy Megahal chatbot and learn to do things by hand.

[bitwize]

I know how to do things by hand, man. But the writing is on the wall: that skill is going the way of writing programs on punchcards. And there's little we can do about it because the economics in favor of LLMs are like laws of physics.

Yes, model collapse is gonna suck. But LLMs are not just left to self-train, they are guided by human researchers who are going to find ways to groom and direct the models to avoid collapse. They can make billions by shipping better models, so why wouldn't they invest a lot of effort in that?

[wiseowise]

> But the writing is on the wall: that skill is going the way of writing programs on punchcards.

Strange, I don’t see any punchcards inside of my computers, but for some reason I still see code behind anything that LLM does.

[anthk]

This is not terminals vs punchcards. This is like Windows ME over Windows 98. Or, maybe, the 286 over a 8086 when a 386 it's the proper path.

[vor_]

One of the amusing things about AI bros is how naively over-enthusiastic they are about the technology and its inevitability.

[bitwize]

You still don't get where I'm coming from. The AI takeover of programming is inevitable, and I hate it. But my feelings don't make the brutal economics go away. A skilled developer can now accomplish in days what used to take weeks or months with proper use of these tools. Period. I know this because of the absurd number of skilled developers here, on X, Mastodon, and elsewhere—including OP's author—saying "with AI I'm accomplishing in days what used to take me weeks or months". And if you have the opportunity to make use of the tools, you have to be stupid, or you're cutting off your nose to spite your face, not to.

[kryptiskt]

I find all those arguments unconvincing. The right 10,000 lines of code can be worth a billion dollars. The idea that it would be somehow uneconomical for me to take the time to get it right feels like utter nonsense. I don't have to have much of an edge over an LLM to come out on top once you start to distribute the resulting product. Three months of my time costs $25,000 or so (hey, I'm in Europe, adjust as you see fit), if I can make something just a little bit better than AI Albert who can whip something together for a tenth of the price, my time will pay for itself once you have modest amounts of revenue from it.

And I'm fully convinced that what I do will not just be a little bit better than what AI Al makes. It will trounce it in all quality criteria. But of course, coincidentally with the rise of AI assistance, software quality has completely disappeared from the conversation. I wonder why.

[anthk]

Contrary to you I've been playing with the AI Howto stuff from TLDP forever from Markov chain based chatbots to genetic algos and neural networks and I know the limits on LLM's and how the rot on retroalimentation by reusing their own data. They can't extrapolate. Period. In every cycle they get dumber by design unless there's new human curated content. Go try to explain that to corporations having their copyrighted code being stolen away, be GPL or propietary.

[NoGravitas]

You know, economics are made by people and can be changed by them. They're historically contingent, not laws of physics.

[wiseowise]

> here, on X, Mastodon, and elsewhere

You should’ve started with this. Take a really deep breath, take your phone, find closest park, go slowly there (don’t prompt LLM on the way), find a green patch on the ground (it’s called grass) and touch it.