I've been coding professionally for over 30 years. LLMs have changed the profession more in the last 12 months than anything else has in all that 30 years.
I would totally understand your position if it was, say, crypto that you wanted to exclude. The whole of crypto finance is an edifice of scam built on some interesting but not very useful maths, and there's nothing to redeem it. There are no interesting tech discussions to be had there.
And sure, there are plenty of AI scam artists out there (most seem to have switched from Crypto experts to AI experts in the last couple of years).
But the underlying tech that is being used in AI is not only interesting, but also useful. I'm seeing people who have never coded before produce some cool apps. OK, they're not production-grade, but that's still new people doing new and interesting stuff with this tech. My own workflow is profoundly different from what it was a year ago. I've seen old problems that were really incredibly difficult to fix collapse completely using this tech. It's a useful tool if you're developing software. I suspect there are other areas of human endeavour where it will be useful too. I very much doubt it will replace all human work, or become sentient.
I think we need to separate out the AI business, which is its usual mess of scam, exaggeration, and buffoonery, and the actual AI tech, which is producing some really useful tools.
OP does not want to censor AI topics from every news source. They want news sources which provide access to topics that exclude AI. (Without necessarily those same sources excluding AI entirely.)
This is legitimate. There are many topics in computing and tech.
Not wanting to read about AI in every category is much the same like not wanting to see a C++ forum filled with threads about Angular.
To use your example; if the next version of the C++ language was switching to interpreted and compiled C++ was becoming an obsolete thing of the past, then I would expect every forum discussing C++ to be discussing this change. Trying to exclude that topic and still read interesting news about C++ would be very difficult, obviously, because everyone would be expressing their opinion on that change.
LLMs are the biggest change in the tech industry for ~50 years. It's not a separate tech (like C++ and Angular) it's a fundamental change in the way we develop software across the board. Yes you can still hand-code software (in the same way that in the example you could still compile C++) but the entire industry is moving in a different direction, and trying to ignore that seems quixotic.
Obviously, everyone is entitled to ignore whatever they want, so good luck to OP. I hope they find their source of non-AI tech news.
fundamental change in the way we develop software across the board
Whether you produce your code using "ed" on a hard copy printer TTY, or use an IDE, is off topic in a C++ forum.
The way you develop software is a specific topic: the way-you-develop-software topic. Someone not interested in that topic should be able to easily filter that out from their feed, like any other topic.
Not only that but it impinges on your life; it would be irresponsible to ignore it. There goes your job while you weren't paying attention... This is the mother of all tech revolutions. There will never ever be anything as big as AI, especially after embodiment.
As a consultant I am looking forward to being hired by companies to get rid of all the vibe code and to replace it with beautiful maintainable artisanal code.
Idk if someone paying attention to how 2025 and 2026 have gone thinks that by 2028 we will be backing off of agenting coding that is wild. Like the other comment says: future models refactor the code of older models.
You can use LLMs heavily without ever actually "vibe coding". I do think to the degree "vibe coding" continues to exist there will always be work to do in turning some portion of vibe coded work into more robust production quality code. You can still use LLMs to do this you just have to maintain control over architectural choices.
Yea it’s hard for me to think of what the end state equilibrium is. A pile of vibe coded junk today is bad. You need humans. But we’ve made such a ridiculous amount of progress in such a short amount of time and, most importantly, this shows no sign of slowing down or plateauing. So will we hit a point where “vibe coding” is just all there is? Where human intervention is bad, just as hand tuning assembly is bad?
Is there a level of abstraction where human involvement will always be necessary? If so where?
I think it's not going to be a straight line upwards, it's going to get weirder. LLMs are still riffing on what we humans have done. If we stop giving them good examples because we aren't architecting anymore I don't really know what's going to happen. Probably some kind of meta architecture that emerges from lots of agents working in parallel but I worry it might have a strong house of cards theme to it.
if you were paying attention you would've noticed that between 2025 and 2026 the pricing of these things have somewhat changed. How does the extrapolation look with that?
I saw this play out in Y2K, and yes, I was also looking forward to getting paid an absolute fortune to refactor all those old VB applications at their end of life.
Now, no. All that work will be done by an LLM. I'm afraid we don't get to play at being the returning heroes like those old COBOL dudes did.
I entered the programming world circa 1995. There were indeed still some holdouts. A few of them were even good enough to hold out up to that point and write some code that would have been hard to replicate with the compilers of the time.
By the 200xs they were gone. Interestingly, I would say what killed them in the early 2000s wasn't actually compilers, it was the interpreted languages. Others may disagree. Even if they were dog slow by comparison, scripting languages made some things so much easier to program that it didn't matter. And then it prompted static languages to up their game to try to match that. By the time that process played out, people writing only in assembler couldn't keep up anymore.
My first job in tech was writing desktop applications in VB3 (1994, so around the same time)
The company also had an AS400 with a collection of COBOL programmers. They were utterly scathing of the new toy language for doing toy things on PCs. There was no way that VB would ever be a "real" language or that anyone would do anything "real" with it.
And yeah, in terms of serious computing, that's probably true. But the industry leapt at the new tools and tooling, and COBOL faded to obscurity (though there are still AS400s out there, and some of the code they wrote is still managing vast swathes of our essential services).
And all of that was less of a revolution in the industry than the last 12 months have been.
Yeah, the process I described was several years. Depending on how you measure this could well be a 15-20 year process overall, but even what I witnessed was at least 5 years, and that was already the tail end of an ongoing process.
I'm a little reluctant to go too triumphalist on the "adapt or be left behind" bandwagon, because I think that loses some very important nuances as well... but on the other hand, last week I set up a new project and the AI chewed through a lot of boring boilerplate and setup and configuration in about 30 minutes that would have taken me at least a tedious week just a year ago. Anyone who is leaving that on the table is going to find it hard to compete. I still had to go over it line-by-line, and make quite a few changes here and there, but it was also way, way faster to do that then to do it all from scratch.
My position has been to encourage the skeptics to give it an honest try (no deliberately picking something you pretty much know it can't do, or withholding info from it so it fails) but at the same time, hold on to the skepticism, it helps you use it properly. Excessive trust in the AI is definitely a problem right now.
I had great times making simple things I can describe well. But compared to what people get excited about, that's all toy stuff, I still read every line, and massage it into what I actually want, unless it's a throwaway/experiment.
For me, the main thing, the only thing really, is the pushiness.
To put a point on it: I think the wine is poisoned. So what? Are you offended? Or is it that you are so scared that I, some random stranger you never cared about and never offer to help with something I actually want, might miss out on some fine wine? Then let me miss out.
It's the fact that it gets so pushy and insulting and full of gibberish, that it sets my spider senses tingling, yeah. So I would even say: what if I hold on to the skepticism regardless of ability? That even if it cures cancer, I still want to be able to use tools without a black box in-between? That at most we can have a "fully AI" world after we have dealt with the people, I would even say dudes behind curtains, that for whatever reason just cannot let that happen? Fuck the dark enlightenment and the dumb dorks it consists of, is what I'm trying to say, and where that is agreed on, we can discuss earnestly. Where that is a "deal breaker", I want separation, because I have trust issues and intend to keep them.
Compiler developers didn't hoover up as much human creative work as they could, legally or not, to evolve a giant inscrutable thing that does what it does probabilistically, with the explicit goal of replacing as much human labor as possible for the enrichment of the already rich. Whatever benefits we get out of generative AI are just a side effect, and one that may not last when the investors stop subsidizing our access to the big models.
As I said, I think we need to separate the business of AI, which is full of the usual bullshit, and the technology of AI, which is producing some useful tools.
The open source models are proving just as capable as the commercial ones. If Anthropic goes bust tomorrow (which seems likely) then we will still have those useful tools.
LLMs are not going to replace all our jobs. I know they've been claiming this, but anyone who actually uses the tools can see that this isn't true. This is part of the business bullshit. Hopefully it stops when the bubble pops and we get into the depressed phase of the Gartner Hype Cycle, and start building the actual businesses and tools that this tech can provide.
Compilers produce the same output for the same input. You can reason about the output by looking at the input, if you know the compiler (that many modern compilers are way, way too complex for anyone to be actually able to predict the machine code byte by byte doesn't take away from that fundamental determinism). LLM introduce a black box middle man, and that is the feature, whatever short bursts of autonomy people get seduced by is the bug.
It's like saying "we no longer need to be able to read and write because Friendly Company Man provides each of us with an assistant that will always act with our best interests in mind." On a technical level, it's wrong and sloppy, on a societal level it's suicidal. So I'd say whoever wants to follow the pied pipers can do so, when someone tries to drag you off your property for some promised land, stand your ground. If I'm wrong, the Luddites will wither away so why worry. I think the worry actually is that they might be right, and to attempt to not have a control group, because if everything is slop, nothing is slop. If nobody can think, everybody is perfectly fine. If everybody is a slave, all are free.
The difference between compilers and LLMs is that compilers actually work. LLMs do not produce a usable result, no matter how much AI bros try to convince everyone else otherwise.
They absolutely 100% produce usable results for large classes of problems. Usually problems on the more "boring" side, but that's most code.
Even local ones are getting "usable." As an experiment I used OpenCode + Qwen coder to code a text based side scroller game in Rust. Left my laptop on and went to bed and in the morning I had a passable demo that looked like the old DOS game ZZT. This was with a 30b model at 4-bit quantization, so pretty tiny by LLM standards.
BTW LLMs seem to do well with Rust. I think it might actually be the guard rails. It lets the LLM iterate against itself. Dynamic languages don't give any compile time feedback, so it's harder to do that. This is something that's 100% the opposite of what I would have expected.
Comments
I've been coding professionally for over 30 years. LLMs have changed the profession more in the last 12 months than anything else has in all that 30 years.
I would totally understand your position if it was, say, crypto that you wanted to exclude. The whole of crypto finance is an edifice of scam built on some interesting but not very useful maths, and there's nothing to redeem it. There are no interesting tech discussions to be had there.
And sure, there are plenty of AI scam artists out there (most seem to have switched from Crypto experts to AI experts in the last couple of years).
But the underlying tech that is being used in AI is not only interesting, but also useful. I'm seeing people who have never coded before produce some cool apps. OK, they're not production-grade, but that's still new people doing new and interesting stuff with this tech. My own workflow is profoundly different from what it was a year ago. I've seen old problems that were really incredibly difficult to fix collapse completely using this tech. It's a useful tool if you're developing software. I suspect there are other areas of human endeavour where it will be useful too. I very much doubt it will replace all human work, or become sentient.
I think we need to separate out the AI business, which is its usual mess of scam, exaggeration, and buffoonery, and the actual AI tech, which is producing some really useful tools.
OP does not want to censor AI topics from every news source. They want news sources which provide access to topics that exclude AI. (Without necessarily those same sources excluding AI entirely.)
This is legitimate. There are many topics in computing and tech.
Not wanting to read about AI in every category is much the same like not wanting to see a C++ forum filled with threads about Angular.
Thanks for the clarification.
To use your example; if the next version of the C++ language was switching to interpreted and compiled C++ was becoming an obsolete thing of the past, then I would expect every forum discussing C++ to be discussing this change. Trying to exclude that topic and still read interesting news about C++ would be very difficult, obviously, because everyone would be expressing their opinion on that change.
LLMs are the biggest change in the tech industry for ~50 years. It's not a separate tech (like C++ and Angular) it's a fundamental change in the way we develop software across the board. Yes you can still hand-code software (in the same way that in the example you could still compile C++) but the entire industry is moving in a different direction, and trying to ignore that seems quixotic.
Obviously, everyone is entitled to ignore whatever they want, so good luck to OP. I hope they find their source of non-AI tech news.
Yes it is.
Whether you produce your code using "ed" on a hard copy printer TTY, or use an IDE, is off topic in a C++ forum.
The way you develop software is a specific topic: the way-you-develop-software topic. Someone not interested in that topic should be able to easily filter that out from their feed, like any other topic.
Not only that but it impinges on your life; it would be irresponsible to ignore it. There goes your job while you weren't paying attention... This is the mother of all tech revolutions. There will never ever be anything as big as AI, especially after embodiment.
As a consultant I am looking forward to being hired by companies to get rid of all the vibe code and to replace it with beautiful maintainable artisanal code.
Idk if someone paying attention to how 2025 and 2026 have gone thinks that by 2028 we will be backing off of agenting coding that is wild. Like the other comment says: future models refactor the code of older models.
You can use LLMs heavily without ever actually "vibe coding". I do think to the degree "vibe coding" continues to exist there will always be work to do in turning some portion of vibe coded work into more robust production quality code. You can still use LLMs to do this you just have to maintain control over architectural choices.
Yea it’s hard for me to think of what the end state equilibrium is. A pile of vibe coded junk today is bad. You need humans. But we’ve made such a ridiculous amount of progress in such a short amount of time and, most importantly, this shows no sign of slowing down or plateauing. So will we hit a point where “vibe coding” is just all there is? Where human intervention is bad, just as hand tuning assembly is bad?
Is there a level of abstraction where human involvement will always be necessary? If so where?
I think it's not going to be a straight line upwards, it's going to get weirder. LLMs are still riffing on what we humans have done. If we stop giving them good examples because we aren't architecting anymore I don't really know what's going to happen. Probably some kind of meta architecture that emerges from lots of agents working in parallel but I worry it might have a strong house of cards theme to it.
Great that you know the future when nobody else can.
No, I just have a prior that’s informed by real information and evidence and that’s quite strong.
- scaling laws exist
- downstream perf trends also exist (epoch capability index)
- gpt4 to gpt5 leap in capabilities every 16-18 months
- actual adoption and retention and engagement numbers are out of this world
- RL with verifiable rewards will get you to super human performance even with poor sample efficiency
- zero evidence of a plateau
I don’t know the future I am just skeptically looking at the data.
What data are you looking at?
if you were paying attention you would've noticed that between 2025 and 2026 the pricing of these things have somewhat changed. How does the extrapolation look with that?
Good thing we have reams of data on this, holding performance constant the cost goes down 10-40x per year: https://epoch.ai (like the first box)
Also, frontier token prices have remained roughly constant:
3.5 sonnet: $3/$15 3.7 sonnet: $3/$15 Opus 4: $15/$75 (opus tier) opus 4.1: same Opus 4.5: $5/$25 Opus 4.6 (same) 4.7 (same) 4.8 (Same) Fable: $10/$50
So Fable is cheaper than Opus 4 was at launch.
One thing that has increased quite significantly? Spending and adoption.
I saw this play out in Y2K, and yes, I was also looking forward to getting paid an absolute fortune to refactor all those old VB applications at their end of life.
Now, no. All that work will be done by an LLM. I'm afraid we don't get to play at being the returning heroes like those old COBOL dudes did.
I wonder if people said this about compilers. Some day they’ll replace all that compiler generated junk with hand crafted ASM.
This reminds me of that. The spec is the new high level language. Code is ASM. ASM is like CPU microcode.
I entered the programming world circa 1995. There were indeed still some holdouts. A few of them were even good enough to hold out up to that point and write some code that would have been hard to replicate with the compilers of the time.
By the 200xs they were gone. Interestingly, I would say what killed them in the early 2000s wasn't actually compilers, it was the interpreted languages. Others may disagree. Even if they were dog slow by comparison, scripting languages made some things so much easier to program that it didn't matter. And then it prompted static languages to up their game to try to match that. By the time that process played out, people writing only in assembler couldn't keep up anymore.
My first job in tech was writing desktop applications in VB3 (1994, so around the same time)
The company also had an AS400 with a collection of COBOL programmers. They were utterly scathing of the new toy language for doing toy things on PCs. There was no way that VB would ever be a "real" language or that anyone would do anything "real" with it.
And yeah, in terms of serious computing, that's probably true. But the industry leapt at the new tools and tooling, and COBOL faded to obscurity (though there are still AS400s out there, and some of the code they wrote is still managing vast swathes of our essential services).
And all of that was less of a revolution in the industry than the last 12 months have been.
Yeah, the process I described was several years. Depending on how you measure this could well be a 15-20 year process overall, but even what I witnessed was at least 5 years, and that was already the tail end of an ongoing process.
I'm a little reluctant to go too triumphalist on the "adapt or be left behind" bandwagon, because I think that loses some very important nuances as well... but on the other hand, last week I set up a new project and the AI chewed through a lot of boring boilerplate and setup and configuration in about 30 minutes that would have taken me at least a tedious week just a year ago. Anyone who is leaving that on the table is going to find it hard to compete. I still had to go over it line-by-line, and make quite a few changes here and there, but it was also way, way faster to do that then to do it all from scratch.
My position has been to encourage the skeptics to give it an honest try (no deliberately picking something you pretty much know it can't do, or withholding info from it so it fails) but at the same time, hold on to the skepticism, it helps you use it properly. Excessive trust in the AI is definitely a problem right now.
I had great times making simple things I can describe well. But compared to what people get excited about, that's all toy stuff, I still read every line, and massage it into what I actually want, unless it's a throwaway/experiment.
For me, the main thing, the only thing really, is the pushiness.
To put a point on it: I think the wine is poisoned. So what? Are you offended? Or is it that you are so scared that I, some random stranger you never cared about and never offer to help with something I actually want, might miss out on some fine wine? Then let me miss out.
It's the fact that it gets so pushy and insulting and full of gibberish, that it sets my spider senses tingling, yeah. So I would even say: what if I hold on to the skepticism regardless of ability? That even if it cures cancer, I still want to be able to use tools without a black box in-between? That at most we can have a "fully AI" world after we have dealt with the people, I would even say dudes behind curtains, that for whatever reason just cannot let that happen? Fuck the dark enlightenment and the dumb dorks it consists of, is what I'm trying to say, and where that is agreed on, we can discuss earnestly. Where that is a "deal breaker", I want separation, because I have trust issues and intend to keep them.
Compiler developers didn't hoover up as much human creative work as they could, legally or not, to evolve a giant inscrutable thing that does what it does probabilistically, with the explicit goal of replacing as much human labor as possible for the enrichment of the already rich. Whatever benefits we get out of generative AI are just a side effect, and one that may not last when the investors stop subsidizing our access to the big models.
As I said, I think we need to separate the business of AI, which is full of the usual bullshit, and the technology of AI, which is producing some useful tools.
The open source models are proving just as capable as the commercial ones. If Anthropic goes bust tomorrow (which seems likely) then we will still have those useful tools.
LLMs are not going to replace all our jobs. I know they've been claiming this, but anyone who actually uses the tools can see that this isn't true. This is part of the business bullshit. Hopefully it stops when the bubble pops and we get into the depressed phase of the Gartner Hype Cycle, and start building the actual businesses and tools that this tech can provide.
Compilers produce the same output for the same input. You can reason about the output by looking at the input, if you know the compiler (that many modern compilers are way, way too complex for anyone to be actually able to predict the machine code byte by byte doesn't take away from that fundamental determinism). LLM introduce a black box middle man, and that is the feature, whatever short bursts of autonomy people get seduced by is the bug.
It's like saying "we no longer need to be able to read and write because Friendly Company Man provides each of us with an assistant that will always act with our best interests in mind." On a technical level, it's wrong and sloppy, on a societal level it's suicidal. So I'd say whoever wants to follow the pied pipers can do so, when someone tries to drag you off your property for some promised land, stand your ground. If I'm wrong, the Luddites will wither away so why worry. I think the worry actually is that they might be right, and to attempt to not have a control group, because if everything is slop, nothing is slop. If nobody can think, everybody is perfectly fine. If everybody is a slave, all are free.
AI is not an abstraction.
The difference between compilers and LLMs is that compilers actually work. LLMs do not produce a usable result, no matter how much AI bros try to convince everyone else otherwise.
At this point, this is categorically false. Your mental model is very out of date.
The results may not be ideal but I can't say I've had a single output so far this year that wasn't usable.
That, if true, was pure luck. Compilers are deterministic, LLMs are casinos.
Have you tried them recently?
They absolutely 100% produce usable results for large classes of problems. Usually problems on the more "boring" side, but that's most code.
Even local ones are getting "usable." As an experiment I used OpenCode + Qwen coder to code a text based side scroller game in Rust. Left my laptop on and went to bed and in the morning I had a passable demo that looked like the old DOS game ZZT. This was with a 30b model at 4-bit quantization, so pretty tiny by LLM standards.
BTW LLMs seem to do well with Rust. I think it might actually be the guard rails. It lets the LLM iterate against itself. Dynamic languages don't give any compile time feedback, so it's harder to do that. This is something that's 100% the opposite of what I would have expected.
I already get hired to replace/fix code built by humans.
Sure but I'd still use an LLM to do the grunt work
I'm waiting for Fable to come back online so that it can do the refactor while I sleep, for peanuts.