AI Can Make You Suck Faster Too

The code smell in my repos are at an all time high and I'm a senior dev, can't image how worse vibe coders have it.

'Or else admit this is a dopamine game that makes you feel like The Universe's Most Special Programmer™ when it's really just gamified mass-scale intellectual dependency.'

Disesdi Shoshana Cox

Pre-AI, the limiter on my bad code was how much code I could type in a day.....

Now with AI I can 10x my output and 10x my bad code!

“I wanted to see if I can get in on this 10x magic. I decided to put my money where my mouth was and I bought $10 worth of DeepSeek credits to use with a project I was working on.“

Wow. I guess that’s the punchline!

> Uses only DeepSeek and comes to the conclusion that LLM's are bad at coding?

Why not use actual frontier models, and you know do some real research, before writing a blog post?

There are some good points, and I ask the question of where is the ground breaking stuff myself, but severely weakened by

* stretching the timeline: the actual real programming ability appeared in LLMs in the last 6-8 months, not 3-4 years,

* using the weakest possible tool: and I bought $10 worth of DeepSeek credits that is a far cry from Claude with Fable.

Also, I know nothing about marathons but for most uses putting the app, database, and background processes on the same server is very much the right starting point. With the next steps being employing Cloudflare or similar solutions long before managing a fleet of servers.

His AI experience is $10 of DeepSeek - but I think he is right anyway in the main points.

You can most definitely ship crap much faster than you used to. It's obvious to anyone when you're shipping crap. And it seems everywhere I look people are shipping crap. Both software and writing.

The hardest part of shipping quality software is not and has never been "writing the code". The hard parts are product taste, architecture and ensuring your product actually solves the problems it should in an efficient and secure manner.

If you don't have an intuition of those, you will likely still be shipping crap. Just faster.

> The chatbot recommended some of the dumbest shit you could possibly do

The "I tried it and it sucked" is borderline conspiratorial at this point. There are enough talented, thoughtful developers saying there's something real here, and it is worth believing them and investing some time to understand it, even if you come out the other side and decide you don't want to use LLMs.

Use a very good model. Set up a good harness. Spend some time on your system prompts and skills. Develop your intuitions about how the model works, what it's good at, how to scope the work, and how to steer it. Recognize when it's alleviating menial work and recognize when it's making choices you really need to understand yourself. Be patient and accept that the failures are going to be very painful for a while.

Don't write it off until you've genuinely seen the upsides.

Previously, the limit on bad code entering any serious product was gated by having devs that at least knew how to change what they copied from SO.

Seriously, that was the lowest level of skill I saw in 30 years of development.

Now we have people who can't even do that proudly showing off PRs to widely used products.

"B-b-but I do the systems design and hard thinking".

Sure, buddy.

> three AirBnBs, two Stripes, and three Dropboxes

you want more SaaS?

If you don’t understand how the sausage was made you have made legacy sausage.

If one truly believes it's not in a bubble, then borrow and leverage an unlimited amount and bet the house & your family on creating a business with infinite growth and value. Don't know how to do your own prompts? Borrow and then hire others to do it for you. If those who you hire don't know, they can hire others too.*

[* This is not financial advice. Please don't actually do this.]