AI can code better than most humans? BS. Only takes a few features to end up with spaghetti.
this post was submitted on 29 Dec 2025
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Fuck AI
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AI, in this case, refers to LLMs, GPT technology, and anything listed as "AI" meant to increase market valuations.
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In my experience it doesn't even take a few features, a medium-size non-trivial script by Claude would not pass review by me without human cleanup.
It doesn't have to be better, just cheaper.
You tried adding stuff to a spaghetti code base or tried fixing bugs? Half the time you need to rewrite it. It's not cheaper, you just pay more later.
If it's cheaper this financial quarter then they don't care if they have to pay for it the next financial quarter. That's a future problem!
Do you know why software gets expensive?
I wonder if some bolognese would make it a little bit better… ~I’ll~ ~see~ ~myself~ ~out~
I'm always seeing this claim:
AI can code better than most humans.
Yet literally every formal study on this says exactly the opposite.
Most humans can't code though, so I think this is technically true (and a weird flex). No way is AI better than human coders.
You don't even need to be an experienced developer to see how bad AI created code is. AI just hallucinates too much. I tried asking ChatGPT to write a fairly simple shell script script for me a few times and it added non-existent commands or references EACH times.
Honestly I think AI has other fields of application. It's good when you do something yourself but need an approximation about something. However trying to replace humans with it is just a sign of misunderstanding of the technology. AI shouldn't be called Artificial Intelligence in the first place (damn good marketing tho). It's more like a way of automating statistics.
All coding, bad or good, looks like gibberish to me, so I have no means of judging LLM output in it.
Except by results.
And that's where those formal studies come in: the results are catastrophically bad.
"AI can code better than most humans."
They actually mean: After burning millions of tokens and using up the energy of multiple households (for a year) it can code better than an intern.
I think the conclusion that a software engineer can't find a job due to LLMs is a load of bullshit. I work as one, we are always hiring, just not rubbish candidates....
But the problem is that fresh out of college candidates are generally going to be rubbish, especially when competing against candidates in CA with skills and candidates in lower cost of living areas with a near equivalent education.
Why hire a junior programmer from Stanford at the lower half of their class when you can hire two junior programmers from the University of Warsaw?
This is what killed my love of learning programming. An llm is years beyond me since I'm a noob and it would take 5 years of learning for me to surpass it vs someone typing into it and telling it to code an entire game. Id have to look up every syntax.
Id like to get away from computers since ai has ruined it for the most part and it'd be a lot smarter to learn metal work or woodworking. But I just enjoy computing and its interesting.
Keep going on it. We'll need programmers when the bubble pops or Claude/Copilot/whoever pull a Broadcom and locks everyone into predatory contracts.
And, really, AI is not good at code. It's good at mimicking stuff it's seen before. That's why most of the use-cases the AI heads at my company point to are things like REST servers or configuration files. You know, stuff that fucking everyone has in their 21st century codebase. Once you get into the weeds and start solving novel problems, AI just hallucinates a solution.
I started my career back when everyone said that Visual Basic would make most programming jobs obsolete. Spend your time building your craft. Spend a little longer learning why and how. Worst-case scenario, you can find the flaws in AI code instead of just shrugging and committing.
Not fresh grads. My company is hiring but we demand experience.
To be fair. I've worked with companies that would hire rubbish developers, because "more is better" and also they have no idea what they are doing.
One such company just shuttetered an entire offshored part of the company "because AI". No transition, because "AI can handle it without a transition"
The leadership are idiots that have no idea what they are doing, but thanks to them, rubbish candidates had a career path.
Apart from that, the AI companies are taking a lot of oxygen out of the industry. Not much money left for other companies to hire even if they wanted to.
There's no jobs!
Lands "technical lead" in LA after four months
I’m not in California but I have a CS degree and am going on 15 months of unemployment.
No it can't.
They can't get a job because they do not possess any skills that are marketable.. I hate to break it to you, but going to computer Science school doesn't make you a coder, and doesn't make you good at anything.
Tbh I feel like computer science was the most overrated major this past decade and way too many students picked it.
Exactly, as hard as it is to swallow for people, there was a time when coding was a cushy job that you could land after drinking through college. Those days are gone, and it's back to what it was when I was a dev: you made your own way; You made something awesome and you force companies to look at you and say holy fuck let's get this person they've got something going on.
I thought most corporations just used the free software made by people who've "got something going on" without paying. I keep seeing complaints about that crossing my feed in Mastodon.
What does this have to do with anything.
You made something awesome and you force companies to look at you and say holy fuck let's get this person they've got something going on.
From what I gather the modern pattern is "holy fuck this person has got something going on; let's harrass them to do free labour for us!"
Basically ever since the late 90s. The late 90s enshrined comp sci next to lawyer and doctor as the get rich jobs, except with super low education requirements.
I remember tons of folks when I was in college who didn't want to do any of this "nerdy crap", but they saw dollar signs.
Actually about 1997-2015
Most of the 90s was renegades and hobbyists. The gravy boat for lazy incompetants didn't start, really, until the post dot-bomb bubble pop settled around 2003ish