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Cory Doctorow: The people who tell you ‘AI is changing everything’ are lying
(www.thenerve.news)
this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2026
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I'm a software developer since the 90s, basically before the internet, we had some C books for reference and that's it. I can tell you that I started last year to use copilot in vscode and some chatgpt on a web page, and it basically changed my world, and all my 50+ years old coworkers are amazed by what it can do really.
You are right it will not fade at all in software development.
Completely disagree. The difficult part of software development was never writing code OR speed of delivery. It was understanding requirements and problem solving. LLMs still can not do either of those things and there is no evidence they ever will be able to.
An example of how harmful LLMs actually are to development can succinctly be described with an issue I had a few weeks ago. I found an issue in an open source project, code was fine if a bit hard to understand. I came up with a PR to fix the problem.
In the time from me checking out the code to submitting the PR, a little less than 24 hours, the maintainer had completely rewritten the entire project with Claude. It was complete nonsense. Incredibly difficult to understand. Abstracting things that didn’t need abstracting. My PR was useless, because the entire project was new. The maintainer definitely didn’t understand the changes either. If a bug came up there’s no way AI would be able to solve it (the bug was still there even though the code was entirely new).
LLMs don’t understand the code. They just make things that look like they will work. And then a human has to maintain it (or keep paying billions of dollars for Claude to try to fix it).
the person in your scenario is just fkin stupid. When people say that llms are helpful for coding, they aren't talking about telling an llm to rewrite an entire codebase.
You are right, but right now we are living in a very messy reality where it's hard to know who's being stupid and who is using it well. One person I know that, well, I was never a huge fan of his work but at least it was somewhat serviceable is now all-in on AI and his code has been rewritten in a similar manner as the parent poster comments. He's got no idea how it works or how it should worked, the AI decided to rewrite it in an entirely different language, and it's a buggy mess and it never fixes the bugs without making new bugs. Then he hit his token quota 3 weeks early and basically said he was going to stop working on it because he no longer could manually work the codebase. He didn't ask for a rewrite, but AI advised him that his language choice was a poor fit and reworked things in another language, one that none of us use to that level of seriousness. It also made it largely based on super convoluted regular expressions.
The problem is that the leadership is singing the praises of these people, they were on their 'leaderboards' of AI adoption and much like the craze of praising "lines of codes", we are neck deep in the most stupid non-technical evaluation of technical work you could imagine.