I like the saying that LLMs are “good” at stuff you don’t know. That’s about it.

When you know the subject it stops being much useful because you’ll already know the very obvious stuff that LLM could help you.

Fun how the article concludes that AI tools are still good anyway, actually.

This AI hype is a sickness

That's still not actually knowing anything. It's just temporarily adding more context to its model.

And it's always very temporary. I have a yarn project I'm working on right now, and I used Copilot in VS Code in agent mode to scaffold it as an experiment. One of the refinements I included in the prompt file to build it is reminders throughout for things it wouldn't need reminding of if it actually "knew" the repo.

• I had to constantly remind it that it's a yarn project, otherwise it would inevitably start trying to use NPM as it progressed through the prompt.
• For some reason, when it's in agent mode and it makes a mistake, it wants to delete files it has fucked up, which always requires human intervention, so I peppered the prompt with reminders not to do that, but to blank the file out and start over in it.
• The frontend of the project uses TailwindCSS. It could not remember not to keep trying to downgrade its configuration to an earlier version instead of using the current one, so I wrote the entire configuration for it by hand and inserted it into the prompt file. If I let it try to build the configuration itself, it would inevitably fuck it up and then say something completely false, like, "The version of TailwindCSS we're using is still in beta, let me try downgrading to the previous version."

I'm not saying it wasn't helpful. It probably cut 20% off the time it would have taken me to scaffold out the app myself, which is significant. But it certainly couldn't keep track of the context provided by the repo, even though it was creating that context itself.

Working with Copilot is like working with a very talented and fast junior developer whose methamphetamine addiction has been getting the better of it lately, and who has early onset dementia or a brain injury that destroyed their short-term memory.

Most ides do the boring stuff with templates and code generation for like a decade so that's not so helpful to me either but if it works for you.

This was the case a year or two ago but now if you have an MCP server for docs and your project and goals outlined properly it's pretty good.

They're also bad at that though, because if you don't know that stuff then you don't know if what it's telling you is right or wrong.

I have limited AI experience, but so far that's what it means to me as well: helpful in very limited circumstances.

Mostly, I find it useful for "speaking new languages" - if I try to use AI to "help" with the stuff I have been doing daily for the past 20 years? Yeah, it's just slowing me down.

I actively hate the term "vibe coding." The fact is, while using an LLM for certain tasks is helpful, trying to build out an entire, production-ready application just by prompts is a huge waste of time and is guaranteed to produce garbage code.

At some point, people like your coworker are going to have to look at the code and work on it, and if they don't know what they're doing, they'll fail.

I commend them for giving it a shot, but I also commend them for recognizing it wasn't working.

Interesting idea… we actually have a plan to go public in a couple years and I’m holding a few options, but the economy is hitting us like everyone else. I’m no longer optimistic we can reach the numbers for those options to activate

I...think that's their point. The only reason it seems good is because you're bad and can't spot that is bad, too.

I work for an adtech company and im pretty much the only developer for the javascript library that runs on client sites and shows our ads. I dont use AI at all because it keeps generating crap

I think the term pretty accurately describes what is going on: they don't know how to code, but they do know what correct output for a given input looks like, so they iterate with the LLM until they get what they want. The coding here is based on vibes (does the output feel correct?) instead of logic.

I don't think there's any problem with the term, the problem is with what's going on.

For some of us that’s more useful. I’m currently playing a DevSecOps role and one of the defining characteristics is I need to know all the tools. On Friday, I was writing some Java modules, then some groovy glue, then spent the after writing a Python utility. While im reasonably good about jumping among languages and tools, those context switches are expensive. I definitely want ai help with that.

That being said, ai is just a step up from search or autocomplete, it’s not magical. I’ve had the most luck with it generating unit tests since they tend to be simple and repetitive (also a major place for the juniors to screw up: ai doesn’t know whether the slop it’s pumping out is useful. You do need to guide it and understand it, and you really need to cull the dreck)

That's kind of outside the software development discussion but glad you're enjoying it.

Did you not read what I wrote?

Inflation went up due to the knock-on effects of the sanctions. Specifically prices for oil and gas skyrocketed.

And since everything runs on oil and gas, all prices skyrocketed.

Covid stimulus packages had nothing to do with that, especially in 2023, 2024 and 2025, when there were no COVID stimulus packages, yet the inflation was much higher than at any time during COVID.

Surely it is not too much to ask that people remember what year stuff happened in, especially if we are talking about things that happened just 2 years ago.