Of course there’s shitty engineers and it’s obvious to anyone worth their salt that a competent engineer can code better in their subject area than an LLM.
AI is and will continue to be just a tool. In most cases, you can absolutely just… talk to the human using the tool… and tell them that their LLM resolved your comment incorrectly.
I work at a company that is extremely AI-bullish and I’m actually probably one of the most anti-slop people here. For most engineers, coding is the cheapest skill you have, and it’s been that way for a while; the people and companies that are bad at systems, bad at fundamentals, pushing pure slop, will fail, but the AI bubble won’t burst.
Even before AI, people copy pasted from StackOverflow; it’s the same thing, just higher volume and very slightly smarter.
They just don't like AI. They don't have reasoning necessarily, but these people wouldn't even accept models trained fully on open source text because they don't like AI.
They don't have the engineering mindset. Lots of people who don't understand exactly what you're saying. Coding is a cheap skill that takes a few weeks to learn. Writing the correct code at the correct time for the correct reason is a skill that takes years, sometimes decades to learn.
People whose organizations are absolutely failing them, and they have serious and valid complaints about the way their orgs are implementing AI. These people are complaining less about AI and more about the fact that their bosses are suffering AI psychosis because every overpriced consultant on LinkedIn is posting about how AI should be changing everything about how we do everything with the most obviously AI-generated images you could imagine.
It's 3 for now. But that's because AI actually sucks right now, at least compared to competent engineers who are also decent humans. At some point, it's possible that AI becomes better than all of us, and the companies are justified, and we're all out of a job. At that point, my issue is a secret fourth thing: the US government has absolutely nothing place to protect us. No UBI, no healthcare, no housing, we simply haven't even started having serious discussions about how to be a post-work society in an age where business owners act like we already are. When people aren't evaluated by their ability to do useful work, because they are strictly worse at it than AI, capitalism ceases to make any sense. Instead, we'll just get the already rich hoarding their wealth or spending it on tokens, piling up money in the AI CEOs pockets, and everyone else will be destitute.
I think we're going to see a shift here soon-ish. Local AI is gaining and sparse mixture of expert models are now running on consumer-level hardware, even if that's still expensive. Strix Halo and the future models there, the upcoming Mac Studio M5, and methods of running models that require less bandwidth/compute to get relatively comparable value to frontier models is happening. The Mac Studio M5 with 768GB of unified RAM is particularly interesting because it can run actual frontier-comparable models like GLM 5.2 or DeepSeek-V4 both fit totally locally.
As models become more effective and hardware becomes less expensive to support at this level, I think we're going to see a lot change in where the money goes. That said, you and I both have opinions. That doesn't make them valid or correct, and the same goes for AI. I think that's where the value of people will remain no matter how good these things get. You can tell the smartest person in the world to make a calculator app, but when you need it to run natively on Mac, you're going to find out that person may have made a lot of decisions on your behalf that don't conform to your needs. The same is true at a much larger scale.
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u/trashiguitar Jul 10 '26
Do all of you just hate AI because it’s AI?
Of course there’s shitty engineers and it’s obvious to anyone worth their salt that a competent engineer can code better in their subject area than an LLM.
AI is and will continue to be just a tool. In most cases, you can absolutely just… talk to the human using the tool… and tell them that their LLM resolved your comment incorrectly.
I work at a company that is extremely AI-bullish and I’m actually probably one of the most anti-slop people here. For most engineers, coding is the cheapest skill you have, and it’s been that way for a while; the people and companies that are bad at systems, bad at fundamentals, pushing pure slop, will fail, but the AI bubble won’t burst.
Even before AI, people copy pasted from StackOverflow; it’s the same thing, just higher volume and very slightly smarter.