this post was submitted on 10 May 2026
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Programming
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I always ask myself how many of these anti ai warriors are actually proficient professional coders. And I'm talking like engineer level, not hobby level.
LLMs are a tool. Give a package power tool to a fool and the result is stupid at best, bloody at the worst. Let's call that vibe tooling and ask if there is a difference to vibe coding.
Imho there is not. LLMs are a tool that can lift up the quality of coding work to a common level if used by proficient people. It helps with searching through and understanding vast outputs as long as you know what to expect. Its a miracle in intuition.
Its not a mind reading tool that will just code your fantasy software for you. Hate it all you like, AI is here to stay, this is like hating cars in the age of horses. Cars are not magic, neither is "AI".
I have over 25 years of development experience. My current role is vice president of development and architecture where I lead a team of 80+ devs, QAs, and architects. By any measure, I am one of those "engineer level" developers you speak of.
Yes, LLMs are a tool, but it's a tool one should use sparingly. LLMs are pattern recognition machines and are great for routine, been-there-done-that type development. For anything that deviates from the norm, LLMs will try to force everything back into common patterns... even when those patterns are not correct. A well designed system can be mangled into junk because the LLM doesn't have enough context or because something is new.
Be skeptical of the rave reviews around coding agents and the use of LLMs for development. Much of the hype seems tied to developer skill. Less capable developers can use LLMs to appear more capable than they are. For good developers, LLMs seem to erode their skills as they rely on the tool instead of their own knowledge. I have seen this first hand.
Overall, it seems LLMs raise skills of bad developers and hamper the skills of good developers. It's creating a bunch of middling developers who are incapable of handling anything novel or complex.
Wen was the last time you actually wrote something production level yourself?
Friday.
@onlinepersona prompting chatgpt right now
Imagine you're a worker of any kind. Some kid from university with a business degree and no experience in your job becomes team leader. They've learned to "lead". Does that make them an expert in your craft?
I'm not sure what you're getting at. By definition, an "expert" is someone with a lot of "experience". Your hypothetical kid has "no experience". Since we know that 1+1=2, I think we can deduce that the answer to your question is no.
The person I was responding to was equating their experience as a leader to being an expert in software development. And even if they had been a good developer 5, 10, or 15 years ago, that doesn't make them stay an expert. Either you're working in the field with the relevant experience, and position, or you're not.
Your qualifications as a software developer don't magically increase to say "far exceed the required qualifications" just because you lead a team, a division, or a company. Otherwise Satya Nadella, Bill Gates, and Jeff Bezos would be the best software developers in the world.