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by Qhemlomo 2 days ago
How is this a gimmick?

It changes my whole profession on a level i couldn't even imagine how we would 'solve' software engineering.

4 comments

Has it been released to the public yet? Genuine question. Because if you didn't try it yourself, you have to rely on others' reports. And different people who tried it on different projects got different results, leading to different conclusions.
it was released a few hrs ago as "Fable 5". it's an incremental improvement over Opus 4.8.
We still didn't "solve" software engineering, try to give Claude code access to your friends or family and see what they do with it.
My partner wrote an android app which was doing what she wanted to do. She did this experiment 5 month ago and she did this in one day.

My wife has 0 knowledge how any of this works.

That was shocking to see.

Progress is not stoping and Fable proves that.

You can scaffold out a simple app pretty easily. Anything large or complex things break down. If you don’t know what you’re doing you end up leaking secrets like the dozens of examples we’ve seen so far.
You know what the problem is in software engineering? A LOT of people have no clue what good software engineering is.

I was working in a company before which used md5 in 2015! Databases on the internet with a 5 character password. No tests.

A person i know would have broken the whole production DB if i wouldn't have stoped the PR.

Another ex-collegue thought its okay to 'encrypt' with a basic shift cyper creditcard data.

I don't think any of these companies care that much

> You know what the problem is in software engineering? A LOT of people have no clue what good software engineering is.

Indeed. Is Mythos going to change this?

On one side, it means that a certain amount of business will just use it even if you think its not safe/good enough and they will throw out people and will still succeed.

And on the other side: yes because they will also use LLM review or other tooling and will be fine whatever the 'security llm agent' tells them.

Yes. It is going to make better decisions for people that don't know better.
Yes the same applies to junior and inexperienced developers.
You could always do this, though.

Before gen code killed the freelance business model, there were hoards of people on Upwork/Fiverr willing to fuck other freelancers over and underpay themselves to make whatever barely-working slop you wanted.

Hell, before managers got the idea of AI layoffs, they had been off-shoring to low-quality code sweatshops for years. That was supposed to kill software engineering in the States 20 years ago. And it was just as frustrating (if not moreso) to get them to actually fulfill the project requirements.

I'd say creating a project is 5% of the job and maintaining it over time 95% of it.

It's true that they can start amazing projects without guidance but then the real work begins.

There is almost no maintenance work for bespoke apps apart from infrequent updates to keep OS and hardware compatibility as the environment slowly changes.

Keep in mind, these are not products in the endless feature treadmill promoted by scrum.

I've worked on an app and I'd say the opposite, I even abandonned the app at some point due to the maintenance work involved.
I don't particularly doubt your experience. But if you have struggled to maintain an app that is effectively complete upon inception, it means that changes in your environment are so common that it's a surprise you get anything at all done.
Thats what the agentic layer will fix, but this is currently getting build.
My non-programmer friends have created:

- A mod manager for Vintage Story in Swift.

- A GameShark Pro adapter using an ESP32 that hosts a web app for dumping N64 ROMs and searching for cheat codes.

> It changes my whole profession on a level i couldn't even imagine

I assure, it doesn't.

I'm happy to have a discussion with you if you bring any argument.

Before GPT what would have been your choise of architecture, setup, alogorithm if someone comes to you and says "write a tool/system which can generate code" "what do you mean generate code? How do i control it?" "by writing what you want in natural language" "puh 50 years of development, 100 billion, top tier team of linguists and software engineers perhaps?"

Ask StackOverflow if they think it didn't change anything for them.

Programming is the reification of decision-making processes. If you don't understand the decision-making process that you want, you get a different one, which at best approximates the one you want but couldn't articulate.

If you do this with COBOL or Python, at least you get consistent operation and errors when you're wrong. If you do this with any LLM, consistency is dropped in favor of obsequiousness.

The base problem is that people aren't equipped naturally to think about all the details of their problems.

Fine for the initial phase were you have to define the architecture and guardrails etc.

But doesn't matter anymore if you just add things.

It already has!

It’s mind-boggling that anyone could deny this in mid-2026. Virtually every software engineer I know is no longer writing the majority of their code. Many are not writing any code, myself included. And I’m a staff engineer with 20 yoe, formerly at big tech, and now building a (profitable) SaaS of my own. The way I work is wildly different from a year ago.

And no one is going back.

For starters it makes you able to bypass having to go on Reddit to find incomplete trace of solution to some niche problem and acts as a sophisticated (but sometimes wrong) search engine. This already is worth every penny and improved my mental health immensely.
Fortunately you still get the reddit experience with AI.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1hxa3kj/ai_reached...

I am not clicking that link. I have blocked all reddit domains in my router, using AI to retrieve answers from Reddit.

You can copy paste it in reply if you want

Sure.

The quote from Gemini is: "one reddit user says kill yourself"