this post was submitted on 29 Sep 2026
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You know I keep seeing this, and I keep trying AI, and my experience really just does not track with the grandiose claims y'all AI fans (with 2 comment accounts that have been dormant for six months...) keep making. Maybe you're some canned code shop with crap devs, but even then I'm real curious what the use case is where AI agents can take over from real devs like you're claiming. Sounds like marketing hype more than anything.
When you try AI, how do to do it? And do you try for hours? Days? Weeks?
There's a learning curve to use these tools productively, and they often feel unproductive early on while building your proficiency.
I think the learning curve is often misunderstood or underestimated, possibly because we interface with these tools using natural language. We overestimate how "easy" it "should" be. (This was my own experience anyway, when I first started learning to use AI)
I know there's a temptation to call "skill issue" when you see anecdotal evidence that runs counter to your own experience, but I can say with some degree of professional certainty and a smidge of personal snark that no, I in fact do know what I'm doing. These tools have their uses, but their general applicability is vastly overstated (if I were the kind of cynical person that enjoyed being right, I would say intentionally overstated in an effort to attain profitability on bootstraps made of hype). And I wanna clarify that I do indeed use some AI tools (ex: security checkers) with regularity. They do absolutely have worth - they just don't have trillions of dollars worth... of worth. Ahem.
The hype-doomer thing that some people have about this, oh woe it's going to destroy an entire conceptual industry, that just isn't what's happening, but it's very much what the advertising would like you to believe it's doing.
You may try to attack my character by implying a bot or throwaway account but my point stands and all metrics agree with what i said. I literally used the newest model of a certain company (not naming them) and the agent finished a weeks work in 2 sessions. It even found lib incompatibilities and a weird bug in codebase without even prompting for that. The models became better but the harness got really good now. Your experience may be a skill issue, your prompts may suck or even your codebase might be too big, or cope, either way we are screwed, please don't give a false hope by moving the goalpost each time a llm evolves further, it's better for programmers to swim with the wave and evolve with the profession than be stuck in denial and becone obsolete.
Y'all have been saying "the problem is you're not using the newest model/harness" to any criticism for 3 years now lol
"But have you considered that it might not be a fundamental misrepresentation of the capabilities of our system that's been borne out repeatedly in real-world testing, but instead a skill issue?"
We didn't even have proper harnesses 3 years ago. Claude Code which more or less kicked everything off is under 2 years old, before that you would've had to use Cursor or something. And we now have local models better than the frontier ones of 3 years ago if you have a good graphics card or an SoC with lots of shared memory. The cheapo Chinese models now beat the super expensive American ones from just a few months ago.
Whole thing is changing so fast if you haven't tried it in a few months, you don't really know what it entails now.
GPT 3.0 couldn't create gta 6 using a single prompt therefore all future models are bad. /s Maybe get out of your cave and test it yourself instead of coping in denial.
The problem is that every time, in the moment, people advocate and then when it comes up short, come back with "Oh, you did XYZ 3.2? Yeah that's busted, 3.3 can really do it" and rinse and repeat and it's hard to take that argument credibly when it's a treadmill of dissing yesterday's tech but swearing today's is different.
The current best of breed I have very limited exposure to (too rich for my blood), but it didn't seem overwhelmingly a slam dunk in my interaction. Incremental value going from more modest models to those don't seem to justify the price tag.
And every developer that is merely curating fully agentic workflow I have dealt with has pretty shit functionality and no idea what the hell they are doing. Whatever the rhetoric is, the results are just utter shit. Somewhat better if the problem domain can be infinitely retried without consequence with results that can be perfectly verified to let it drive eternal retries (while burning through token budget), but generally I just see pretty shit software.
On the other hand, a lot of these groups that I say has pretty shit AI software formerly had pretty shit normal software. Problem being clueless management now thinking they must be smart because they say things more aligned to the AI hype.
Every technology we have today started as being barely usable to "pretty good" across it's lifespan. Why would you think llms are different ?
I have tinkered with it, and I've also had to deal with coworkers using it. I have actual work to do instead of playing with toys that make my job harder.
That may be your experience but it's clearly the exception. Every developer i know doesn't even use ide anymore and have not written a line of code for months. Most of us hate it and prefer we went back to the old ways of manually typing code, but sadly the llms won't go back in the bottle. You are in the denial stage and it's ok, we were all there.
Perhaps your experience is the exception?
You must've been living in a cave. Just go to any social media, youtube, even reddit and look for programming topic. Everyone claims the same, people don't write code manually anymore.
A number of people have shared their experience with you and you seem to be unwilling to acknowledge that your assertion of universal slopping it up as reality is not utterly universal.
It's kinda hard to acknowledge something when every single content I've seen in last couple of months claims the opposite.
The content on Internet will invariably biased towards the novelty. Between that bias and enormous marketing spin and the most self important people gravitating towards it, it's an expected reality. One that will be applicable to some scenarios.
Content saying that for some situations, the existing methods remain best isn't going to light the world on fire. Also, tech folks tend to be more shy about "not getting" a seemingly great new tech.
In terms of how much it applies to an individual situation, it's too nuanced to really make a universal judgement. But in my local circle where I can grasp the nuance, the teams that have gone all in on deeply agentic are teams that already were kind of crappy.
Almost everyone on lemmy DOES live in a cave. They willfully avoid and actively hate new technology.
(Dude you've been trying the "smug condescension" thing for like two hours and nobody's playing along, give it up already it's tedious)
Great counter-argument full of logic and rich of facts.
You're not exactly giving me much to work with - anecdotal evidence is not fact, and rhetoric is not logic.
Dude, come on - what are you actually trying to accomplish here? All you're doing is throwing a tantrum because people don't agree with you, and that's pretty unpleasant behavior.
Arguing with facts is now a tantrum ? Please refrain from ad hominems if you cannot argue honestly.
... Huh. So you don't really have a goal here beyond just offering up bait?
Unlike you, I try to argue with facts, not with logical fallacies.
Nothing you've said can even be commented on with facts and logic - and my goal isn't to debate you, but to point out that you're either wasting your time or aren't terribly good at trolling.
Yet another ad hominem. Since you cannot argue honestly shall block you.
I don't think you understand how that term works, and you cannot simply throw it out like a pokemon and hope it does the work for you. Questioning someone's motivations is not in itself an ad-hominem, nor is describing your behavior as unpleasant.
I think the truth is somewhere in the middle, but I could be wrong. I work in a non-programming technical field and I am also impressed and concerned by the progress the models have made over the last few years, especially in terms of being able to "do my job".
Like the other guy was saying, there are still issues with its implementations, and the second you begin to think it's perfect or immutable, you notice issues that would have been show stoppers if they made it through. And at the end of the day, at least for what I do, if nobody is here to press the buttons, the AI will never be able to do its thing to begin with.
I also personally predict that the cost of tokens and utilizing AI services will eventually become overly expensive and encumbered, as does everything under capitalism. Name one thing that hasn't gotten shittier and more expensive overall. The AI companies haven't even begun to enter their enshittification stage yet.
I maintain that AI in its current form will NOT be able to produce truly novel thought or original work, as it can only put together the Legos that it already has ingested. Perhaps grunt work programming will require less manpower, but cutting-edge developments are still beyond the LLM's grasp at the moment.
Anyways, I welcome other opinions
Software development is by far the most affected profession. Every time a new model gets released another part of my occupation can be done by it. People are moving the goalpost to focus on every mistake the llm makes to cope and fool themselves they are still not expendable and better than the llms. With enough confidence i can say that the vast majority of programmers are not.
Yeah. And the thing that people are completely ignoring is that humans are absolutely not infallible either. This is why we're seeing so many vulnerabilities pop up now, because the work performed by humans over the last many decades is being picked apart by a relentless onslaught of automated calculation and critique by these LLMs.
I can see the passion a lot of programmers have for what they do and it reminds me of how artists feel when people try to produce art with an LLM. I hope the future brings a reasonable balance where programmers can actually use LLMs to advance their efforts instead of being replaced by it. There are some things that are just mindless brute-force effort and at the very least, hopefully that bit goes away and leaves programmers (and the rest of the world's technical workforce) with the ability to exercise creativity instead of doing the annoying parts all day.
Beautifully said, i agree completely !
I implied you were neither of those things - I just quite openly implied you're a shill. Perhaps you should ask an AI for tips on improving your reading comprehension?
Please give me 1 thing that a mid developer can create but the latest model agents can't. There is coping and there's delusion, i think you're heading towards the second.
It's genuinely depressing you're so creatively stifled that you haven't encountered a task that meets those conditions yourself and instead have to retreat to these middleschool-tier insults, but hey, if you're gonna throw down a mitten in challenge, who am I to refuse?
Novel reporting across diverse data systems! That's not even a mid developer task, that's intern shit - and good luck getting an agent to deal with that one lmao.
The more i use it the clearer it becomes it can do much more than a human. One of my hobbies are electronics and embedded development. The llm designed the circuit and even the firmware in 5-6 prompts, that took me a week on a similar project. With clean requirements and scope it may do almost any task, it may struggle on huge projects and monoliths but looking back to each improved model i can guess that won't take a long time to accomplish either. In less than 2 years we went from buggy gpt 3 to multi agents workflow that work almost autonomously.
That you've gone from "I bet you can't name even one thing AI can't do", to being told something it can't do, and now immediately you're ignoring that interaction in favor of telling anecdotes about how great AI is? That says a great deal about your conviction to your own arguments.
I already replied that it may accomplish too, haven't used it in such projects so I won't claim any certainty. Let's say it couldn't accomplish the specific task you mentioned (best scenario), how is the field safe ? Are we going to focus on that scope for our careers ? What if a future model manages to accomplish that too ? You focus on the tree and miss the forest.
Hey, that's nice! you're actually trying to engage, although you're slightly undermining it with the whole "best scenario" casting my example as somehow doubtful instead of the more accurate "something we regularly test"... But that's nitpicking I suppose. To answer your question with an example: Data management has proven pretty resilient to AI - we do use it, it's a great way to fill out boilerplate code, but AI currently fundamentally lacks the ability to manage large complex architecture or databases, adhoc reporting or even middling novel applications (and holy shit it's bad at dynamic SQL).
From your description of your job you're not doing anything (and I swear this isn't a value judgement on you personally) particularly interesting - and IDK if you're devops or webdev or appdev or what (not that those are inherently boring (okay devops a little ( <3 ))) - but there are segments of software development that have been largely "solved problems" for many years; the humans mostly manage and direct tools, and are kept around to solve the interesting and challenging problems. Within those segments, AI has been extremely effective at integrating into, and with some caveats about how much it screws up in devops accelerating, workflows, in an ideal world freeing up the humans to focus even more of their time on the interesting problems (in practice this has led people to think they can lay off their devops team, with disaster not far behind).
In the rest, AI truly is not at the point it can live up to it's promises, and the cost in tokens trying to integrate it is often astronomical. From how you approach this, I get the impression that you don't have much experience outside your segment or role - it's worth not being quite so pig-headed about this when Lemmy, which hosts a population of users heavy with non-mainstream disciplines, shares their own anecdotal experience about this subject; It's not nearly as cut-and-dry as the massive propaganda engines would have you believe.
You basically did tho lol
Hmm. No, but thank you for your contribution!
It's not up for debate. I'm literally telling you how people are perceiving your response. It's not something you can disagree with. Just because you can't understand that other people are reading you differently doesn't allow you to give it a "no thank you" hahaha
No, (but) thank you (for taking the time to clarify)!
They doesn't understand, ladies and gentlemen. They can't help it, probably. Surely the ignorance isn't intentional lmao
I wasn't being insincere - I understand what you're saying, but your condescension while explaining something that was not unclear, nor was it actually the case, and the kinda-sideways arrogance in speaking for the group like you did (and now escalating to cheap trolling and insults when I don't play along) is quite unwelcome. That said, I did genuinely appreciate that you took the time to clarify - truly.
Tbh, I thought you were the one that was being condescending from the start. Apologies. I do come off as arrogant, but only when provoked haha
No harm done, I think - for my part I too apologize. Have a lovely rest of your day!