> It’s Still Your Code... AI maximalists will read this section and scoff. They’re already vibe coding everything and have little to no idea what the generated code looks like.
This frames the argument like a dichotomy. And to be honest, using the Social Media "vibe-coding" as a strawman risks anchoring against something that's a mirage.
There are plenty of good engineers getting good results whilst accepting code-ownership as a continuum.
> If Claude goes down tomorrow, can you still do your job?
This is a valid counterpoint, but doing software is already a tricky set of dependencies. The answer here isn't automatically "you need to be able to do everything". It could simply be also use Codex.
I think the overall point is well made, I just don't agree with the absolute framing. There are things you can hand over AI safely. Even if you start small and increment it'll have a decent impact.
Yes, but also this particular company has the means to justify the expense. I think there's enough opportunity at scale in the industry to really change the business landscape.
Aside from that (and assuming a large enough sample size) I think it's a safe experiment to at least bet on finding profitable use cases. In 1-2 years, after this experiment runs its course, not everyone will have "unlimited" usage.
It seems quite common for the infrastructure teams to put up a dashboard just to keep a sense of what is going on, but it is then misinterpreted as a “leaderboard” and encourages the most prolific users to find creative ways to squander more to stay the “winner”. Management is slightly disappointed by the waste but also happy that staff are engaging with their future replacements.
> You must understand what your AI generated code does
Absolutely yes.
> You must be able to do your job if your AI tooling disappears
Absolutely not.
Look, I'm an alright programmer. Not good, far from great. Interpreted languages work for me; add all that strong typing and compilation and it starts to go beyond what I'm interested in. Nonetheless, pre-AI, I have shipped many very functional, production-grade applications for many companies.
Now, I can write stuff in Go, and Rust, and it's fantastic. So much faster. The AI likes the strong typing, the test-ability, predictability, it all makes total sense. I'm using this stuff all the time, but I have not learned any Go; I'm too busy focusing on the parts the AI cannot do for me, like real requirements gathering, architecture, fit and finish, engaging stakeholders, etc. that still require the human touch. Maybe I could have learned some Go using that time, but at the end of the day my employer is paying me for results, not for my edification!
There are now huge parts of my job I cannot do without AI. Sure, it's like 800-1200 bucks a month of extra cost; ok; but with that extra low-5-figs a year of cost I am a much better employee in terms of my capabilities. It's easily delivering ROI for me, and therefore for my employer. Instead of sitting around wishing I had a Go developer to ask for help implementing a simple feature in a Terraform provider, I can just fork it and add what I need, try to submit it upstream for inclusion, etc. and the lack of language specific skills is no longer holding me back.
Take away the tool and I can't do that part of the job anymore, sorry. I can still do a lot, but slower, and honestly it would feel like going from a car back to walking, now; walking's fun, I do it recreationally for the sheer joy, but when there's hundreds of kilometres to cover in a short amount of time, the car is clearly the correct choice. So too is it with AI: we've invented the car for computers and only a fool would pretend he can do everything the same without it now.
'If you can't build a TODO list app using only punchcards, then you can't do your job...'
Obviously our ambitions expand due to better tools. I now commit to and deliver much more work than before LLMs, and — before then — ditto for frontend frameworks, generation 4 languages etc.
There are projects I now start without thinking twice that I never would have considered a few years ago.
That's what productivity looks like, and it makes you more valuable, and your job more secure (up until the ASI kills us all...).
It makes you less valuable and your job less secure because as LLMs improve, the level of knowledge/skill required goes down, thus putting more people at the level of "good enough", which is generally what companies optimize for over time with regards to hiring (least amount for good enough).
> There are projects I now start without thinking twice that I never would have considered a few years ago.
I'm sick of seeing this argument because it's not as persuasive as you think. If you were incapable of doing it before, why would I ever trust that you could properly evaluate the result? Even if I did, it's still like saying, "I never would've been able to do this project without a subordinate that knew how to do it, now look at me!" Okay? So why would I choose you when it sounds like I could pick anyone with basic programming knowledge to manage the subordinate since I clearly don't need someone with the know-how to do the thing, just someone capable of wrangling a coding agent? Might as well get the cheapest college CS graduate I can find.
Most people making this argument aren’t saying they were incapable of doing the project without AI, they’re saying the cost benefit equation was unfavorable because it would take too long.
What if I can do everything the AI can like read, interpret, and implement code(and not in a likely copyright-breaking way) but also reason about it better.
A better analogy would be "the trebuchet for computers".
"but when there's hundreds of kilometres to cover in a short amount of time, the trebuchet is clearly the correct choice."
you point it in the rough direction and distance you want to go, pull the lever, see if you hit your mark, adjust, pull the lever again, etc.
And once you have dialed in the variables for that particular piece of rock that one time, you write it down in a "skill.md" file and announce to everyone on the team "this trebuchet has been carefully calibrated. Trust it with your other rocks too."
> only a fool would pretend he can do everything the same without it now
Unless you're working in a coding sweatshop, I don't see why you need AI to do what people have been doing for decades just fine without breaking a sweat.
Your competition's behavior necessarily affects you unless your company has an unassailable moat.
If other companies are able to tolerate larger amounts of tech debt while shipping new features faster then you'll be out of a job at some point when your company loses market share.
It's fine if you disagree with the idea that AI lets established companies ship faster. I'm not here to argue that. But I think it's pretty easy to empathize with "why might one need to change their behavior due to this new technology?"
> If other companies are able to tolerate larger amounts of tech debt while shipping new features faster then you'll be out of a job at some point when your company loses market share.
I'm saying that B2B services are very common outside of SV and more focused on stability, compliance, long-term maintenance, and the operational knowhow that comes with all that rather than just shipping new features. It's not that there isn't some competition, but that the business is built on much more comprehensive partnerships than just being a software vendor. I can't believe I'm saying this, but "synergy" sometimes isn't just a meaningless buzzword.
When you try to jam "AI" into the mix, the disruption harms the business value. Many including myself would like to be enlightened if you think otherwise.
Well, I'm commenting from a place of bias, as I'm Head of AI at our company and am in charge of rolling out agentic coding throughout the engineering org.
We're B2B SaaS in the Ed Tech space. It's very sales-driven. There's only so many players in the space, customers come with a laundry list of things they've seen others do and expect you to have those features, too. Some of those are compliance, but, sadly, a lot of it is just... flashy shit that looks good to those signing the checks not those using the underlying software. We lost a sale recently because someone was upset we didn't have the ability to give digital stickers to children - seriously.
You're more than welcome to tell the customer they're wrong and not give them their stickers. Or you can ask Claude to build stickers for you in two days and keep up with the Joneses.
All of these other things are important to people in retrospect. People might churn out because of deeper flaws. But sales for new customers is driven by flashy features and, at least in our experience, we need to be able to build those as quickly as our competitors or we lose out.
Economics are economics. If your company is inefficient by not using AI, then it must make up for it and sacrifice some other economic advantage it has over its competitors to break even. If the loss of efficiency is low enough for your particular business, then perhaps you do not care and are content with sacrificing N% of your economic advantage over your competitors.
The same shit they've always been asking for, judging by what OpenAI and Anthropic are pumping out surrounding their models: bloated, buggy Electron apps that consume gigabytes of memory to display fucking <1kb of text. We are not witnessing better software, even from the people who have unlimited capital and unlimited access to frontier models and are true believers in its potential to replace engineers.
I can do everything the same without it, because I'm still not using it. Why would I want to be a guinea pig for the world's richest companies and also atrophy my brain.
Academia is the place with the least coherent policy. In the few institutions I'm aware of the AI rules for, the guide is usually 3 lines long and it is basically we don't promote usage of it, which is a meaningless phrase. Therefore you end up with students who are not supposed to use it unless they are international masters students who require it because of language barriers, and in that scenario, it is basically allow them to use it however they like even if it makes a mockery of the rigour of a degree. Lecturers can use it as and when they wish, then you get researchers who either use it endlessly or not at all. Then upper management who use it instead of using their own brain.
As a fun exercise replace AI with "junior" and "junior" with "mid-level." It holds up pretty well, as a manager you have responsibility for the work your team does and "make everyone put in more hours for no reason" is dumb. Maybe it comes across a bit neglecting of the "juniors" (in particular, it doesn't show any desire for figuring out ways for AI/"the juniors" to grow their responsibilities in a sustainable way).
Imagine reading that version as someone who doesn't know how big companies work. "But then they'll just fire all the mid-level managers, since they don't do any of the actual work!" Haha, boy would you be wrong.
For another type of incoherent policy: don't restrict your employees to 2025 models and then accuse them of being sticks in the mud when they say the models are inadequate.
This frames the argument like a dichotomy. And to be honest, using the Social Media "vibe-coding" as a strawman risks anchoring against something that's a mirage.
There are plenty of good engineers getting good results whilst accepting code-ownership as a continuum.
> If Claude goes down tomorrow, can you still do your job?
This is a valid counterpoint, but doing software is already a tricky set of dependencies. The answer here isn't automatically "you need to be able to do everything". It could simply be also use Codex.
I think the overall point is well made, I just don't agree with the absolute framing. There are things you can hand over AI safely. Even if you start small and increment it'll have a decent impact.
Aside from that (and assuming a large enough sample size) I think it's a safe experiment to at least bet on finding profitable use cases. In 1-2 years, after this experiment runs its course, not everyone will have "unlimited" usage.
We all know it's such an insanely gameable metric you'd be insane to actually use it...
Absolutely yes.
> You must be able to do your job if your AI tooling disappears
Absolutely not.
Look, I'm an alright programmer. Not good, far from great. Interpreted languages work for me; add all that strong typing and compilation and it starts to go beyond what I'm interested in. Nonetheless, pre-AI, I have shipped many very functional, production-grade applications for many companies.
Now, I can write stuff in Go, and Rust, and it's fantastic. So much faster. The AI likes the strong typing, the test-ability, predictability, it all makes total sense. I'm using this stuff all the time, but I have not learned any Go; I'm too busy focusing on the parts the AI cannot do for me, like real requirements gathering, architecture, fit and finish, engaging stakeholders, etc. that still require the human touch. Maybe I could have learned some Go using that time, but at the end of the day my employer is paying me for results, not for my edification!
There are now huge parts of my job I cannot do without AI. Sure, it's like 800-1200 bucks a month of extra cost; ok; but with that extra low-5-figs a year of cost I am a much better employee in terms of my capabilities. It's easily delivering ROI for me, and therefore for my employer. Instead of sitting around wishing I had a Go developer to ask for help implementing a simple feature in a Terraform provider, I can just fork it and add what I need, try to submit it upstream for inclusion, etc. and the lack of language specific skills is no longer holding me back.
Take away the tool and I can't do that part of the job anymore, sorry. I can still do a lot, but slower, and honestly it would feel like going from a car back to walking, now; walking's fun, I do it recreationally for the sheer joy, but when there's hundreds of kilometres to cover in a short amount of time, the car is clearly the correct choice. So too is it with AI: we've invented the car for computers and only a fool would pretend he can do everything the same without it now.
Spoiler alert: if you can't do the job, you're not going to be doing the job much longer.
Obviously our ambitions expand due to better tools. I now commit to and deliver much more work than before LLMs, and — before then — ditto for frontend frameworks, generation 4 languages etc.
There are projects I now start without thinking twice that I never would have considered a few years ago.
That's what productivity looks like, and it makes you more valuable, and your job more secure (up until the ASI kills us all...).
> There are projects I now start without thinking twice that I never would have considered a few years ago.
I'm sick of seeing this argument because it's not as persuasive as you think. If you were incapable of doing it before, why would I ever trust that you could properly evaluate the result? Even if I did, it's still like saying, "I never would've been able to do this project without a subordinate that knew how to do it, now look at me!" Okay? So why would I choose you when it sounds like I could pick anyone with basic programming knowledge to manage the subordinate since I clearly don't need someone with the know-how to do the thing, just someone capable of wrangling a coding agent? Might as well get the cheapest college CS graduate I can find.
"but when there's hundreds of kilometres to cover in a short amount of time, the trebuchet is clearly the correct choice."
you point it in the rough direction and distance you want to go, pull the lever, see if you hit your mark, adjust, pull the lever again, etc.
And once you have dialed in the variables for that particular piece of rock that one time, you write it down in a "skill.md" file and announce to everyone on the team "this trebuchet has been carefully calibrated. Trust it with your other rocks too."
Unless you're working in a coding sweatshop, I don't see why you need AI to do what people have been doing for decades just fine without breaking a sweat.
What are you working on?
If other companies are able to tolerate larger amounts of tech debt while shipping new features faster then you'll be out of a job at some point when your company loses market share.
It's fine if you disagree with the idea that AI lets established companies ship faster. I'm not here to argue that. But I think it's pretty easy to empathize with "why might one need to change their behavior due to this new technology?"
Is not working in SV enough of a moat?
> If other companies are able to tolerate larger amounts of tech debt while shipping new features faster then you'll be out of a job at some point when your company loses market share.
I'm saying that B2B services are very common outside of SV and more focused on stability, compliance, long-term maintenance, and the operational knowhow that comes with all that rather than just shipping new features. It's not that there isn't some competition, but that the business is built on much more comprehensive partnerships than just being a software vendor. I can't believe I'm saying this, but "synergy" sometimes isn't just a meaningless buzzword.
When you try to jam "AI" into the mix, the disruption harms the business value. Many including myself would like to be enlightened if you think otherwise.
We're B2B SaaS in the Ed Tech space. It's very sales-driven. There's only so many players in the space, customers come with a laundry list of things they've seen others do and expect you to have those features, too. Some of those are compliance, but, sadly, a lot of it is just... flashy shit that looks good to those signing the checks not those using the underlying software. We lost a sale recently because someone was upset we didn't have the ability to give digital stickers to children - seriously.
You're more than welcome to tell the customer they're wrong and not give them their stickers. Or you can ask Claude to build stickers for you in two days and keep up with the Joneses.
All of these other things are important to people in retrospect. People might churn out because of deeper flaws. But sales for new customers is driven by flashy features and, at least in our experience, we need to be able to build those as quickly as our competitors or we lose out.
You are obviously unaware of what the silicon valley companies are asking for and commiting to.
Imagine reading that version as someone who doesn't know how big companies work. "But then they'll just fire all the mid-level managers, since they don't do any of the actual work!" Haha, boy would you be wrong.
https://dora.dev/capabilities/clear-and-communicated-ai-stan...