I don’t log in to my LinkedIn account anymore, haven’t done so in years.
“AI first this, AI driven that,” alright, alright, I get it! You guys absolutely love AI, and I can’t stand the fact that after almost 5(!!!) years, people still talk about it like it’s the best thing since chicken nuggets.
Back when LLMs have started showing somewhat positive results when it came to generating less-than-average code, I came to a devastating conclusion:
My friends and colleagues might not actually enjoy coding at all.
Maybe they just didn’t enjoy coding the way I do—but either way, I was extremely sad and actively burnt out to find that everybody around me jumped on the prompting bandwagon without giving it much of a critical second thought.
I could argue that it was partially because of their employers, but it was definitely because they chose and wanted to.
They pressed me “It’s the future, aob2f, we don’t need to write code anymore.”
“I just tell Claude to do it, and it’s done.”
“I don’t write a single line of code anymore, don’t be left behind.”
Some even outrageously claimed “Yeah I reviewed Claude’s 40k lines PR in two days, it was good.”
I was baffled. Was I in this sick, absent-minded Truman show spinoff? Were these the same smart, even genius individuals that have built and driven the world’s innovation in the past 30 years with their own hands and minds?
It got to a point where I started doubting myself. Maybe it’s really that good? I genuinely gave it a thought.
Eventually, I reluctantly gave in and tried vibe coding for the first time… You see, up until then I exclusively used AI as a sophisticated search engine. I asked a technical question—got an answer. More than 50% of the times it was inaccurate or a full-on hallucination, and then I validated the result through trial and error. Admittedly it was better than blindly googling niche bugs and finding nothing but a lonely and vague question from 8 years ago on Stack Overflow.
But matter of fact—vibe coding was a miserable experience! I ended up arguing with Claude for 45 minutes, and closed the tab with my systolic blood pressure floating somewhere above the 130s.
A few months later, given that my friends and colleagues kept actively pushing AI as nothing less than a miracle of creation, I gave vibe coding yet another try. This time I got a simple static webpage going that didn’t look too bad, and it did what it had to do (which was to send an HTTP request to a local server).
My issue was that about 80% of the code Claude generated was completely convoluted and mostly unnecessary. In the time that it took me and Claude to discuss, go back and forth and create this simple functional webpage—I could have just done it myself!
Not only that—I could have written far superior code, produced a maintainable and readable result, and as a bonus retain my abilities and practical problem solving skills as an engineer.
Hells! Prompting an LLM to generate a buggy piece of code and then testing it blindly over and over again is not even fun! What is going on?!
And there it was, after many months observing my surroundings, I came to an astounding realization. A realization so sad that it made me actively search for a different profession for a while.
AI has given a lot of completely incompetent people a false sense of competency.
…and that is why they love it so much.
That’s it, that’s that. That is the realization and the conclusion, all wrapped up in a short and to the point sentence that is hard to swallow even for me.
If I had to elaborate I would say that perhaps even the somewhat competent people rushed to use the magical crutch they were given, and (ab)used it until it made them less competent than they were initially.
I understand that this point of view might make me sound arrogant and full of myself. Don’t get me wrong—I do believe I am a smart individual, but I am far from perfect. I am stubborn, I have anger issues, I make countless mistakes all the time and I try to mentally humble myself whenever and wherever I can—because I know I know nothing at all.
But I believe AI has given many people something they truly lacked, a sense of competency, or in other words—a sense of achievement. Even if it’s a lie, even if it’s temporary, or costs hundreds of dollars in tokens. I can understand why people who have never felt like they were truly capable or useful, would get addicted to convincing themselves that they are.
The sad reality is that I don’t believe anybody is truly incapable or incompetent.
I did not learn how to engineer in a day, and everything I do know came from countless hours of trial and error. I whole heartedly believe that anybody who would spend the same amount of time I’ve spent learning any sort of craft, would achieve something that is truly valuable.
A reassuring thought I want to leave you with is that the AI hype is coming to an end.
The cracks are showing, the ROI is crawling underground, and the profits have flown out the window. It won’t be long before AI, and mostly LLMs would be what they were meant to be, a sophisticated search engine that hallucinates 50% of the time.
I do have hopes that I will once again be able to browse LinkedIn, friends will post about their niche Javascript libraries, and new podcast episodes will talk about the fresh innovations in web development.
AI will be truly just a tool, and genuine innovation will rise to the surface. Then, maybe then, I won’t have to suffer through the deafening corpo-jargon about “how innovative and AI powered, our AI driven AI solution is” on every, single, post.
With much love,
aob2f
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