[soulofmischief]

LLMs can generate code, but the quality of the code at scale is just not there currently by all important metrics such as security, maintainability, separation of concerns, etc.

Today, it's a kind of chaos magic wherein you summon the beast and try your best to contain him, knowing that someone will probably die in the process. Sometimes literally. It's still a force multiplier in the right hands and domain, and agentic coding is a paradigm that won't retract, at least until something better supplants it.

The problem is that few engineers actually have the discipline available to constrain these models appropriately and instead rely on a hodgepodge network of "skills" aka prompt fragments which are passed around and glued together.

I consider myself as having such discipline, being strongly architecturally-minded, user-first, etc. in both design and implementation. And I still struggle to contain the beast many days. I just got through screaming at Claude for intentionally taking a shortcut that I'd forbidden, leading to a ton of wasted time and tokens.

Sometimes I feel like I saved weeks of R&D with a single ten-minute task handed off to an agent, other times I feel like I'd get better returns playing slots in Vegas at the alarming rate Claude burns through money.

[tstrimple]

I'm tired as fuck of anti-ai zealots pretending like every human is a fucking paragon at programming. I've literally never seen Claude Code produce as bad of code as generated by humans. Literally never. Yet the anti-ai zealots pretend like humans never introduce a bug into a system. Only LLMs produce slop or take shortcuts or ignore tests or do incredibly dumb fucking shit. It's fucking ridiculous. As if The Daily WTF didn't exist before LLMs. The reality is the "average" programmer is far below the skill floor of Claude Code or other frontier models. Those models will write test and explore more edge cases than the "average" developer ever will. But all these zealots pretend like they have only ever worked with the top 1% of the top 1% who never make mistakes or introduce bugs. Ultimately they are full of shit. You're lucky as fuck if your developers can even tell you what common design patterns are. The bar is that low and the HN crowd likes to pretend every developer is Linus Torvalds and not a clueless moron desperately coordinating API layers.

[soulofmischief]

Is this comment directed at me? Where did you get an anti-AI sentiment from my comment?

[MrScruff]

I’d probably word it differently but I agree with much of the sentiment here. I’m also reminded of the stat where 93% of drivers rated themselves as above average.