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I am beginning to low key worry about how good the latest coding agents are, claude code and codex, within the last two weeks. I am routinely building apps in 2 hours now that might have taken me a month if I had to use my own brain.
They'll tailor make stuff to any level of customization or weirdness. Use io_uring? Do this part in x86-64 assembly? Want a JIT for you app? Want to see if we can make this algorithm run on your GPU? Sure it's all good.
If I spot a bug it will take less than five minutes to fix. They never give up.
The slowest part of the loop here is me. I can't test changes and describe features fast enough.
This latest app I've put down about 3500 lines of code and haven't looked at any of it. It may as well have been written by a total stranger in a language I don't understand, it just slows things down too much if I try to read the code.
I am guiding it using my skills and experience but it doesn't really matter. When it can rewrite the entire app in an hour there are not that many bad architectural decisions that can't be undone.
Obviously in a mature product with users and deployed infrastructure, radically changing your approach is harder. But even already it tries to steer me away from crazy stuff.
I'm sorry but software engineer grunts are cooked. If you can't design or product manage yourself, you're going to be unemployed. What does it mean to be a SWE in a world where software is built as fast as you can describe it?
Someone posted an article last week that I initially registered intending to respond to. It was throwing around a lot of breathless talk about "complete coding supremacy over humans" and don't get me wrong it's not like it wasn't getting pushback, but it also wasn't quite getting rotten eggs thrown at it the way I would have expected. I had previously gathered the impression that AI coders were still at the level of an enthusiastic but sloppy apprentice.
Not anymore. They're basically as good as a senior software engineer now, except they finish 100x faster. And never need to rest.
At this point anyone not using them is resisting out of inertia. Or fear. Well placed fear, perhaps.
Or because they don’t work on the kinds of apps and problems you do and detest people who insist on trying to gaslight and force them into using something you happen to like.
It's funny.
Every time I point out that I get sub par results, I'm told I'm holding it wrong.
Gemini 3 wouldn't even generate syntactically valid Java 100% of the time.
Opus 4.5 is better, but it still regularly insists that I'm using spring boot when I'm not using spring boot, and no amount of "prompt engineering" or markdown files seems to fix that.
I may be incompetent, but right now it sure feels like I'm being gaslit.
Ah, but you’re not using FancyModel 4.97-q35-r2 so it’s No True AI.
This just sounds like you guys want people to care about your observations of obsolete models because ayy why should I gotta pay money to have an opinion?
If the free tools suck (and they do), it's pretty unreasonable to expect anyone to pay to see if the paid tool is good. That's a waste of money 9/10 times, and there's not a compelling reason to believe that LLMs are the 1 time in 10.
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I've been trying the frontier models. My employer has actually paid real, honest to God money for them. We have an entire group of people that cuts through developers, marketing, sales, and management trying to get value out of them.
So far the only group that is consistently seeing a productivity improvement is the team that deals with RFPs.
On the development side, there are areas where it is, in fact, uncannily good (eg: converting between file formats), but the actual output we're seeing outside those cases can't yet justify the expense for us.
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