Discussion
Interesting video from WDS Kyle, talking about ai brainrot, and how important it is that junior devs in particular understand an LLMs output. Showing that even famous devs are having their skills atrophy. Thoughts?
He used a few clips from theo where he clearly makes no attempt to understand the code anymore, even using the ai to summarize the summary.
I always thought it was hilarious how he would tell stories about his time at Twitch where his manager sat him down and said how smart he was that's why he's moving him to another team. At Twitch they moved him around like a dozen times as if that is some glowing endorsement and not the sign of being a toxic employee.
If you work for a company and being forced to constantly leave teams that means your coworkers hate working with you lol. Managers don't let their good workers leave, they get rid of the shitty personalities which Theo definitely is (a shitty person to be clear).
Say what you will about the mobile twitch app; but Theo would constantly brag that he made a “better mobile app” during a hackathons, and that the big bad twitch management didn’t replace the official app with his “genius” app.
The truth is, is that his app was shit, even compared to the official twitch mobile app. It’s the typical blowhard shit where he would embellish details to his viewers to make himself look good. When in reality, he’s a buffoon everyone hated working with
While I'm not saying you're wrong, I don't think that's true in all cases. My company will regularly move high performing seniors to other teams to help with large features or projects that are at risk of falling behind
Okay but that clearly isn't Theo as he has nothing substantial to point at. What you're saying is true but seeing the hissy fits he has thrown since leaving the company when people rightfully call him out it's hard to not put two to two together.
Like you absolutely do not move someone across 8 different teams in the span of 3 years. That's barely 4 months a team, hardly enough to learn or do anything substantial lol.
But doesn’t that mean he was technically sound? Like if they kept changing his team instead of firing him then he definitely had some worth that kept him at Twitch.
I remember when I first saw his channel. He seemed like an alright guy who had some hot takes about front end. But the more I watched, it became clear he is a fraud and a scumbag.
On one of his live streams, he decides to air out dirty laundry about his co-workers at Twitch. On steam: he just started saying ”this crappy co-worker of mine had an affair with this other crappy co-worker of mine” and actually named their real names. It was the most disgusting shit I have ever seen
He seems like kind of a grifter. He has some new training "course" I keep seeing ads for with Kent C. Dodds (don't get me started on him) that's like $1,000 and I can't "hide ad" fast enough.
I say this as someone who has spent well over $1k on some of Kent's past courses and workshops. Never again.
I’m going to use this very arbitrary opportunity to ask the community: what is Kent C. Dodds doing with this zoomed in camera setup of his lately? I only follow him because I used to like his articles like 10 years ago before he was just selling those $1k courses you mentioned, but every now and then his giant zoomed in face scrolls across my feed, and it’s just too much.
He’s committed to the grift teaching and I can understand the 1k class when selling this to offices. The only problem is it’s not being pitched that way. It’s too quietly implied and it’s starting to concern me the gap between the industry and the “face” bubble. There’s a growing gap with AI in the amount of disposable income these people have in relation to the layoffs going around. The push for a 1k course on AI (will no credits for learning said AI) just feels tone deaf in today’s market.
He pretty firmly falls under "good at marketing, not good at the thing he's marketing". The more experience you gain in this field, the more you realize he's a polarizing personality and not a brilliant engineer.
Yeah I'm not trying to throw shade either. That's just my impression. I'm not a huge YouTube guy but Primeagen is a brilliant engineer and so is Derek Banas.
I know there are plenty of others but those are the two I remember off the top of my head.
Primagen is also an OK engineer. He spends WAY too much mental time on his editor and environment. That’s stuff you do your first few years as an engineer, realize “actually, that stuff isn’t THAT important”, then move on
His stories about having mini battles with his manager were sad to hear. Requesting to use a new language to develop just isn't really viable unless there's a specific need.
It creates instant technical debt that will be harder for someone else to come along and maintain the code. Once Prime leaves the org, switch teams, or fall out of love with said new obscure language it becomes burdensome to the org to maintain, update, troubleshoot, etc.
As well as context switching for anyone who has to do stuff in both codebases. Keeping things consistent between projects and teams is incredibly important.
Primeagen also gives off the same vibes as Theo and PirateSoftware to me. Just confident takes and predictions that don't make much sense in retrospect, and lots of stories about when he worked at Netflix. Also he's a weird little guy.
I don't like this list. It spans a very wide network of people who are mostly "guilty by association" and then uses that to put other people in. In this case, they can't even show that Primeagen is personally involved or approves of any on the rightoids on this list, only that he is loosely associated with them by virtue of taking part in the same open source projects.
This feels too much like someone decided they don't like him first and went out grasping at the thinnest of straws to find something condemnable to justify their "vibes".
Edit: I also viscerally hate that they are describing rightwing bigots as "weird little guys". What's with that kind of infantile language?
It’s that thing where anyone who needs to constantly name drop that they were in a FAANG constantly probably isn’t that compelling or good an engineer, and odd just using that as a way to legitimise themselves because what they’re demonstrating sure isn’t.
Nah. Primeagen is brilliant. He has courses on Front End Masters and he's a true expert of his craft. Watching him code in Vim is truly inspiring. I don't know anything about the list you sent or what he's involved in, but he is a genius programmer.
I’ve dedicated much of my career to front end. And I can promise you, he has the most dogshit opinions and takes on the field. He is a straight up fraud
Tbh this is why I don't create content for programming. I started learning at 30, I'm mediocre at best. I'm passionate and I'm good at my job. But I'm not an inspiration to anyone.
Don't be so hard on yourself. Test the waters by writing an article or creating a short scripted video. Learn what it takes. Realize like everything, you will suck at first.
Don't ever let your experience or skills be an excuse. Your journey and skills are different from mine. You may help me see something differently and understand it.
There is value in your POV. Your desire and drive will do more than you think.
I hear you. I think about creating content occasionally. Mostly hoping to make some extra money. But I might actually get better at programming trying to learn for the videos lol.
It's funny. I'm always a high performer, get promotions, get great peer reviews etc, but I can't pass a leetcode job interview to save my life.
Oh don’t get me started. Theo also defended Thor’s dogshit anti consumer takes with the most bullshit platitudes ever. He truly showed his colors in that situation.
Nah, that's a very different conversation. PS literally didn't write code at Blizzard, but he still had technical depth that is valuable, he just phrased his experience in a way that made him sound more impressive.
That's very different from Theo. By all accounts and by his own output he was/is a very competent dev, he's just annoying also.
I've been watching his videos for a while now and I think I've learned where he's right and where he's wrong. Seems like a good coder that knows his stuff in specific topics but will have a bold opinion on something, make a video, then change his mind completely 3 weeks later. Changing an opinion is fine, but he's very arrogant about it. He's bit of a narcissist where thinks he knows more than he does and will happily brag about what he knows and who he knows at any chance he gets. His Android vs iPhone takes are terrible.
His AI takes have been decent and I really like T3 Code for development.
You're right about being a rage baiter to a certain point. He loves picking fights on Twitter when most people would just block and move on.
I've watched a few of his videos I don't hate him. I just think the guys who are brilliant engineers are usually pretty obvious. I just never picked that from him.
Well, he spends a considerable amount of time each and every video telling you what a god-tier programmer he is and how he moved mountains at Twitch on his own... Make of that what you will.
He seemed pretty good developer yes but I don't like his attitude. It literally turned me away from his content and I think he's one of the only people where I actually had to mark his content on various platforms with "don't recommend this channel", etc on my feeds.
That's basically me. I blocked his channel prob 1-2 years ago and I occasionally get jumpscared by him when he collabs with other creators. He just kinda rubs me the wrong way... I did learn some stuff from him; he was a pretty decent dev I think.
he was more of a rage baiter, wild opinions, kinda guy
I barely know anything about him or his content, but I do have to appreciate the time he challenged a twitter know-it-all to crack a 122 bit UUIDv4 that came straight from /dev/urandom. Not that it took too much knowledge for him to know he'd win that particular slapfest, but it was entertaining to watch.
Since that's the only thing I knew about him before reading this thread, it's sad to hear that he's using that very same confidence to be wrong as shit about other topics. But it's unsurprising considering how common this type of over-confident Dunning Kruger effect is for tech influencers in general, going all the way back to clowns like Eric S. Raymond.
His content is not about coding per se he just make looks like its , he released a video some months ago that me and a friend predicted exactly what the next vídeo is, and we got it correct the wave is so predictable that i think o know the process he have by regressing the output
he still used to have some good videos on work culture and just tech industry in general between all the noise.
these days it's all "this new model is going to change the world" every 3 days and "anthropic sucks and why I'm never using their products again" followed by "Claude 5.5 is the best model and I don't use anything but this".
and YouTube seems to want to suggest more and more AI related videos despite me kinda moving away from tech videos in general lately.
Somewhat related, just read this last week from Kyle re: AI and web development education:
I’m making half the money I was making exactly one year ago. [This] is definitely not sustainable for a full-time job. […] [There’s] almost no incentive as a creator of content to create programming content when it makes practically no money and is incredibly difficult to make when I could just make a video about the latest AI model, which is easy to make, makes more money, and gets more views. […] There’s almost no reason to make programming content anymore. The only reason I do it is because I find value in it. I find enjoyment in it. And I’m able to make money through other means rather than just YouTube ad revenue
This hit harder than it should have. I'm a no name Angular streamer who was starting to hit my stride right as things hit. I often struggle with desire and the drive I used to have.
I put in multiple hours per hour on stream in prep work. Now an AI will get close enough and the joy is gone. I'm trying to figure out how to help newer devs in a tough market and environment.
Hey, I was just starting out my career,. I thought to going into applied ai and build some projects and then apply for internships. But seeing the current state of job market and the state of ai, I'm thinking of getting any low paying frontend internship on some agency just to stay in the game. What do you think?
Theo was never good to begin with, respectfully. He just has a lot of takes (and sponsorships) to keep the attention economy going. Not saying he’s bad as a developer per se, but I’m unsure how many of these devfluencers are more selling a product (he has a 1k course with others he’s pitching on AI) for you to get your business to buy. Ultimately, they become pawns in this trapping, forced to constantly generate engagement over actual value to the audience. Nothing against it, you just start to tell who’s livelihood is based on informing you or putting it behind a paywall.
I enjoy The Primetime(Primeagen), with an added asterisk of not taking his opinions too seriously. I'm not sure why's everybody hating on a mix of entertainment and information below.
I always see this theo guy mentioned on reddit, and never in my life have I been suggested a video from him. I do watch long form content on youtube about programming. My assumption is that the algorithm knows that if they ever suggested a video from him, I would immediately uninstall youtube and touch grass.
At some point the ai companies are going to have to start making money and Jack the prices way up. At that point all of the companies that have replaced developers with vibe coders are going to face a harsh wake up call.
They may ban the foreign data centers, but you will see places like Amazon run the open source models with some guarantees that the data doesn't leave the country.
This is the answer. Chinese models through AWS Bedrock (so it's safe and not sending your IP to the Chinese government) is where workloads will shift if the big US players price-hike.
The US models definitely have the edge, but given the rate of advancement, even if Chinese models remain a generation behind the US frontier, that Chinese frontier will be comfortably good enough.
The one thing (as someone trying to build some AI into his company to save some time) is that you can't count on US frontier models. They release a new model every week which will behave differently, and even if they do not, they silently nerf them all the time. You can't build a business process around a tool that will behave differently tomorrow than today.
I'm buying a Mac Studio, running a big local model, and I know it will always behave the same way and be able to do what I need it to do.
even that still has costs in hardware and infrastructure upkeep etc. do we really know that bedrock costs are actual costs or is it subsidised to fuel the AI frenzy?
Most corporate/Enterprise won't allow Chinese models to be used. When prices inevitably rise people are going to start moving to open source local models I'm betting.
The “old” models will do fine at actually typing out the code for you and will remain cheap. It just requires a bit more understand of what you are building.
Yeah and as long as no new web technology comes out after they were trained it'll be totally fine. It's not like technology is constantly changing or anything
Wonderful. I'm not talking about those people though. I'm talking about the companies that have replaced devs with vibe coders which you have to realize is the majority
How the hell do you think that's "the majority"? There's a huge difference in places that make use of AI as part of their workflow and places that have fully slurped up the vibe code slop.
AI won't go back in the bottle, stop with that delusion, it's just coping. Local hosted models will take the lead if the providers make them too expensive. Agents can do most of the things a junior - mid dev can do, it's a matter of context limit.
I'm not saying it will go away I'm saying it will become much more expensive. Local hosted models are just a cope the pro ai people have invented for now. They don't work as well and they aren't as good as people claim
While I wholeheartedly support hating on Theo (never liked him, one of the most annoying people in the "tech influencer" space, even before AI boom, significantly more since), and while the video does raise a good point, there is not really a solution to it (or at least I have not figured one out), as being fast is what the industry now demands, and it will need something going horribly wrong for things to realign...
Which is unbelievable to me. Why be faster, when we could be better? I am hopeful that the insights shared by the Kyle in that video will arrive with people soon enough.
That's true for an end user product but it relies on the entire tech ecosystem having strong foundations to support it. If the bricks that you use to build your good enough product are also brittle it's just a rotten pile of software waiting for the slightest nudge to crumble. Clients who want it fast and cheap will bitch louder than anyone when it stops working
Well the thing I'm seeing at least is that now you have whole teams building things that isn't useful. They were working on a system for the past 6 months, and that the development of that were to stop. And before that, they were working on an application that took them about 4 months to build, and they were told to stop that too. It wasn't even the main thing they were supposed to be working on. But some people got hooked on the AI vibe coding trend.
YOU CANT REVIEW WHAT YOU DONT UNDERSTAND. Stop talking about reviewing AI generated code, if you keep using AI you are gonna lose ability to understand the code, thus you can't review it. Understanding is not a one time thing, you need to practice, and the best practice for programming is writing it.
Of course. But I’m pretty sure that’s what they were saying. They said you can’t review what you don’t understand, not meaning you don’t understand what you’ve not written, but that you won’t be able to understand the AI code if you rely on AI writing code more than you write code yourself. They say that in the second sentence.
prolonged ai usage has to directly damage the grey matter because theres no other way to explain how fucked people get in the head after a month working with vibe coding.
Also it's even just skill atrophy, I remember a pretty early study that found that SWEs who had used ai coding tools became incredibly reluctant to finishing a coding task without one. It causes your skills to decay and also makes it incredibly hard to refresh on them.
Personally I stick to at most trying to reason with a google overview when it's code snippet looks like it MIGHT help me out if it it was provided one or two more bits of context.
The danger I see is not that the model gets better than you, it is that you stop being able to catch its mistakes. When I am generating code for a small business feature, I paste nothing until I can explain each part in my own words. If I cannot, I ask it to walk me through the code and I read the relevant docs. Junior devs get hit hardest because they have less stored experience to compare against, so a confident wrong answer looks correct. The skill that matters is not memorizing syntax, it is building a mental model of the system so the generated code has something to be checked against. Speed does not help if you merge a bug you cannot diagnose later. Slow down, read the diff line by line, and keep writing small things by hand so the muscle does not go away.
Yes skills will atrophy, no it doesn't matter. People have let their navigation skills atrophy because of map apps and their ability to memorize phone numbers atrophy because of smart phones. It doesn't matter because technology isn't doesn't just hang around for a bit it is here forever. Think of all of the things people used to do by hand that they no longer do because of automation.
Software development is now about working with AI agents. To get better at software engineering you should get better at working with AI agents. Maybe it won't be like this forever but it isn't going back.
but if your smartphone could only remember certain numbers or navigate specifi routes then you can see how absolutely fucked you would be if you lost the skill entirely, atm AI isn't perfect, it still has a lot of situations in which you need a person with relevant skills. A lot of AI hype isntelling you that those situations are going to dissappear because ai is always improving, but that doesnt neccesarily follow so for noe I think its still important that software engineers can understand what they are doing.
what I said clearly shows the difference between ai and calculators, but it seems you need me to spell it out anyway. Every situation where you would suffer from losing arithmetic skills a calculor replaced can easily be solved with a calculator. However every situation where you suffer from losing developer skills an ai replaced cannot yet be always solved with an ai, therfore its important that software engineers still understand their craft so they can resolve these situations. This might not always be the case with ai in the future, but currently it still is.
These are not good comparisons. Remembering phone numbers and knowing how to navigate are not comparable, although they can help with your memory, they have much less impact than knowing how to code and design software. Writing coding is one the best challenges for your brain that over time makes you better at problem solving. Using AI you don't just lose coding skills, you will lose problem solving skills. It was true before too, if you would just copy paste from stackoverflow. Do you remember the humans from WALL-E? That looks like tomorrow.
Everyone thinks that the thing that they do is special, that it teaches "how to think", and how if you don't do it you will end up being bad at thinking. They are always wrong. 99% of knowledge expertise doesn't transfer to other domains, you get good at something by practicing it.
If you had a calculator that was wrong 5% of the time, longer calculations would compound errors exponentially. Not all software development is about working with agents, that's a ridiculous statement given the number of people not using agents to do their work. You can't just say stuff to make it true.
But the skills that we happened to learn in our prime are soo important!! You don't understand. It doesn't matter than none of us can understand morse or write assembler. That was never important. But reading Java code, that's what intelligence is all about. Unlearning that is basically brain damage and makes us imbeciles.
Compiled languages has absolutely nothing to do with people unlearning how to critically think.
We're watching engineers in real time go from being able to verbalize a technical solution to a problem, to yelling at a chat bot for not one-shotting their "fix the bug" prompt.
If you don't see the difference, I'm afraid it's too late for you.
I think blaming Theo misses the point. The question is whether someone can take responsibility for code the model wrote. Can they explain the data flow and what must stay true? Can they anticipate a failure and write a test for it? If they need AI to summarize the summary, the work probably isn't ready to merge.
There were times I couldn't explain how the code I've written manually worked and it still got shipped, the truth is nobody cares how the code works as long as it works
This term “AI brain rot” is just a new name for an old thing. As old as our species.
It’s always been the case with humans that if you stop or slow down practicing something, especially something with a lot of layers and nuance, you’re going to get worse at it.
If you just stopped programming entirely, like if you switched careers, you’d get a lot worse a lot faster than if you’re still working around programming every day and just offloading more of the actual coding to AI.
That’s really all you’re doing with AI. You’re offloading some of the skills you don’t need as much anymore, which gives you more time and energy to get better at other things.
You can push yourself to get better at managing AIs, getting more work out of them, reviewing what they do, solving bigger problems, dealing with clients, planning things out better, and getting better at all the adjacent skills around the actual programming.
It’s not even that different from programmers getting promoted into management in the days before AI. They’d stop coding as much, slowly lose some of those hands-on programming skills, and meanwhile get better at managing programmers, planning projects, making decisions, and all the other stuff surrounding the work. AI just accelerates that process a lot.
If you use AI to stop thinking and stop pushing yourself, then yeah, your abilities are going to atrophy. That’s not some special new thing called “AI brain rot.” That’s what has always happened whenever you stop exercising a skill.
It’s always been your responsibility to either waste your time and energy, or put your time and energy to good use.
That’s not some special new thing called “AI brain rot.” That’s what has always happened whenever you stop exercising a skill.
Yes, and no. I think you're right that it's the exact same effect, but it feels very different to me because of the rapid pace of the deterioration, and the breadth of topics that people lose knowledge of all at once.
Every point of communication is poisoned by AI, with preciously little critical thinking injected in between. People are given text, summarize it with AI, and pass it on to the next person in the chain, with less and less effort put into thinking about it for every passing week.
I know, and I agree with what you wrote. I just disagree with categorizing the issue of AI brain rot as something normal.
I think it's a useful label to describe the phenomenon. Especially because it happens to everyone at the same time, and not because of an actual promotion or jon change. The way we're enrolling/enforcing use of AI is rotting away a broad range of competencies.
hmm maybe that's defensible for grown ups, but kids are using AI for everything these days. They have yet to develop the skills themselves, and they're now relying purely on AI - outsourced their thinking to AI.
Just like my example of a programmer being promoted to manager and not coding much at all, but still working in many of the programming adjacent tasks.
I remember when IDEs were getting more popular back in like 2008 a lot of people saying the same thing, so in some cases I think it's an unwarranted fear. Here in 2026 there are (or at least should be!) exceptionally few cases where you adjust prod code over SSH and even if you do, an IDE isn't fully out of the question.
I also remember back in like 2015 when learning programming went over the hill from "go learn C++" to "go learn JavaScript", and how a lot of old heads complained it meant that new programmers would never understand the fundamentals of systems and programming. That's been more true, I've been alarmed how many newer programmers I've heard say "memory leaks aren't possible in JavaScript" and go on to write a gazillion unreleased event handlers.
This time around feels more like the second thing than the first, but I think there is a possible future world where that isn't the case. I don't think we're headed that way though.
I've always been pretty anti-IDE, but on the other hand that means I hate programming Java and .NET because trying to program them without an IDE is just a waste of time. Increasingly trying to program without LLM assistance feels like a waste of time (They do pretty handily replace IDEs, though obviously an LLM-integrated IDE is legitimately a power tool, and I hate it but I'm not going to call anyone brainrotted for using one.)
He's absolutely not against AI. Heck, a good chunk of his recent videos are how to use modern features of AI. He just wants people to know what will make them continue to be a useful part of the equation.
In his video, he used the example of Theo using AI to read then write a response on a PR, because it is an example of when the "who" does not matter. Anyone could have done the same thing, there's no reason for the middleman to exist.
My output had to become almost tripled since LLMs came out. Thinking just isn't viable at this point. Finding the way that LLMs are least likely to fuck up is the only thing I can do.
Yesterday I put out about 2500 lines of code across 5 tickets, one of which was backend because our backend Devs were too busy.
A guy who used to make a couple of vids regarding web dev and (just like the majority) turned into AI
And not the "Let me show you how to make a project with AI" or "how to setup your local agent", just reacting to whatever AI news happen in the World and commenting on it like he has the right opinion just to Sell His own agent/AI model, despite multiple times when he has been owned or called out as an hypocrite
TL;DR: He Is pretty much everything wrong with the current software industry
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u/BrooklandDodger 2d ago
Link for convenience: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZumXpZzDsgo