I’m working as a single solo developer of a tiny video game. I’m writing it in C with raylib. No coding assistants, no agents, not even a language server.<p>I only work on it for a few hours during the week. And it’s progressing at a reasonable pace that I’m happy with. I got cross-compilation from Linux to Windows going early on in a couple of hours. Wasn’t that hard.<p>I’ve had to rework parts of the code as I’ve progressed. I’ve had to live with decisions I made early on. It’s code. It’s fine.<p>I don’t really understand the, “more, better, faster,” cachet to be honest. Writing the code hasn’t been the bottle neck to developing software for a long time. It’s usually the thinking that takes most of the time and if that goes away well… I dunno, that’s weird. I will understand it even less.<p>Agree with writing less code though. The economics of throwing out 37k lines of code a week is… stupid in the extreme. If we get paid by the line we could’ve optimized for this long before LLM’s were invented. It’s not like more lines of code means more inventory to sell. It’s usually the opposite: the more bugs to fix, the more frustrated customers, the higher churn of exhausted developers.
>I don’t really understand the, “more, better, faster,” cachet to be honest. Writing the code hasn’t been the bottle neck to developing software for a long time. It’s usually the thinking that takes most of the time and if that goes away well… I dunno, that’s weird. I will understand it even less.<p>This is what I've always found confusing as well about this push for AI. The act of typing isn't the hard part - its understanding what's going on, and why you're doing it. Using AI to generate code is only faster if you try and skip that step - which leads to an inevitable disaster
Don't worry. In a few years we'll be like the COBOL programmers who still understand how things work, our brains haven't atrophied, and we make good money fixing the giant messes created by others.
> The act of typing isn't the hard part - its understanding what's going on, and why you're doing it. Using AI to generate code is only faster if you try and skip that step - which leads to an inevitable disaster<p>It’s more than just typing though. A simple example remembering the exact incantation of CSS classes to style something that you can easily describe in plain English.<p>Yes, you could look them up or maybe even memorize them. But there’s no way you can make wholesale changes to a layout faster than a machine.<p>It lowers the cost for experimentation. A whole series of “<i>what if this was…</i>” can be answered with an implementation in minutes. Not a whole afternoon on one idea that you feel a sunk cost to keep.
> It’s more than just typing though. A simple example remembering the exact incantation of CSS classes to style something that you can easily describe in plain English.<p>Do that enough and you won't know enough about your codebase to recognise errors in the LLM output.
> It lowers the cost for experimentation. A whole series of “what if this was…”<p>Anecdotal, but I've noticed while this is true it also adds the danger of knowing when to stop.<p>Early on I would take forever trying to get something exactly to whats in my head. Which meant I would spend too much time in one sitting then if I had previously built it by hand.<p>Now I try to time box with the mindset "good enough".
> But there’s no way you can make wholesale changes to a layout faster than a machine.<p>You lost me here. I can make changes <i>very</i> quickly once I understand both the problem and the solution I want to go with. Modifying text is quite easy. I spend very little time doing it as a developer.
This is not correct. CSS is the style rules for all rendering situations of that HTML, not just your single requirement that it "looks about right" in your narrow set of test cases.<p>Nobody writing production CSS for a serious web page can avoid rewriting it. Nobody is memorizing anything. It's deeply intertwined with the requirements as they change. You will eventually be forced to review every line of it carefully as each new test is added or when the HTML is changed. No AI is doing that level of testing or has the training data to provide those answers.<p>It sounds like you're better off not using a web page at all if this bothers you. This isn't a deficiency of CSS. It's the main feature. It's designed to provide tools that can cover all cases.<p>If you only have one rendering case, you want an image. If you want to skip the code, you can just not write code. Create a mockup of images and hand it off to your web devs.
So AI is good for CSS? That’s fine, I always hated CSS.
Eh, I've written so much CSS and I hate it so much I use AI to write it now not because it's faster or better at doing so, just so I don't need to do it.
AI not just types code for you. It can assist with almost every part of software development. Design, bug hunting, code review, prototyping, testing.
> This is what I've always found confusing as well about this push for AI. The act of typing isn't the hard part - its understanding what's going on, and why you're doing it.<p>This is a very superficial and simplistic analysis of the whole domain. Programmers don't "type". They apply changes to the code. Pressing buttons in a keyboard is not the bottleneck. If that was the case, code completion and templating would have been a revolutionary, world changing development in the field.<p>The difficult part is understanding what to do and how to do it, and why. It turns out LLMs can handle all these types of task. You are onboarding onto a new project? Hit a LLM assistant with /explain. You want to implement a feature that matches a specific requirement? You hit your LLM assistant with /plan followed by apply. You want to cover some code with tests? You hit your LLM assistant with /tests.<p>In the end you review the result,and do with it whatever you want. Some even feel confident enough to YOLO the output of the LLM.<p>So while you still try to navigate through files, others already have features out.
Honestly I think you can tell pretty quickly if a company or person is approaching AI from the viewpoint of accelerating development and innovation or just looking to do the same amount of work with less people. The space has been flooded by mean-spirited people who love the idea of developers becoming obsolete, which is a viewpoint that isn't working out for a lot of companies right now...many are already scrambling to rehire. Approaching the situation practically, integrating AI as a tool and accelerator is the much smarter way and if done right will pay for itself anyway.
> <i>Writing the code hasn’t been the bottle neck to developing software for a long time. It’s usually the thinking that takes most of the time</i><p>Does your coding not involve thinking? And if not, why are you not delighted to have AI take that over? Writing unthinking boilerplate is tedious garbage work.<p>Today I wanted to address a bug I found on a product I work on. At the intersection of platform migration and backwards compatibility I found some customers getting neither. I used an LLM to research the code paths and ensure that my understanding of the break was correct and what the potential side effects of my proposed fix would be. AI saved me stepping through code for hours to understand the side effects. I asked it for a nice description of the flow and it gave it to me, including the pieces I didn’t really know because I’d never even touched that code before. I could have done this. Would it have been a better use of my time than moving on to the next thing? Probably not. Stepping through function calls in an IDE is not my idea of good “thinking” work. Tracing through glue to understand how a magical property gets injected is a great job for a machine.
>> Writing the code hasn’t been the bottle neck to developing software for a long time. It’s usually the thinking that takes most of the time<p>> I used an LLM to research the code paths and ensure that my understanding of the break was correct and what the potential side effects of my proposed fix would be.<p>Using the LLM for understanding is <i>very different</i> to using the LLM for codegen.<p>You are not really disagreeing with the author here; it's just that for the specific project he is talking about, he already understands it just fine so the advantages of LLM help in understanding is tiny.
My point is that these are not separate activities. They are drawing a false distinction between thinking and coding and then asserting that code speed doesn’t matter and implying that AI only helps with the coding bit.<p>None of this is actually true, though. Coding and thinking are often tightly intertwined, as rarely is the coding piece so straightforward that it requires no interesting thought. Coding speed does matter, even if it’s not the primary bottleneck for many things. And AI can be very helpful outside the context of pure coding.
You can use LLM to write less code too. Just takes more intention. Which is kind of the whole point.
>Writing the code hasn’t been the bottle neck to developing software for a long time.<p>Then we're doing different things.<p>I didn't like GitHub so I wrote my own. 60k lines of code later... yes writing code was the bottleneck which has been eliminated. The bottleneck is now design, review, and quality assessments that can't be done trivially.<p>This isn't even the project I wanted to be doing, the tools that were available were holding me back so I wrote my own. It also consumes a few hours a week.<p>If you think writing code isn't the bottleneck then you aren't thinking big enough. If you don't WANT to think big enough, that's fine, I also do things for the joy of doing them.
We do different things, I do code for other people to use.<p>Once we tried shipping features and updates every week, because we could ideate, code, test and deploy that fast.<p>No user wanted that - product owners and business wanted that or they thought they wanted, until users came with torches and pitchforks.<p>Don’t forget there is user adoption and education.<p>Churning out features no one will use because they don’t know about is useless.
> Writing the code hasn’t been the bottle neck to developing software for a long time.<p>I see this on HN just so much and I am not sure what this is, almost seems like a political slogan that followers keep repeating.<p>I had to do some rough math in my head but in the last 5 years I have been involved with hiring roughly 40 SWEs. <i>Every single one of them</i> was hired because writing the code was <i>THE</i> bottleneck (the only one) and we needed more people to <i>write the code</i>
If you’ve never read Fred Brooks, I’d recommend it. The aphorism is a bit dated but rings true: you can’t add another developer and make the process go faster. It usually slows teams down.<p>I’ve seen it time and again: startups move from their market-fit phase into an operational excellence phase on the backing of VC funding and they start hiring a ton of people. Most of those developers are highly educated, specialized people with deep technical skills and they’re often put to work making the boxes more blue or sitting in meetings with PMs for hours. Teams slow down output when you add more people.<p>You don’t have a quota. It’s not like you’ll have fewer units to sell if you don’t add that 30k lines of code by Friday.<p>This is knowledge work. The work is understanding problems and knowing how to develop solutions to them. You add more people and you end up adding overhead. Communication, co-ordination, operations overhead.<p>The real bottle necks are people and releasing systems into production. Every line of code change is a liability. There’s risk tolerance to manage in order to achieve five-nines.<p>A well-sized team that has worked together a long time can outperform a massive team any day in my experience.
> If you’ve never read Fred Brooks, I’d recommend it. The aphorism is a bit dated but rings true: you can’t add another developer and make the process go faster.<p>He didn’t say that. He said adding developers <i>to a late project makes it slower</i>, explained why, and even added some charts to illustrate it. The distinction matters.<p>By your interpretation, no company should have more than a few developers, which is obviously false. You can argue team organization, but that’s not what Brooks was saying, either.<p>On top of that, parent never said he hired 40 devs for one project at one time. He was talking in general terms, over the course of years, perhaps in multiple companies.<p>Finally, let me invoke another aphorism: <i>hours of planning can save you weeks of development.</i> Right here you have the bottleneck staring you into the face.<p>Of course it’s development. And unless you’re in a really dysfunctional environment, most of that development is coding, testing and debugging, where AI can help a lot.
> they’re often put to work making the boxes more blue or sitting in meetings with PMs for hours<p>Haha, this is exactly my experience.<p>I'll never forget the best candidate I ever interviewed - my feedback was to absolutely hire him and put him on the most interesting and challenging problems. They put him in a marketing team tweaking upsell popups. He left after 2 months.
> The aphorism is a bit dated but rings true: you can’t add another developer and make the process go faster. It usually slows teams down.<p>I've been doing this for 30-years and this is another political slogan of sorts. this is true <i>in every single imaginable job</i> - new people slow you down, until they do not and become part of the well-oiled machine that is hopefully your team. not sure why people insist on saying this, it is like saying "read this book, says that that Sun will rise tomorrow morning"<p>> I’ve seen it time and again: startups move from their market-fit phase into an operational excellence phase on the backing of VC funding and they start hiring a ton of people. Most of those developers are highly educated, specialized people with deep technical skills and they’re often put to work making the boxes more blue or sitting in meetings with PMs for hours. Teams slow down output when you add more people.<p>I wasn't talking about startups or developers making boxes more blue, I was talking about personal experience. The bottleneck, if you are doing amazing shit and not burning some billionaries money on some silly "startup" is always the code which is why we hire developers to write the code. Everything else is just coming up with some silly unrelated examples - of course there are people (at every job again) doing nothing or menial tasks - this isn't what I was talking about.<p>> You don’t have a quota. It’s not like you’ll have fewer units to sell if you don’t add that 30k lines of code by Friday.<p>I do have customers that want features that would make their lives easier and are willing to handsomely pay for it, that good enough?<p>> This is knowledge work. The work is understanding problems and knowing how to develop solutions to them. You add more people and you end up adding overhead. Communication, co-ordination, operations overhead.<p>This is only on super shitty teams with super shitty co-workers (especially senior ones) and super shitty managers. I feel for the careers in this industry where this is/was the case. A whole lot of people are terrible at their jobs in places like this - a whole lot of people...<p>> A well-sized team that has worked together a long time can outperform a massive team any day in my experience.<p>a well-sized team was at one point (well-sized team - 1) and (well-sized team - 2) and (well-sized team - 3) and in the future if it is right team will be even more amazing as well (well-sized team + 1), (well-sized team + 2)
If you’ve heard it a number of times and refuse to consider what people are saying then maybe I can’t help you.<p>I’m talking from personal experience of well over twenty years as both a developer, and for a while, a manager.<p>The slow part isn’t writing code.<p>It’s shipping it. You can have every one vibe coding until their eyes bleed and you’ve drained their will to live. The slowest part will still be testing, verifying, releasing, and maintaining the ball of technical debt that’s been accumulating. You will still have to figure out what to ship, what to fix, what to rush out and what to hold out until it’s right, etc. The more people you have to slower that goes in my experience. AI tools don’t make that part faster.
> <i>If you’ve heard it a number of times and refuse to consider what people are saying then maybe I can’t help you.</i><p>What someone says “I’ve heard this a thousand times, but…”, it could be that the person is just stupidly obstinate but it could also mean that they have a considered opinion that it might benefit you to learn.<p>“More people slow down projects” is an oversimplified version of the premise in The Mythical Man Month. If that simplistic viewpoint held, Google would employ a grand total of maybe a dozen engineers. What The Mythical Man Month says is that more engineers slow down <i>a project that is already behind</i>. i.e. You can’t fix a late project by adding more people.<p>This does not mean that the amount of code/features/whatever a team can produce or ship is unrelated to the size of the team or the speed at which they can write code. Those are not statements made in the book.
I've worked in two different types of environments - one where what you said is absolutely true (most of my jobs), and another where it's not true and the quote holds up.<p>The difference, I think is:<p>- Code factories where everything is moving fast - there's no time to think about how to simplify a problem, just gotta get it done. These companies tended to hire their way out of slowness, which led to more code, more complexity, and more code needed to deal with and resolve edge cases introduced by the complexity. I can count many times I was handed directives to implement something that I knew was far more complex than it had to be, but because of the pressure to move forward it was virtually impossible to push back. Maybe it's the only way they can make the business case work, but IMO it undoubtedly led to far, far more code than would've been necessary if it were possible to consider problems more carefully and if engineers had more autonomy. In these companies also a lot of time was consumed by meetings trying to "sync up" with the 100 other people moving in one direction.<p>- Smaller shops, open source projects, or indie development where there isn't a rush to get something out the door. Here, it's possible to think through a problem and come up with a solution that reduces code surface area. This was about solving the largest number of problems with the least amount of complexity. Most of my time at this company was spent thinking through how to solve the problem and considering edge cases and exploratory coding, the actual implementation was really quick to write. It really helped that I had a boss who understood and encouraged this, and we were working on safety critical systems. My boss liked to say "you can't birth a baby in less than 9 months just by adding another woman".<p>I think most of the difference is in team size. A larger team inherently results in more code to do less, because of the n*(n-1)/2 communication overhead [1].<p>Recently I learned the Navy SEALs saying "Slow is smooth, smooth is fast" which I feel sums up my experience well.<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month</a>
I think your mind might be blown when you discover a third type of environment. It's neither a small shop of yak-shaving idealists, nor a desperate code factory.<p>The third environment is a large business maintaining services long term. These services do not change in fundamental ways for well over a decade and they make a shit ton of money, yet the requirements never stop changing in subtle ways for the clients. Bugs pop up constantly, but there's more than enough time to fix them the right way as outlined by their contract where expectations have been corrected over the years. There's no choice to do it any other way. The requirements and deadlines are firm. Reliability is the priority.<p>These are the stable businesses of the broader working world and they're probably what will remain after AI has driven the tech industry into the ground.
Even if the entire totem pole of decision makers in a company thinks writing code is the bottleneck doesn't make it true that writing code is the bottleneck.<p>On the extreme end to prove the point, the suits intentionally abstract out reality into neat forecasts and spreadsheet cells.<p>It's hard for me to think of something concrete that will convince you. Does code map directly to business outcomes in your experience? Because it's overwhelmingly not even remotely true in my experience.<p>even just "all lines of code are not created equal" tells me there's no direct correlation with business value.
But how much time per week does an SWE actually spend writing code?
another one, this is 2nd most frequent thing people write here, not sure how to even approach answering :)<p>so I’ll do what I was thought in first grade to never do and answer a question with a question - how much time per week does a brick layer spend laying bricks? they are looking at these new “robots” laying bricks automatically and talking on BrickLayerNews “man, the brick laying has not been a bottleneck for a long time.”<p>But to answer your question directly, <i>a lot</i> of time if other people do their job well. Last week I had about 7 hours of meetings, the rest of the time I was coding (so say 35 hours) minus breaks I had to take to stretch and rest my eyes
Interesting! I guess it really varies between jobs, roles, and companies.<p>Thats never been my experience but I have an odd skill set that mixes design and dev.<p>I’ve always spent a lot of time planning, designing, thinking, etc.<p>How detailed are the tickets if you spend all your time coding? You never have to think through architecture, follow up on edge cases the ticket writers didn’t anticipate, help coworkers with their tasks, review code, etc.?
i think this is it. you're a bricklayer. No, the bottleneck for erecting buildings is <i>not</i> bricklaying.<p>Without taking all the time to write a dissertation to try to convince you, because why; how about we just start with even zoning laws and demographic analysis preclude the laying of the bricks.<p>is it so unreasonable to think it is not about the laying of the bricks?
I think you comparing software development to brick laying says all anyone needs to hear about your approach to software development.<p>It's like saying the bottleneck in mathematics is arithmetic.
It sounds like you just aren't very good at managing teams of programmers tbh. If your bottleneck is producing code, very rarely does hiring more programmers actually help.
I agree the slogan isn't very true. It's similar to another line of commentary that would suggest soft skills are more important than the hard skills of actually being able to program, i.e. the primary service being paid for.<p>There is some truth to it, like Brooks' Law (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks's_law" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks's_law</a>) about how adding people to an already late project will just make it later. There are many factors in how long a software engineering task takes beyond pure typing speed, which suggests there are factors beyond code produced per day as well. But some typing has to be done, and some code has to be produced, and those can absolutely be bottlenecks.<p>Another way of looking at it that I like is Hickey's hierarchy of the problems of programming and their relative costs, from slide 22: <a href="https://github.com/matthiasn/talk-transcripts/blob/master/Hickey_Rich/EffectivePrograms.md" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/matthiasn/talk-transcripts/blob/master/Hi...</a> If you have inherent domain complexity, or a misconception on how to apply programming to a domain, those are 10x worse costs than any day-to-day practice of programming concerns ("the code"), and there's a 10x further reduction for trivialisms like typos.<p>I think some of it must be cope since so many are in organizations where the more they get promoted the less they program, trending towards (and sometimes reaching) 0. In such an organization sure, code isn't the bottleneck per se, it's a symptom of an underlying cause. The bottleneck would be the bad incentives that get people to schedule incessant unnecessary meetings with as many people as they can to show leadership of stakeholders for promotion doc material, and other questionable things shoved on the best engineers that take them away from engineering. Remove those, and suddenly productivity can go way up, and code produced will go up as well.<p>I've also always been amused by estimates of what constitutes "good" productivity if you try to quantify it in lines of code. There's a paper from 1994 by Jim Coplien, "Borland Software Craftsmanship: A New Look at Process, Quality, and Productivity". It's summarized in the free book by Richard Gabriel, "Patterns of Software". (<a href="https://www.dreamsongs.com/Files/PatternsOfSoftware.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.dreamsongs.com/Files/PatternsOfSoftware.pdf</a> pg 135) They were making new spreadsheet software for Windows, and had a group of "very high caliber" professionals, with a core group of 4 people (2 with important prior domain expertise) and then 4 more team members added after a year. "The QPW group, consisting of about eight people, took 31 months to produce a commercial product containing 1 million lines of code. This elapsed time includes the prototypes, but the line count does not. That is, each member of this group produced 1,000 lines of final code per week."<p>Later on, Coplien was asked "what he thought was a good average for US software productivity", and the answer was "1000 to 2000 non-commentary source lines per programmer per year". Also: "this number was constant for a large in-house program over its 15-year lifetime -- so that original development and maintenance moved at the same pace: slowly". An average of 1k lines a year is 19 lines a week, or about 4 lines a day for a work-week. This was considered acceptable for an average, whereas for an exceptional team you could get 200 a day. Might not there be ways to boost the average from 4 to something like 12 or 20? If your organization is at 4, there is clearly a bottleneck. (For extra context, the QPW group was in C++, and Gabriel notes he had personal experience with several groups demonstrating similar productivity levels. "I watched Lisp programmers produce 1000 lines of Lisp/CLOS code per month per person, which is roughly equivalent to 350 to 1000 lines of C++ code per week." Of course language matters in lines of code comparisons.)
My current take is that AI is helping me experiment much faster. I can get less involved with the parts of an application that matter less and focus more (manually) on the parts that do. I agree with a lot of the sentiment here - even with the best intentions of reviewing every line of AI code, when it works well and I'm working fast on low stakes functionality, that sometimes doesn't happen. This can be offset however by using AI efficiencies to maintain better test coverage than I would by hand (unit and e2e), having documentation updated with assistance and having diagrams maintained to help me review. There are still some annoyances, when the AI struggles with seemingly simple issues, but I think that we all have to admit that programming was difficult, and quality issues existed before AI.
> Nowadays many people are pushing AI-assisted code, some of them in a responsible way, some of them not. So... what do we do?<p>You hold them accountable.<p>Once upon a time we used to fire people from their jobs for doing things poorly. Perhaps we could return to something approximating this model.
I am a machine learning engineer. I've been in the domain almost 12 years now (different titles and roles).<p>In my current role (and by no means that is unique), I don't know how to write less code.<p>Here are problems I am facing:
- DS generating a lot of code
- Managers who have therapy sessions with Gemini, and in which their ideas have been validated
- No governance on DS (you want this package? import it)
- No governance on Infrastructure (I spent a couple of months upskilling in a pipeline technology that were using: reading documentation and creating examples, until I became very good it...just for the whole tech to be ditched)
- Libraries and tools that have been documentation, or too complex (GCP for example)<p>The cognitive overload is immense.<p>Back few years ago, when I was doing my PhD, immersing in PyTorch and Scipy stack had a huge return on investment. Now, I don't feel it.<p>So, how do I even write less code? Slowly, I am succumbing to the fact that my tools and methods are inappropriate. I am steadily shifting towards offloading this to Claude and its likings.<p>Is it introducing risks? For sure. It's going to be a disaster at one point. But I don't know what to do. Do I need a better abstraction? Different way to think about it? No clue
I've seen some success teaching data scientists how to write better code. SWE concepts like modularity, testing, and refuse. Things that they normally ignore or choose to throw out the window.<p>(Disclosure: I'm a corporate trainer)
What is DS?
After experimenting with various approaches, I arrived at Power Coding (like Power Armor). This requires:<p>- small codebases (whole thing is injected into context)<p>- small, fast models (so it's realtime)<p>- a custom harness (cause everything I tried sucks, takes 10 seconds to load half my program into context instead of just doing it at startup lmao)<p>The result is interactive, realtime, doesn't break flow (no waiting for "AI compile", small models are very fast now), and most importantly: active, not passive.<p>I make many small changes. The changes are small, so small models can handle them. The changes are small, so my brain can handle them. I describe what I want, so I am driving. The mental model stays synced continuously.<p>Life is good.
I'm not entirely sure I can trust the opinions of someone on LLMs when their blog is sponsored by an AI company. Am I not simply seeing the opinions that the AI company is paying for?
For various internal tools & other projects, I started using config only tools and avoid code as much as possible.<p><a href="https://avilpage.com/2026/03/config-first-tools.html" rel="nofollow">https://avilpage.com/2026/03/config-first-tools.html</a>
I like this. Thanks for sharing.<p>I think "config first" is an understatement. The more general term here is "data driven".<p>It's sort of obvious that agents are way better and faster when writing data that can be validated easily against a schema and understood and reviewed in far less time. Data driven also gives you leverage, because it is far easier to for a program to produce data than code.<p>The same applies to humans as well. Sort of ironic that we are now rediscovering and celebrating robust approaches like writing well designed CLIs, data driven programming, actionable error messages and good documentation.<p>Maybe AI agents are a sort of reality check or even evolutionary pressure that forces us to do the right things.
Good framing. I’d add that “be responsible” extends well beyond code quality - it’s about product responsibility.<p>AI making code cheaper to produce doesn’t make the decisions around it any cheaper. What to build, for whom, and why — that’s still fully on you. It should free up more time for strategy, user understanding, and saying “no” to things that shouldn’t exist regardless of how easy they are to ship.<p>The maintainability concern Orhun raises is real, but I think the root cause isn’t AI — it’s ownership. If you don’t understand what was built, you can’t evolve it. It’s the same failure mode as a PM who doesn’t grasp the technical implementation — they end up proposing expensive features that fight the architecture instead of working with it. Eventually, someone has to pay for that disconnect, and it’s usually the team
A similar post with more emphasis on validating changes: <a href="https://bower.sh/thinking-slow-writing-fast" rel="nofollow">https://bower.sh/thinking-slow-writing-fast</a>
It was always possible to write large amounts of crappy code if you were motivated or clueless enough (see <a href="https://github.com/radian-software/TerrariaClone" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/radian-software/TerrariaClone</a>). It's now just easier, and the consequences less severe, as the agent has code comprehension superpowers and will happily extend your mud ball of a codebase.<p>There are still consequences, however. Even with an agent, development slows, cost increases, bugs emerge at a higher rate, etc. It's still beneficial to focus on code quality instead of raw output. I don't think this is limited writing it yourself, mind - but you need to actually have an understanding of what's being generated so you can critique and improve it.<p>Personally, I've found the accessibility aspect to be the most beneficial. I'm not always writing more code, but I can do much more of it on my phone, just prompting the agent, which has been so freeing. I don't feel this is talked about enough!
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