Discussion
Every time I see a vibe coder say something along the lines of "if you haven't used these tools over the past five minutes, you don't know what they're capable of, because everything's different now!" I get a little bit perplexed.
You do know that we can see the output without using it ourselves, right? Some of us are still reviewing pull requests and reading through code repositories, y’know?
@baldur dude reading is so last year.
@baldur Now that we’re a bit into this hype cycle it’s also fun to see that the same people who said something along these lines a year ago are now saying the same thing but just with an updated timeline.
”You don’t get it, everything changed in March 2026, before that I would have agreed everything from LLM’s were shit.”
…said by the same person who praised the progress in November 2025 ”since February 2025” or something 🤷🏻♂️
Yeah, but Baldur, you don't _know_, man. Like... You just... You can't. And if you don't agree it's not that you _understand_ and are simply opposed to it... You just don't _get_ it, man. Like, you know?
🙄
The number of people which I no longer feel like I have to take seriously grows exponentially _every_ day.
<3
@401matthall Yeah, same. In a way that's doing us a favour. Less work to keep up with things that way. 😁
So, much this, sir. Sooooo much. <3
@baldur but charlie brown, I'm putting better and better footballs out every day!"
@baldur What's honestly even worse is juniors using AI making such statements towards experienced devs and countering a:
"I have used it, but I get better results using it as a helper for mundane tasks"
with a simple
"Well, then you just don't know how to use it - my code is better letting it do the job!"
Congratulations; You just highlighted that you didn't learn anything and why people try to replace you with it.
@baldur Observing drunk people while sober makes me want to stay sober, not get drunk 🤷♂️
@baldur Exactly. Reading the PR is using the tool, just not the dopamine loop. The 'everything changed five minutes ago' line mostly means 'please don't judge the demo by last month's output.'
@baldur Those pull requests must have been done by someone who Prompted It Wrong™
or something like that
idk I'm not a slop defender
> You do know that we can see the output without using it ourself, right? Some of us are still reviewing pull requests and reading through code repositories, y’know?
Thank you for putting into clear words what I was not able to explain to my colleagues.
@baldur ah but you're just observing the drug addict from the outside. It's a totally different experience from the inside!
@baldur I have been involved in reading and putting in practice standards specifications for 15 years. I don't need to use the magic lamp to know how people screw up when putting in words what needs to be done.
@baldur "If you haven't tried it, how can you know" is one of those takes that make me reconsider the sanity of the humanity.
Deducing something is bad before trying is one of the main purposes of the brain.
@petrikas Yeah. Learning from other people’s experience has historically been key to survival.
@baldur @petrikas And there's so, so many people eager to depreciate it! Even in the form of my elderly relatives replying to insights from me doing just that with a "you're inexperienced, you don't understand it".
Like, I get it, we all need to prop up our egos somehow, but can we do it in a less self-sabotaging way, please?
@baldur If the change sets for a supposed trivial refactoring with LLM "assistance" are so complex that I must switch to a new-generation semantic diff tool, rather than a standard unified diff viewer, code flow has suffered, not improved.
"AI" generated code is everywhere. It's impossible to avoid. We can see it. The only thing using the tools would accomplish is expose us to a bunch of cognitive hazards that come with chatbot bullshit.
@baldur Yup, it is everywhere. So is Climate Change. AI is Climate Change denial.
(It's the delta that worries me in the code I see—the change in quality, that is. Engineers with a quarter century of experience churning out code by the bucketful that's quite a bit worse than what they used to write. So either they aren't reviewing their own code like they used to or their skills have degraded.)
@baldur the way I see it you can let an LLM generate code or review it but not both. As a human I'm better at writing it and wrong review suggestions are way easier to ignore.
@baldur I had someone who I had respected quite a bit tell me that AI-generated code no longer needed abstractions that makes the code readable and I found that to be dumb in the face.
@baldur
i've been strucked by what was saying a Microsoft engineer in one article on vibe-coding, that they were so busy prompting they didn't review anymore, lack the time to do it..
(noted that detail but don't have the source and don't remember it)
@bituur_esztreym I think I came across that same article recently but don't have at hand either.
@baldur The most perplexing ones are those who confidently state that the models now produce code better than humans. Either they are all bots, or there are a lot of devs who have no idea what good code even is. The last year has been the worst in my career for encountered code quality.
@baldur reviewing code is hard - it is likely that no one is capable of reviewing slop and revising it up to "written by a good engineer" quality.
@baldur The lack of self-review is the thing which really really upsets me about this torrent of slop - if the operators of the tool were at least as proud of the *output* as they are of their *use* of the tool then we might not be quite so inundated with crud.
@baldur I still remember (in the early days of chatbots) my brother insisting he reviews 100% of the output himself. Nowadays he doesn't even bother pretending anymore.
@baldur I'm pretty sure it's both.
@baldur This is precisely why I revived KScope for Qt6 after years of it languishing after the Qt4 port bit-rotted. The tool exists to aid human understanding. It is not relevant to any so-called "agentic development paradigm", nor is it intended to be. I continue to be more productive by rejecting LLM driven tools.
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@baldur "everything has been different now" for the last few years.
It's almost like it's not actually different.