[athrowaway3z]

Every time i see a comment chain like this i'm annoyed. In the last 3 decades we never truly found the words to define what kind of skills, problems, and people /-space exist in the industry, and AI has literally added a whole axis to the space so we're more unable to communicate than ever.

Having said that, and feeling more with you than the other guy, there is nothing for you to "disagree" with.

Mediocre was always buggy and broken in some ways, but for all intents and purposes it was good enough. Today somebody with a year of study can reasonably deploy something - for which the appearance of taking ownership and shipping a full stack of features has reached the bar of good enough.

Consider 10 years ago: Did you believe it was more likely that in the quality-distribution-of-software that we would, over time, create proportionally more quality? I dont think so and AI didn't meaningfully change the trend.

It changed the work dynamics, and still is changing, and with our inability to communicate is going to be an annoying mess.

Dont let the annoyances blind you to what LLMs can do for your point in space, or to where most of the points lie for the rest of the world.

[stavros]

The problem with AI isn't that it's mediocre, I can work with mediocre. The problem with AI is that it produces absolutely stellar world-class code with two hidden 0days in it.

I can't work with that sort of surprise. I'm tuned to consistency, and I can work with consistently bad, but not with "95% absolutely amazing, 5% abysmal".

And I say this as someone who develops exclusively with LLMs now.

[otikik]

> it produces absolutely stellar world-class code

I am using Claude Code with Opus 4.5 and I have to correct it every day. It produces working code but it makes mistakes. The code is more verbose than it should be, misunderstands/ignores edge cases, etc. Daily.

And I am not a stellar world-class programmer. I am pretty average. I just read what it produces.

[Kamq]

> I just read what it produces.

I don't think that's average right now.

[bluGill]

With junior programmers I typically just look for high level patterns that are commonly wrong. Sure if they are touching our cross thread communications code I need to spend a lot of time on that because it is so complex nobody gets it right - but we only have a tiny amount of that and most people look at it and run the opposite way (even me - I wrote it but I still do my best not to touch it when I can avoid it - that is hard hard hard)

[otikik]

I was disagreeing with "they shouldn't be".

I think we should care that our engineers have put the effort to understand the code they are responsible to produce. I don't care specifically about how they get that knowledge (I am using AI to learn myself, for example). But I disagree with the implicit assumption on the statement, which is, in my view, "humans don't need to understand the code any more" (because some fresh out of university might think they understand, but they really don't).