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I Went All-In on AI. The MIT Study Is Right.
(open.substack.com)
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this post was submitted on 07 Dec 2025
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And then there are actual good developers who could or would tell you that LLMs can be useful for coding, in the right context and if used intelligently. No harm, for example, in having LLMs build out some of your more mundane code like unit/integration tests, have it help you update your deployment pipeline, generate boilerplate code that's not already covered by your framework, etc. That it's not able to completely write 100% of your codebase perfectly from the get-go does not mean it's entirely useless.
Other than that it's work that junior coders could be doing, to develop the next generation of actual good developers.
Yes, and that's exactly what everyone forgets about automating cognitive work. Knowledge or skill needs to be intergenerational or we lose it.
If you have no junior developers, who will turn into senior developers later on?
At least it isn't my problem. As long as I have CrowdStrike, Cloudflare, Windows11, AWS us-east-1 and log4j... I can just keep enjoying today's version of the Internet, unchanged.
AI, duh.
Al is a pretty good guy but he can't be everywhere. Maybe he can use some A.I. to help!
If it's boilerplate, copy/paste; find/replace works just as well without needing data centers in the desert to develop.
The only people who believe that are managers and bad developers.
You’re wrong, whether you figure that out now or later. Using an LLM where you gatekeep every write is something that good developers have started doing. The most senior engineers I work with are the ones who have adopted the most AI into their workflow, and with the most care. There’s a difference between vibe coding and responsible use.
There's also a difference between the occasional evening getting drunk and alcoholism. That doesn't make an occasional event healthy, nor does it mean you are qualified to drive a car in that state.
People who use LLMs in production code are - by definition - not "good developers". Because:
This already means the net gain with use of LLMs is negative. Can you use it to quickly push out some production code & impress your manager? Possibly. Will it be efficient? It might be. Will it be bug-free and secure? You'll never know until shit hits the fan.
Also: using LLMs to generate code, a dev will likely be violating copyrights of open source left and right, effectively copy-pasting licensed code from other people without attributing authorship, i.e. they exhibit parasitic behavior & outright violate laws. Furthermore the stuff that applies to all users of LLMs applies:
You're pushing code to prod without pr's and code reviews? What kind of jank-ass cowboy shop are you running?
It doesn't matter if an llm or a human wrote it, it needs peer review, unit tests and go through QA before it gets anywhere near production.
We have substantially similar opinions, actually. I agree on your points of good developers having a clear grasp over all of their code, ethical issues around AI (not least of which are licensing issues), skill loss, hardware prices, etc.
However, what I have observed in practice is different from the way you describe LLM use. I have seen irresponsible use, and I have seen what I personally consider to be responsible use. Responsible use involves taking a measured and intentional approach to incorporating LLMs into your workflow. It’s a complex topic with a lot of nuance, like all engineering, but I would be happy to share some details.
Critical review is the key sticking point. Junior developers also write crappy code that requires intense scrutiny. It’s not impossible (or irresponsible) to use code written by a junior in production, for the same reason. For a “good developer,” many of the quality problems are mitigated by putting roadblocks in place to…
When it comes to making safe and correct changes via LLM, specifically, I have seen plenty of “good developers” in real life, now, who have engineered their workflows to use AI cautiously like this.
Again, though, I share many of your concerns. I just think there’s nuance here and it’s not black and white/all or nothing.
While I appreciate your differentiated opinion, I strongly disagree. As long as there is no actual AI involved (and considering that humanity is dumb enough to throw hundreds of billions at a gigantic parrot, I doubt we would stand a chance to develop true AI, even if it was possible to create), the output has no reasoning behind it.
A good developer has zero need for non-deterministic tools.
As for potential use in brainstorming ideas / looking at potential solutions: that's what the usenet was good for, before those very corporations fucked it up for everyone, who are now force-feeding everyone the snake oil that they pretend to have any semblance of intelligence.
Not a problem if you believe all code should be free. Being cheeky but this has nothing to do with code quality, despite being true
This argument can be used equally well in favor of AI assistance, and it’s already covered by my previous reply
It’s deterministic
This is not what a “good developer” uses it for
I can't keep you from doing what you want, but I will continue to view software developers using LLMs as script kiddies playing with fire.