Blog posts like this just blow me away.
> I believed this so strongly that my company built an entire product around this concept. I used to tell folks that "session transcripts were the new oil," that they were more valuable than the code itself.
> [ā¦]
> We don't really write code by hand anymore.
Honestly, isn't this just influencer spam? What possible value is there in reading about people who used to have products, but no longer write their own code, complaining about the inscrutable prediction machine they have handed that job and their livelihoods to?
Like, if you have complaints about the thing, perhaps you should address them to your supplier directly. None of your readers can help, and nobody's magic folk solution to your problem is better than yours.
And there are so many of these sorts of posts. Are we not entirely cooked?
(I think I have concluded that if people writing about AI aren't writing about interesting things they have achieved with small, local LLMs ā which for clarity I am fully interested in reading - then I'm done reading. This whole blogging-about-cloud-AI genre is just weird and irresponsible now)
general_reveal
today at 5:44 PM
Look man, Iāve got a MMO that Iām working on thatās set in 2014 where everyone is a programmer in SV (might call it World of Legacy). Itās a period piece. I NEED as much blog training data of this type so that my NPCs can talk in a historically accurate way (god bless Medium.com, a historical treasure trove of a bygone medieval era).
Itās gonna be a living breathing world, you see. Youāre going to be like āomg, this game even accurately captured the blog posts, woahā.
bryanrasmussen
today at 5:50 PM
The perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from. Which is why the Matrix was redesigned to this: the peak of your civilization. I say your civilization, because as soon as we started thinking for you it really became our civilization, but the peak of your civilization was an MMO where everyone is a programmer in SV.
I ā¦ Iā¦ don't want to play this, thanks ;-)
general_reveal
today at 5:47 PM
Itās the only way youāll ever be able to pretend to be a programmer again though.
Oh god, I just realised this really is the logical parallel to all those TV crime dramas set in the early 1900s.
general_reveal
today at 5:51 PM
Itāll be the programmers version of those civil war reenactments.
nerdsniper
today at 6:09 PM
Leet code competitions will be as relevant as sailing regattas.
whateveracct
today at 6:08 PM
so far, i just keep writing by hand and keep getting paid for it. weird.
I'm pretty sure there's an element of sarcasm here, but if this game is real, it does sound super promising.
goostavos
today at 5:51 PM
>session transcripts were the new oil
Something about this idea really resonates with certain personality types. I equate it to the Zettelkasten hype phase from several years ago. People (...like me..) got really wrapped up in the belief that the process was more important that the content. "Linking" was an "activity." Something good will happen as long as you (a) take notes on stuff and (b) link them to other notes on stuff.
You see the same thing with the session transcripts people. They're building ever more sophisticated setups of indexing and storing and cross referencing every conversation they've ever had on the (I would argue) mistaken belief that the transcripts are the valuable part, rather than the uncomfortable part where you go do something. A lot of it, I say from falling in the trap, is fancy procrastination.
(Although, I have found myself jealous on many occasions where their fancy system retrieves something they vaguely recall from a conversation they had 3 months ago. So, who knows.)
I have to ask: do you still write a lot of code yourself? I and most people I know do not.
I am a freelancer recovering from severe burnout so the answer is a sort of irrelevant no.
I'm trying to rebuild my life so I am in an experimenting and learning phase rather than a massive coding phase, and most of my code work is maintenance of things I have built. That which I do code, I am still coding by hand, though I am dealing with other people's Claude output and I am really unimpressed by it. It's often rather crass.
But I would say to you that if you personally don't write code now but you do have a dependency on one of two presumably unprofitable cloud AI providers, aren't you in trouble? How is this not a three-alarm fire for you?
jenniferhooley
today at 6:04 PM
Programmers can use smaller models like deepseek v4 flash for 98% of the same productivity as SOTA models and cost (true cost) around $10-$30 a month. So I doubt most people who heavily use them are too concerned.
It's only vibe/hobby coders who really need SOTA and they probably don't think about it much.
> That which I do code, I am still coding by hand, though I am dealing with other people's Claude output and I am really unimpressed by it. It's often rather crass.
Unfortunately the point of code is rarely to impress people (certainly not other engineers) or to avoid being "crass." 99.99% of code exists to achieve business outcomes, and velocity matters a lot in many contexts. A lot more than elegance or impressiveness.
The platform risk is a valid concern but alleviated by China's theft and redistribution of open models.
I'm not talking about impressing people.
We used to be concerned about code quality. Are we not anymore?
Crassness was a signal. Still is, to me ā in a human I find that people who write crass code are going to cause me trouble.
"Code quality" encompasses a lot of dimensions, one of which is impressing your colleagues, and many of which there's virtually no reason to care about now.
On the contrary, it's more important than ever. With ever more code being generated, it's essential that the code be understandable and maintainable - by human and machine.
michaelchisari
today at 6:07 PM
And quality is the new differentiator when everyone can generate slop.
Nobody cares about code quality /s
They only care about the things which you can only get with good code quality like reliability and speed of development.
slopinthebag
today at 6:01 PM
It doesnāt matter what materials or techniques you use to build a house. 99.99% of construction exists to achieve business outcomes, and velocity matters a lot more than using the right materials or techniques.
Of course the house must pass safety inspections and stuff, but the materials and techniques donāt matter one bit for that. All that matters is you achieve the desired outcome, and I will ignore the glaring fact that you achieve the desired outcome by using the right materials and techniques. The materials and techniques donāt matter, just the outcome.
yoyohello13
today at 6:15 PM
> Of course the house must pass safety inspections and stuff, but the materials and techniques donāt matter one bit for that. All that matters is you achieve the desired outcome, and I will ignore the glaring fact that you achieve the desired outcome by using the right materials and techniques.
This analogy is more true than you think. This is why modern homes/appartments are trash. You can pass safety inspections using subpar materials and the house will fall apart after a few years, but who cares right? At least you achieved the business outcome!
This mentality is so infuriating. This is why I need to buy new shoes every year. Or why my washer/dryer motherboard craps out in 2 years instead of 10. Nobody gives a shit about quality anymore, this is why society is crumbling around us. Profit driven incentive for fast/cheap over everything else. And now I need to spend my day prompting an AI to fix AI slop code to keep the business hobbling along another day. What a fucking joke.
No the materials and techniques matter a lot. This is why we need to build houses with sticks and jute cord, just like we always have. It's vital also that we paint our special symbols above the door to ward off the spirits.
It's insane to me that you're implying we could build houses with pre-fabricated materials or pneumatic nail guns and still somehow "have houses?" No sticks/jute cord and special symbols, then no house.
techpression
today at 6:10 PM
Iāve worked at many companies where this idea of velocity was claimed to matter, and it never did. The only thing it mattered for was to make it look like middle managers were worth anything, but the success was always in the foundational idea/concept.
Personally I use 5 different model families, 3 of which are open weights with 3rd party inference providers (GLM, DeepSeek, Kimi), so if the frontier labs were to shut down it'd be a nuisance, nothing more.
Worst case scenario you just switch to a free model, which are 2025-ish in quality.
The open weights models I am interested in, and testing, learning, experimenting with etc.; I am confused and cynical, not insane.
I am not convinced it isn't vulnerable to the same problems but the whole tenor of the community around open source/open weights models just doesn't have the same YOLO madness to it.
AlotOfReading
today at 5:47 PM
Of course? I'm still better than sonnet or opus, just slower and much more expensive.
Sometimes it takes me a day or more to find the one line fix or abstraction necessary, while claude can hammer through a hundred line fix in under an hour.
Sounds like your definition of better is pretty narrow.
Quick and cheap are two of the three fabled: "Fast, cheap, and good: choose two"
AlotOfReading
today at 6:19 PM
Why would I want to start out at the fast & cheap ends of the triangle unless I'm doing exploratory development as part of the process to get to good?
A majority of lifecycle cost isn't in writing the code. I want to use as little of it as I can get away with.
Are you perhaps missing the true message of that aphorism?
Or are you saying the industry is (because it is)
twister2920
today at 6:17 PM
"more good" seems like a pretty decent definition of better to me. The words you are looking for are "cheaper" and "faster"
In coding we usually change it to "cheap, fast or correct: choose two"
I reject your correction: I present the options as nouns, not modifiers to the work. Maybe I should say "Cheap, Fast, or Good" as a compromise.
Ronsenshi
today at 5:44 PM
I am. I have Codex running, doing some tasks which I don't care much about, but anything I want to understand I write myself.
Same thing with hobby projects - I might ask ChatGPT or Gemini some questions about best practices in Swift for example, but writing code is done by hand.
As others said - if you don't use it, you'll lose it. And I'd rather keep my skills up to date.
hirako2000
today at 5:53 PM
You have the privilege to keep yourself sharp, most businesses favor productivity over their workers' long term relevancy.
This is the thing that makes me saddest. Second to the fact that none of the management tier promoting and weaponising this insanity will meaningfully suffer consequences.
Right now I am lucky that I have the time to recover and learn.
I write my API specs, my domain models, Postgres schema, and SQL queries myself. Then I'll have AI bots fill in the application details connecting those things since that's mostly boilerplate once you lock in the data structure, query patterns, and API contract.
I never have AI generating database table schemas or really the shape of my data at all.
LastTrain
today at 5:48 PM
I still write code and sometimes it works well. I also use Claude and it writes code and sometimes that goes well. We have better success together, where I do the interesting stuff and let Claude write my unit tests, reconcile my documentation. That is to say, Iām using it for quality not quantity. There arenāt enough humans to deploy or consume all the sloppy shit it could write on its own.
I am now in the process of fixing code I wrote using AI. I have come to the realization that AI can't really write software and I am annoyed that it took me that long (months) to realize that.
techpression
today at 6:14 PM
This is quite terrifying to me, because I have a feeling I will soon come to the same conclusion.
Iām starting to see some really glaring omissions in code Iām responsible for (using Opus) that at first (and second) look seemed fine, but really isnāt.
walt_grata
today at 5:32 PM
I write code by hand every day. I do the main part of the feature implementation myself and leave comments for the code i want the agent to write. I have some skills and a command that sets the stage to get the agent to fill in the rest
I force myself to do it at least once a week, you know, like cardio. Keeps the doctor away.
Picard should have been a bergamot grower, not a winemaker.
ungreased0675
today at 5:36 PM
It reminds me of the peak crypto days. Lots of resources consumed, many late nights, little to no value created.
I mean at least crypto provided value to criminals, tax evaders and Trump? (regardless of what you think of that). I don't see a parallel with AI.
micromacrofoot
today at 5:51 PM
Occasionally posts like this do get the attention of the company responsible, more than an email does... but indeed that's like a one in a million situation
fortyseven
today at 5:27 PM
[flagged]
I'm not the Blog Police, I'm a very naughty boy.
I have opinions people apparently don't like, for no subscriber money.