I have a coffee cup with the writing "Do stupid thing faster with cafe". That's how I feel about myself when I use AI carelessly... The speed with which I can make a mess is astronomical!

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.

I think it depends on what area of the world you work. We recenty had one of our plant managers build a web portal to keep track of some of our operational tech, with features you wouldn't find in standard products. I've been turning it into a container app that can actually deploy safely into our cloud infrastrcture. It's quite frankly better quality than what most external software companies have provided us with in the past.

Don't get me wrong. It's not great. It would never pass any of our policies for things that actually operate stuff on the power grid, but as an administrative tool that can live in total isolation from the vital networks. It's perfectly fine. It's also not like we would have hired the best software companies to build it otherwise. We'd hire some low-level cheap consultant house who would then likely get cheap student labour to build it. With that in mind though, the AI is much better than what the realistic alternative would be.

Money wise it's also cheaper. It's been roughly €1000 + the time it's taken us both. If I had known they were doing it, I would have rolled out the developer cowork app/skills/whateveryoucallconfigurationsthesedays to them. This would have avoided their AI building it to be depoyed on a VM rather than in our managed k8s in our Azure. It would also have written the code a little different, used UV and maybe django rather than flask. But hey. For what it is, it's like a 95% cost saving compared to buying what would've been a less maintainable and lower quality system.

I think perhaps the greater issue will be finding people who want to extract the gold from the heap of shit and getting it to run in production. I don't personally mind, but it's not like any of my colleagues would've wanted the task.

> 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?

> do some real research

It is funny that only real research on productivity gains from AI shows at best very minimal gains, but AI bros will always tell you "no no no, you have used wrong model, try a different one, there are more of them, you have to try, trust me" and call that a "research".

“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!

I'm sure DeepSeek isn't the point here. You can change the name to whatever you prefer and the article still holds.

Actually, I think the author put DeepSeek on purpose to avoid the obvious ChatGPT/Claude comparison — because whatever he chose, there would be a question of why model A and not B, while the point of the article isn't about models comparison at all.

I think the point is that $10 isn’t exactly a lot of money to put where your mouth is, nor a serious effort to see if it works.

Maybe the failure is in trying only one model / one prompt.

Right. Better throw money at 5 different ones and then people come and tell you that you just need MORE agents and throw MORE money at it or you're not doing it right.

I got here and... I agreed with everything up to this point.

The author makes a good point. If you don't know what you're doing, AI accelerates that. No question.

But they put a whopping... ten bucks into using DeepSeek and weren't impressed with the initial results.

I know they try to cover this with "you just aren't prompting correctly!" but if, in 2026, you aren't able to have an LLM generate decent quality code... IDK what to tell you. Good luck I guess?

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!

Whoever is giving a bad coder resources and access will eventually stop

Nope. That would require the people paying for the code (those requesting the projects) to see something wrong with the code. As a coder, you would look in an see a mess. As a user they'll probably see something relatively nice, with some maybe strange behavior and non ideal, but what software sin't non ideal? It does most of what we wanted, and you finished it how fast!?

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.

Even as someone using AI on the regular I'm starting to hate the "You didn't actually use this exact most expensive model so your point is invalid" argument.

This is fair to say if someones last experience with AI was copy-pasting code into GPT3 chat windows years ago, but Deepseek is a more than capabale model and enough for someone to get an informed opinion about the technology.

If people have actual counter argument, use those. And if some of those counter argument are "What you say isn't possible, the neweste model can do and here are examples of that", that is fine.

But a blanket "Nuh-uh, it wasn't Model X" is not only a poor argument but also automatically invalidates any criticism when a new, better model comes out - and that can't be the basis of a good argument.

Is the issue that nobody has come up with the idea for the great ground breaking ideas?

Or B that the ideas are there but are not get released as the code is ai slop?

I tried really hard to get senior management to understand this where I work. Yes, AI is an accelerator, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's going to accelerate you in the "right" direction.

Why does it have to lead to a 10x increase in revolutionary companies?

Next to maintaining and expanding my own network of websites I 10xd writing boring CRUD applications for companies that were otherwise unable to afford it, making all their employees more productive. There's true economic value in that.

'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

AI is like a tool used by mega-corporations to change the world according to what they want. We see this with the increase in RAM prices. I don't want to pay the overprice here - AI companies owe us money. People seem still mostly in the AI hype phase, but a lot more criticism has amplified in the last months. It is only a matter of time until the hype phase is over.

You could make the converse argument, too: why don't you borrow and leverage and bet and short these AI companies, if you so vehemently think it's a bubble?

The bottom line is that markets are complicated, useful technologies are often accompanied by bubbles, investors are not always rational, and people generally try to make the best decision with the information they have available. The answer is likely somewhere in the middle, but that's a lot more boring and a lot less inflammatory.

> You could make the converse argument, too: why don't you borrow and leverage and bet and short these AI companies, if you so vehemently think it's a bubble?

Because going long and going short are very different. For successfully shorting something you need to have a pretty precise estimate of when the crash will happen. Being a comparatively short time off can cost you everything.

While I do believe its a bubble, that seems like a silly viewpoint that presumes infinite risk tolerance.

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.

At least once a week I have to drop what I'm doing and race in to stop the non dev manager from merging a fully vibe coded patch which will blow up production. Claude Code has made this guy a negative 10x developer.

how does this non dev manager have perms to do this

My guess: forcing the hands of those who do/should have access by going above their heads using escalations with soothing words like 'velocity' and 'time to market', ignoring quality or aptitude entirely.

Wouldn't be the first change control procedure to be undermined by a single lunch or organization to regret the movements.

He's the manager - that's like corporate root privileges

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.

Yep, using AI to remove your thinking process and judgement, and just let it generate stuff as fast as possible, will definitely make you ship crap faster! If you did the same thing with a junior developer you would get the same result.

Where AI shines for me is accelerating the learning and exploration process. I can get up to speed with new tech fast. It is good at spotting issues in designs and code. It can knock out quick tests or benchmarks to support me. The quality of what I can produce with AI support is much higher than I could without it.

So it really just depends on what you use it for. If the goal is "replace humans and ship fast" that's one thing. If the goal is "explore the problem space in greater depth", it's another.

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

when I tell codex to build me a chat app and it uses gpt-4o

If you don’t understand how the sausage was made, do you even know if it's sausage?

You describe my experience with Claude (except my gut feeling is that system prompts and especially skills are useless, and I've even done limited testing that agrees with that).

However, your discourse is not the usual borderline religious discourse that's used by LLM advocates. You're not extreme enough either pro or against LLMs :)

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

This is ridiculous. Basically you're saying "if you try it and find it sucks, you're wrong, keep at it until you change your mind". That isn't a tool at that point, it's a religion.

No, it just means you have to learn to use the tool well.