Maybe both of you guys issue is that you think of Porthos first, Athos, Porthos, Aramis is burned in to my mind, never read any book about musketeers either and I am terrible with names

There is like a very basic topological fact here that you are just failing to grasp.

I think the “very basic topological fact” you’re looking for is that you’ve discovered a continuum and then somehow convinced yourself that this means both ends of it are the same thing.

Implementations are just requirements with very high specificity.

Yes, if you progressively specify every implementation detail until you’ve literally specified the complete implementation, then congratulations: you’ve eventually implemented it.

This is a genuinely fascinating discovery.

Unfortunately, absolutely nothing requires you to do that.

“Rename this field everywhere, update the tests and verify they pass” is more specific than “fix the code,” and considerably less specific than enumerating every character that needs to change in every file.

The entire useful space between those two points is apparently missing from your topology.

I will have to manually construct it anyway because that is literally the only way I’ll know if the AI-that-fucks-up has fucked it up or not.

This might be my favourite part.

No, reviewing something does not require independently recreating it from scratch. I genuinely don’t know how you function professionally if you believe this.

I review other people’s code without first independently implementing their ticket.

I review pull requests without recreating every commit myself.

I review architecture diagrams without drawing a second architecture diagram and holding them up to the light.

I review PowerPoint decks without secretly making my own PowerPoint deck first.

I can inspect a sequence diagram and notice “service B doesn’t call service C there” without first spending twenty minutes lovingly dragging boxes and arrows around myself.

This is, in fact, one of the rather important properties of human cognition: recognizing whether something is correct can be dramatically cheaper than producing it.

Otherwise code review would involve two developers independently implementing every feature so one of them could check the other.

Your Suno example is equally compelling. You found a tool that couldn’t produce output meeting your standards for a particular task, so you stopped using it for that task.

Excellent.

I once encountered a screwdriver that was unsuitable for hammering in a nail. Thankfully I managed to resist developing a general theory of screwdrivers from the experience.

And this:

It’s a rule that’s served me well. I think I’ll keep doing it.

is at least refreshingly explicit. We’ve finally abandoned the argument and arrived at “I have decided AI output is shit, therefore AI output is shit.”

Which is perfectly fine as a personal preference.

It’s just considerably less interesting than the “very basic topological fact” you dressed it up as.

I actually don’t need to know how my IDE works to use it.

Neither do I need to know how a transformer works to use an AI agent. What does that have to do with anything?

I need to know Java to recognize whether IntelliJ’s refactoring produced sensible Java, just as I need domain expertise to recognize whether an AI agent produced sensible output. “Requires oversight and expertise” does not mean “requires understanding the internal implementation of the tool.”

With increasing degrees of specificity, it kind of is, yeah.

No, it really isn’t, and this is probably the strangest part of your argument.

Specificity of requirements and effort of implementation are two completely different things.

“Take these 30 classes, rename this field, update its usages, add null checks at these boundaries, update the affected tests, and run the test suite” is a reasonably specific description of a task. It is quite obviously not equivalent in effort to manually performing every edit.

“Create a sequence diagram showing the interaction between these five services for this request flow” can take seconds to describe and considerably longer to manually construct.

“Take these documents, extract these specific metrics, compare them by quarter, and put the results into a PowerPoint using this existing deck as the visual template” is a perfectly comprehensible specification. Actually reading the documents, extracting the data, calculating the comparisons, creating the charts and assembling the slides is where the work is.

This distinction is the entire reason programming exists. A specification describes what computation you want performed. We don’t conclude that because SQL lets me precisely specify which data I want from a database, I might as well manually inspect every row.

And “it only saves time where you don’t care about shit-quality work” is just begging the question. You’ve defined AI output as shit and then concluded that anyone accepting AI output must therefore not care about quality.

The useful workflow isn’t “ask AI for something and blindly ship whatever comes out.” It’s “specify the task, let the machine perform the expensive mechanical portion, inspect the result, and correct or reject it where necessary.”

Sometimes that is slower than doing it yourself. Sometimes the output is shit. Sometimes AI is simply the wrong tool.

But the idea that describing a task with sufficient precision inevitably approaches the effort required to execute that task is just demonstrably false.

If that were true, half of software engineering wouldn’t exist.

You asked for it:

This is an incredibly stupid take, and I genuinely can’t believe people are upvoting it.

Have you actually used an AI agent at any point in the last six months?

Your entire argument seems to rest on the bizarre assumption that describing what you want is roughly equivalent in effort to producing it yourself. It isn’t. That’s literally why abstractions and tools exist.

I can describe the architecture I want in a few paragraphs and have an agent generate a Mermaid diagram. I can give it a pile of documents and have it pull together information I didn’t manually write into the prompt. I can describe the structure and content of a presentation and have it generate the actual PowerPoint. I can give it a repetitive refactoring task that I fully understand how to perform myself and have it apply that change across a codebase.

The fact that I need enough expertise to verify the result doesn’t somehow eliminate the time saved producing it.

I know how to write Java without an IDE. That doesn’t mean IntelliJ becomes useless because I need to understand Java to verify whether the code it generates, refactors, or autocompletes is correct.

And the claim that requiring expertise somehow eliminates AI’s usefulness is particularly strange. Most useful tools require expertise. IDEs require expertise. CAD software requires expertise. Excel requires expertise if you’re doing anything remotely complicated with it. Their purpose isn’t necessarily to let an unskilled person impersonate an expert; it’s to make an expert substantially more productive.

Natural language also isn’t the only interface. Modern agents operate on files, repositories, documents, databases, APIs, tool outputs, search results, and existing context. The prompt can literally be “turn this into a presentation” or “diagram this architecture.” You don’t have to painstakingly reconstruct the entire source material in prose first.

There are plenty of legitimate criticisms of generative AI: hallucinations, unreliable output, loss of control in certain workflows, mediocre prose, inappropriate use cases, people blindly trusting the output, etc.

But “if you know enough to check its work, you might as well have done the work yourself” is basically an argument for coding in Notepad because a competent programmer shouldn’t need a stupid machine-assisted IDE.

Knowing how to do something and wanting to spend your time manually doing every part of it are not the same thing.

Yes AI or LLM isn’t able to code solution itself, but it can fill in a lot of gaps based on what you tell it, it can copy existing patterns.

And you can direct it, it’s a tool like an IDE, just much better .

Ok

Maybe you are doing some exotic stuff, but for me it’s more than capable of writing code, coding is mostly about applying existing patterns to solve known problems, very few programmers deal with novel problems.

Design Patterns book has been out for what? 2 decades, and it’s not outdated.

For good team interoperability you want to have code that’s standardized, that’s also where LLMs excel at.

It’s a nice productivity tool, just like an IDE is a nice productivity tool

This is an incredibly stupid take, can’t believe people upvoted this shit, lol

Have you not used AI agents anytime in the past 6 months?

They can pull in information that you don’t write down, it can create Powerpoint slides, it can create mermaid diagrams from your description.

Those are not things you just do manually because you can? At that point why not code in Notepad instead of relying on the stupid machine assisted IDEs?

Why did you try to like him? You don’t owe that to anyone, especially not a piece of shit like Rogan

Why spend money on housing them when you can instead (i assume) employ someone to keep to anti-homeless benches on schedule and pay consultants extraorbitant fees to help you design anti-homeless parks

Also 70K net or gross is quite a big difference.

Also me not having kids and commuting using an EV that’s charged at almost entirely by solar/nuclear means I am well below that threshold.

Where I live district heating also comes from geothermal heat.

Because upvotes

What is novelty though? It can be used to shortcut your development time, your documentation time, your presentation preparing time, that’s a shit ton of stuff that developers/office workers do.

I think making false narratives is not how you fight AI, you fight for regulation on Data center water use, noise pollution, then let the cost bankrupt the companies that need to go bankrupt.

Although maybe this is just one of those communities that wants to endlessly circlejerk around an issue.

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I feel like this is a pretty useless study, this is going to be entirely subjective what you prefer. Optionality gives a lot of upside, more than either extreme.

Personally I prefer being in the office, better for my focus, my likely (undergoing diagnosis) ADHD as fuck brain, but I also have dynamic work hours so I can simply avoid peak traffic.

That being said, if I was required to be in the office everyday at a set time e.g 9 to 5 I would fucking quit.

Nice, one more OS where I can choose to not use it.

Yes, I thought of ISO-8601

You would have a point, but they don’t actually speak my Native language as I am of Hungarian descent and that’s my mother’s tongue.

I also spent 10 years in Czechia both studied there then worked there for a few years.

So I can compare, I’d say definitely Czechia > Slovakia, it’s just that my family is in Slovakia.

Basically anything that’s bread/or baked that’s a few hours old and started to dry out.

Not everything as some things hold up well, others I don’t like.

Also potato that you air fried but then took to work and reheated, F that.

Also plain rice as it gets a few hours old

autopilot driver