Look I loved our field, functional programming, etc. But the field as we knew it is dead, and if you think that your work is anything but providing new tests/edge cases and occasionally providing some guidance, you're in denial.
As someone whose world used to revolve around this stuff, I agree completely. For all intents and purposes, what I thought was my career is gone. Sure, it's always been about solving problems but not like this. The problem is that the future hasn't been evenly distributed. This is going to be one long drawn out funeral
For me, the middle ground is review and keeping a mental model, not never using LLMs. The "Anthropic are our friends and will never fuck us over!" seems pretty naive.
There are ultimately a lot of unknowns at the moment, and it is simply too soon to know if giving up understanding your code base is sensible. People (influencers) have only been saying not to bother reviewing for about a month.
Also, so many vibe coders don't seem to know that you need to keep third party elements patched.
That said AI feels a bit alien.
My experience with frontier models is that in many areas of software engineering they outperform the average software developer. In some they blow everyone away. In others they're not as good. But they are getting better. The problem is often not the model's capabilities but rather what you ask it to do and are you able to understand what it does and give it guidance when needed.
Semantic diffusion? Not that I have high standards for hmm, curious but humans already X comments.
In practice code gets worked and reworked and reworked. I work on code where every single line in a huge file was written by a different person. Even the initial implementation could often fit your definition of slop. Isn't human training also mushing things together?
But cool. I think the discussion mirrors the gap Andrej was talking about. Interesting times.
Definitely the best comment I’ve read from the demoralization patrol in a good while.