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PaperclipPerfector  7d ago (text post)   20433 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 31, 2026

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but as a whole I would agree that software engineering productivity has been meaningfully enhanced via AI.

I'm not sure if I would even go that far. I work at a software company, and I do some consulting on the side. I've been able to watch a lot of AI-coding initiatives from the sidelines due to that consulting, and I see the same pattern a lot.

First, management picks something they can measure. Lines of code, commits, and PRs merged are the most common ones. This causes a certain kind of climber who doesn't actually want to be a programmer to ruthlessly optimize for whatever the metric is. Management lauds that person as a "10x/100x/1000x developer" and they receive glowing performance reviews while spending their days giving presentations to their coworkers about how to avoid being Left Behind In the Permanent Underclass.

At the same time, the rest of the team ends up drowning in this person's "work". Their PRs are 30,000 line, codebase-spanning fever dreams that come with "helpful" documentation that doesn't make any sense. The "spec" is under-defined and the code fails to adhere to it. The tests are made up nonsense. Management softly forces to team to rubber stamp the Rockstar's work. Nobody knows what the hell is going on, defects rise, baffling production down events occur, and nobody can figure out why.

The net productivity for the organization doesn't actually change much. What the technology does do is shift perceived productivity into a small group of people who have offloaded all the work to everybody else.

The con man who job hops has been a rampant problem in this industry for decades. LLMs have just systematized and automated it.

I'm not sure if I would even go that far

I think if you're skilled and disciplined with your LLM usage, it's pretty unquestionable that software engineering productivity has improved.

For example, I've really enjoyed using Ghostty, Dwarfstar and pi; each of these excellent software projects are written using LLM's with no slop in sight, but importantly these projects are also owned by mitchellh, antirez, and badlogic, who are three incredible programmers in their own right.

That being said, I basically agree with you that ironically, the natural-language programming interface is actually extremely difficult to use correctly, and many AI coding initiatives aren't going particularly well because it's so easy to default into slinging slop and hence productivity improvements are hard to find in many cases.

I'm optimistic that over time the industry will develop better norms and understand how LLM tooling should and should not be used, and we'll all be able to reap the benefits (a man can hope...).

I'm optimistic that over time the industry will develop better norms and understand how LLM tooling should and should not be used

Overall, I am less optimistic than you. It seems like the incentives are too broken for us to reach a new equilibrium any time soon. If we do get there, it'll be on the other side of a graveyard of companies that got too greedy.

Yes, I don't disagree that there will be a lot of churn and pain in the meantime.

I find it's practically a second part-time job to hold back the worst impulses of my non-technical coworkers, the junior developers and management to slop up tickets, documentation and the codebase, which has been somewhat taxing. Unfortunately, it'll probably get worse before it gets better.

That seems like a big-company problem rather than an LLM problem. I work in a small startup and while I won't claim AI-coding has been without complications, if you tried something like that at my company you would be fired immediately.

That is, the manager would be fired for proving they are totally unable to be trusted with a codebase and have no idea how development works, nor any understanding of what is being done under them.

I've seen it repeat at every scale, from legally-a-small-business to a fairly memorable consult at a Fortune 100 company.

I won't argue as to whether your group has some secret sauce or unusual competency, but I will say that what you have described is absolutely not the norm at the kinds of places that will contract me.

Given your work, is it plausible that you are only going to get contracted by the sort of place that’s absolutely addicted to being Goodhart’d to start with?

I can't rule it out. By the time a company calls me, they're generally fucked to the point where they'll call me.

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