Transcription
Oh boy. I was reminiscing about the times when the biggest debate in tech was whether or not to use React hooks. And somehow we ended up with videos like this resulting in a stick of RAM costing the same as my liver. In between that space, the trend of vibe coding emerged. And with it came the AI hype bros and their slander. Bro, AI makes coding pointless. Bro, AI makes you smarter. Bro, AI makes you faster. Bro, AI can replace the soft embrace of your waifu. I'm tired of these lies, especially the last one. Slander. Zero ball knowledge.
Believe it or not, AI has been taking quite a few L's recently, and I'm the kind of guy that keeps receipts. Now, the first receipt I want to bring to your attention, does AI even make you faster? This study looked at experienced programmers on real world code bases. The assumption was with the mind of a senior engineer and the power of AI, they'd spit out code faster than Eminem did with his mom's spaghetti. Well, it turns out the same engineers were actually 19% slower with AI. And this is because a huge chunk of their time was spent pring, waiting for Gibbid to spit something out, and then getting completely sketched out by what it generated. Then there's stuff you don't necessarily see after reading you're absolutely right for the 82nd time. Like the fact that 45% of AI generated code has security flaws or the amount of bad practices and code smells it introduces into your code. So even if you ship a feature somewhat faster, it balances out in the long term when you get foot gunned by some clanker code you can't decipher. Generating code was never really the bottleneck. It's debugging code that seems to take the same amount of time as Iran developing nuclear weapons.
Even when AI makes you faster, it comes at a cost. The cost of your abilities. Anthropic partnered with researchers to study how AI impacts developer learning. And to save your time, the group that used AI performed the worst. The researchers took developers that were using Python for at least a year or more. And they wanted to test the impact of AI on learning something new like a library, which in this case was the Python library trio. The programmers were split into two groups. One group would trade, which is just using their brain in Google, and the other group had access to AI. They gave them a task to learn Trio, and finally they quizzed them. So what were the results? The group that used AI finished the test 2 minutes faster, but they scored around 50%. Whereas the group that didn't use AI scored 67%. And no, I didn't round that up to make it funny. It really was 67%. While the TRA coding group was slower, they actually understood the material. And as a result, the biggest gaps in scores came in debugging questions, which ironically is the only skill you need if you're going to vibe code anyway.
But why would you prompt anymore? Didn't you see the news? Agents are going to do everything. Ever since the open claw hype, I can't scroll on Twitter without seeing something about AI agents. AI agents can replace your marketing team. AI agents will replace your software team. AI agents can give you the soothing embrace of a waifu. And I almost bought into the hype until I saw this study Alibaba dropped a few weeks ago. They took 18 agents and put them into a 100 realworld repositories where the agents were told to keep fixing and improving repos. And they just kind of let them cook for 8 months. When they came back, only 25% of code bases didn't break immediately. And out of those 25% only half of them were somewhat stable. The Asians could solve very simple problems. Say something like a syntax error updating a library. But when the problem wasn't simple, for example, it needed to update more than two files at once. It freaked out and introduced a hacky solution. The hacky solution broke something else, which in turn made the next bug even harder to fix. It basically speedran a Java developer's career in about 8 months.
Fundamentally, with all the layoffs, it may seem like I'm huffing on copium. You should remember that AIdriven layoffs aren't really AIdriven layoffs. They're stock price boosters. Just click on the 6-mon stock price for any of the companies doing layoffs. Then zoom back in to see how the markets react. We're 4 years into being 6 months away from AI taking all of our jobs. But now, instead of tab completion, you can ask a chatbot and wait a solid 3 minutes for something you already know how to do. I hope hype bros and doomers alike realize that AI is just another technology. There are some places where AI has been absolutely great, and then some other places where it misses the mark entirely. An important skill that's emerging is knowing when to use AI. And that's because common sense and taste are two things that are seriously in decline. Being a great engineer is much more than the number of tokens you have. It was, it is, and it always will be about one thing, solving problems.
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