[marcus_holmes]

I've been coding professionally for over 30 years. LLMs have changed the profession more in the last 12 months than anything else has in all that 30 years.

I would totally understand your position if it was, say, crypto that you wanted to exclude. The whole of crypto finance is an edifice of scam built on some interesting but not very useful maths, and there's nothing to redeem it. There are no interesting tech discussions to be had there.

And sure, there are plenty of AI scam artists out there (most seem to have switched from Crypto experts to AI experts in the last couple of years).

But the underlying tech that is being used in AI is not only interesting, but also useful. I'm seeing people who have never coded before produce some cool apps. OK, they're not production-grade, but that's still new people doing new and interesting stuff with this tech. My own workflow is profoundly different from what it was a year ago. I've seen old problems that were really incredibly difficult to fix collapse completely using this tech. It's a useful tool if you're developing software. I suspect there are other areas of human endeavour where it will be useful too. I very much doubt it will replace all human work, or become sentient.

I think we need to separate out the AI business, which is its usual mess of scam, exaggeration, and buffoonery, and the actual AI tech, which is producing some really useful tools.

[kazinator]

OP does not want to censor AI topics from every news source. They want news sources which provide access to topics that exclude AI. (Without necessarily those same sources excluding AI entirely.)

This is legitimate. There are many topics in computing and tech.

Not wanting to read about AI in every category is much the same like not wanting to see a C++ forum filled with threads about Angular.

[botfriendsarent]

You speak it gracefully. People who have never coded....

Are you volunteering to fix their bugs?

I was fired from my first software job the day I showed up. It was 1982. The Apple II was quite mature the PC was on scene.

I showed up 30 mins late. The software chief fired me.

I said "why Im only 30 mins late?", he replied "because I can write a complete accounts receivable system in 30 mins."

I was 14.

And he wasnt lying. He could. Using tools available to him in 1982.

You in 2026, cannot using an LLM, maybe the sass is there. But YOU cant make it. Copy and paste and prebuilt apps will always and forever beat intellectual property theft obfuscation.

Dont get any ideas this didnt happen here. This was in Alabama.

Im still coding professionally.

[marcus_holmes]

An Apple II in 1982 has 256 Kb of RAM. My first computer, an Acorn Atom, had 12Kb of RAM with the expansion pack, and packed two programming languages into 1Kb of RAM. I used to write Assembler on it, and there were 3 registers and no paging at all.

I wrote an timesheet tracking system for my A-level in 1986 on my BBC micro (the Atom's big brother). It took me more than half an hour, but it worked and did useful things. I'm sure it had bugs in it.

So I remember this period you're describing. Your software chief was a dick, though turning up 30 mins late on your first day would be a firing offence in any job back then.

We learned how to code when coding was very simple. There were no GUIs, no mice, all professional software was menu-driven. Screens had one resolution. None of these systems were networked, you only ever had to deal with one user. Security was never an issue, there was no external interface at all. Performance was usually not an issue, because everything was so simple. The OS was tiny and did almost nothing [0]. You could write software quickly because everything was much, much, simpler back then.

I'm seeing people who have never coded before write useful apps in 2026, against our modern massively more complex and intricate tech stack, using LLMs. No it's not perfect, but it's improving. There is absolutely zero chance that they could write an app themselves, or learn how to do that in less than a year, like we did back in 80's, because everything is so much more complex now.

[0] yes there were systems that did do all these things, but they weren't on the machines we're talking about here.

[botfriendsarent]

More useful than a working accounting system?

Because of the disaster of screen resolutions, mobile form factors and all the previous dishonesty inherent in the past 30 years of software development?

That must be really useful. The machines are not the problem. UI layout was solved 40 years ago on all windowed and non windowed platforms.

Mobile breakpoints are not special.

How about the browser as a "failed platform"? Seems to fit! Hardware is irrelevant.

[esafak]

Not only that but it impinges on your life; it would be irresponsible to ignore it. There goes your job while you weren't paying attention... This is the mother of all tech revolutions. There will never ever be anything as big as AI, especially after embodiment.

[retired]

As a consultant I am looking forward to being hired by companies to get rid of all the vibe code and to replace it with beautiful maintainable artisanal code.

[aspenmartin]

Idk if someone paying attention to how 2025 and 2026 have gone thinks that by 2028 we will be backing off of agenting coding that is wild. Like the other comment says: future models refactor the code of older models.

[zzzeek]

You can use LLMs heavily without ever actually "vibe coding". I do think to the degree "vibe coding" continues to exist there will always be work to do in turning some portion of vibe coded work into more robust production quality code. You can still use LLMs to do this you just have to maintain control over architectural choices.

[aspenmartin]

Yea it’s hard for me to think of what the end state equilibrium is. A pile of vibe coded junk today is bad. You need humans. But we’ve made such a ridiculous amount of progress in such a short amount of time and, most importantly, this shows no sign of slowing down or plateauing. So will we hit a point where “vibe coding” is just all there is? Where human intervention is bad, just as hand tuning assembly is bad?

Is there a level of abstraction where human involvement will always be necessary? If so where?

[ares623]

if you were paying attention you would've noticed that between 2025 and 2026 the pricing of these things have somewhat changed. How does the extrapolation look with that?

[aspenmartin]

Good thing we have reams of data on this, holding performance constant the cost goes down 10-40x per year: https://epoch.ai (like the first box)

Also, frontier token prices have remained roughly constant:

3.5 sonnet: $3/$15 3.7 sonnet: $3/$15 Opus 4: $15/$75 (opus tier) opus 4.1: same Opus 4.5: $5/$25 Opus 4.6 (same) 4.7 (same) 4.8 (Same) Fable: $10/$50

So Fable is cheaper than Opus 4 was at launch.

One thing that has increased quite significantly? Spending and adoption.

[marcus_holmes]

I saw this play out in Y2K, and yes, I was also looking forward to getting paid an absolute fortune to refactor all those old VB applications at their end of life.

Now, no. All that work will be done by an LLM. I'm afraid we don't get to play at being the returning heroes like those old COBOL dudes did.

[joeyguerra]

I already get hired to replace/fix code built by humans.

[AussieWog93]

I'm waiting for Fable to come back online so that it can do the refactor while I sleep, for peanuts.

[zzzeek]

Sure but I'd still use an LLM to do the grunt work

[api]

I wonder if people said this about compilers. Some day they’ll replace all that compiler generated junk with hand crafted ASM.

This reminds me of that. The spec is the new high level language. Code is ASM. ASM is like CPU microcode.

[jerf]

I entered the programming world circa 1995. There were indeed still some holdouts. A few of them were even good enough to hold out up to that point and write some code that would have been hard to replicate with the compilers of the time.

By the 200xs they were gone. Interestingly, I would say what killed them in the early 2000s wasn't actually compilers, it was the interpreted languages. Others may disagree. Even if they were dog slow by comparison, scripting languages made some things so much easier to program that it didn't matter. And then it prompted static languages to up their game to try to match that. By the time that process played out, people writing only in assembler couldn't keep up anymore.

[marcus_holmes]

My first job in tech was writing desktop applications in VB3 (1994, so around the same time)

The company also had an AS400 with a collection of COBOL programmers. They were utterly scathing of the new toy language for doing toy things on PCs. There was no way that VB would ever be a "real" language or that anyone would do anything "real" with it.

And yeah, in terms of serious computing, that's probably true. But the industry leapt at the new tools and tooling, and COBOL faded to obscurity (though there are still AS400s out there, and some of the code they wrote is still managing vast swathes of our essential services).

And all of that was less of a revolution in the industry than the last 12 months have been.

[bigstrat2003]

The difference between compilers and LLMs is that compilers actually work. LLMs do not produce a usable result, no matter how much AI bros try to convince everyone else otherwise.

[OutOfHere]

> The whole of crypto finance is an edifice of scam

That is straight-up false. It's best to not speak of things you don't properly understand. If it were true, they wouldn't hold the financial value that they do or anywhere close to it. You don't know the first thing about its utility and place in the financial sector.

People will try to scam others in basically every sector, even in academia. It doesn't in any way invalidate the respective sector.

[marcus_holmes]

I don't want to get into the argument here, so won't respond.

[OutOfHere]

You started the dumb argument. If this site didn't have policies protecting even its most asinine users, you would really hear it from me.

Also, if you think that AI will never become sentient, then you're no technologist at all, but an offense to it. The buffoonery you speak of is present most of all in your comments.