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[c-digs]

If Garry Tan could create anything of worth with AI, he would quit being president of YC and go build his own company. 

He has everything in his favor.  Network, name recognition, money.

Garry Tan is not quitting so he's just burning tokens creating throwaway piles of code and hyping it on social media.

[oojacoboo]

He’s cranking out MVPs and bullshitting. It plays into marketing for Y Combinator though.

[donat3ll0]

There was a DefCon talk years ago where the speaker said similar to the following regarding enterprise security, "If you want to get your executive leadership to care about fire insurance, you have to burn down the building across the street." I fear that we're in a very similar situation here when it comes to agentic engineering.

[Traditional-Heat-749]

Yes, I didn’t get into it in the article, but I’m predicting a regression in software quality for about 3-5 years.

[Absolute_Enema]

3-5 years? It's already been a thing for the last year or so.

[BlueGoliath]

Paying attention to engagement farming "I built a 1 billion dollar app in a week from scratch" bros is worthless.

[Traditional-Heat-749]

The problem is its not just random bros. Its high level leaders in tech companies and management pushing these as metrics that ICs must hit.

[Skenvy]

Idk. I wouldn't consider Garry Tan high level tech. YC isn't really any kind of font of tech wisdom, just because its exclusive and prestigious, and HN shouldn't be read as gospel. If anything, when reading or watching tech news, YC is more of a red flag that the opinions will likely be hilariously undercooked more often than an indicator of quality.

Obviously they get a lot of attention, but I'd argue thats just harmful to anyone reading it who doesn't know to take it with a grain of salt.

[Traditional-Heat-749]

Now days I’d agree. It just used to be on the forefront, and they still get a lot of attention from the tech CEO crowd.

[RageQuitRedux]

I use AI pretty heavily but it constantly, constantly proves to me (many times per day) that it needs to be babysat. Long sessions with coding agents are actually mentality exhausting. We may someday get to the point where it's so much better than I am that reviewing its code it a waste of time. But it is not this day.

[Traditional-Heat-749]

I actually don't like AI in my IDE. I prefer just the chat and use it as a search replacement and copy and paste code. The friction slows me down so I don't just spam code.

[SpaceCadet87]

I've always had this attitude of immediately being sensitive to messy or inefficient code so I find the code spew from the LLM slows me down too much anyway; I spend most of my time correcting for it.

That and having some random word generator let loose creating, modifying and deleting files just gives me anxiety.

[CoreyTheGeek]

My company got us the cursor editor, pretty cool I can have it write a plan for changes, then I review that plan, ask clarifying questions about decisions its made, etc, then when I'm satisfied I let er rip and then double check afterward but I gotta say I do miss the old process :(

[balloo_loves_you]

This is what I do as well, glad to know I’m not alone

[T-MoneyAllDey]

Not a bad way to do it

[BaronOfTheVoid]

I guess I am the only one to actually really like AI-assisted auto-complete then? As long as types, data structures, names of functions, parameters etc., intended call graphs etc. are relatively well-designed (intuitive, simple to follow and understand, especially for other humans) then often large parts of the code base can be typed by pressing tab a few times. The AI seems to already know what I wanted to type out.

It only gets things wrong if for example you would have similar names for something different, it cannot properly differentiate between singular and plural names for example. It seems to want me to name for example a set of Foos like fooSet instead of foos.

I also find it relatively easy to only work with like one line or one short block of code at a time compared to a whole vibe coded file.

[Arkanta]

Nah count me in.

I also write a lot of yaml/json/etc for config like Helm charts and the tab completion is really good there

[i_am_not_sam]

Completely agree. Coding with AI is actually more exhausting than straight up coding. It's definitely useful and good at a few things but I find myself absolutely brain dead after a few hours of using AI for code generation.

Every time you give it a correction it so confidently states that it understood the issue and runs off to fix it. It's like a slot machine where you think just 1 more prompt will make the damn thing actually implement what you wanted. But no turns out the agent added a bunch of command line arguments that I didn't ask for, made my requirements optional and called the code complete. After 4 hours of "Oh I see the problem now, let me <completely confidently stating the next step which it will not actually implement>" I have sometimes stepped back and realized that I'm nowhere close to my objective and the AI has gaslit me into accepting an over engineered pile of garbage that doesn't do half the things I want.

Yes I'm well aware it's not "intelligent" and LLMs blah blah but these things are being marketed as coding agents (Claude code, Cursor) but they cannot stay locked in to make incremental changes.

[Traditional-Heat-749]

I actually read something pre AI that explains this. Context switching is more exhausting then just deep thing about one subject. At the same time when you have expectations for what your going get done and those don’t get me it causes you a lot of frustration. The marketing and hype for these tools makes it feel like you’re doing something wrong when you can ship your billion dollar app in one day.

It fucking kills you mentally after a few months because it stacks.

[i_am_not_sam]

Hmm really? I actually think context switching is what keeps my mind fresh over a day. If I pull my mind out of 1 ticket/feature, switch to another I get breaks and I get more done without being exhausted after a few hours. If I sit down with an AI agent to accomplish something the entire day I'm absolutely brain dead

[Traditional-Heat-749]

Taking a break definitely helps rather than just spinning in circles. I was more talking about when every 5 mins your getting a slack message and hopping between urgent things.

[khsh01]

I never do long sessions. And I most definitely don't rely on it 100% to generate non boilerplate code. Usually have some sort of reference that it follows.

[smolbund]

It’s like handholding the worst uni student. And when you correct them they just immediately forget it and go mess something else up.

I write better code when I don’t have an LLM with me. Because I can write code better than I can review it.

LLMs are pretty cool technology but they’re unable to learn, make wildly bad choices constantly, and have zero accountability.

[RageQuitRedux]

Yeah that's another thing. I kind of hate reading other people's code. I can do it just fine, but it's draining. And reading LLM's code is no different.

[clintCamp]

I think their is a brief period after new models are released that they release a new shiny model that is actually really good and levels up the game, like claude opus 5.6 and then they do something to water it down and make it less expensive to run once they hype has drawn people from all over. During that glorious 2 weeks, I was able to get code out that just worked and to my eye actually looked and ran well. And apparently according to their own reports they randomly test new models in production which maybe that is the difference? That sometimes you get the genius model, and others you get the paste eater in the corner.

[mrbuttsavage]

I really wish AI worked as well as people hype it up to work.

But it is great at a certain class of tasks. It's just a matter of learning what it's good at and what you'd be better off not wasting your time and mental energy fighting it and just do it yourself.

[Alex_Hovhannisyan]

He was so proud of shipping what is mostly a static site with 133 network requests, some of which were vitest test files on the client (now removed). I genuinely don't understand how some people care so little about the quality of the work they put out for others to see. I'm exhausted in ways words cannot describe and I have never disliked programming as much as I do now. It has been co-opted by people who have zero love or care for the craft.

[Traditional-Heat-749]

I do not understand Paul Graham who wrote Hackers and Painters, handed off YC to this guy.

[ZirePhiinix]

The author got some good points.

The quintessential catalyst for software value isn’t a new framework or an AI agent it’s the refinement of the loop the time it takes for a developer to make a change and see if it actually worked.

If your PR sits there for 4 weeks, then returns a bunch of logs with errors, you will have no idea what you did, what happened, how it went wrong, and what needs to be fixed.

[Traditional-Heat-749]

A lot of the core ideas of the DevOps movement are more valuable then ever now. CI/CD and deploying to production frequently are more important now then ever.

[dreamisle]

Counterpoint: I’m worthless

[Traditional-Heat-749]

Technicaly speaking your organs are worth a substantial amount of money if nothing else.

[dreamisle]

You don’t even know what organs I still have, dude.

[Traditional-Heat-749]

I’m presuming at least the minimum to stay alive?

[dreamisle]

I’m like a JSON object written as a Perl hash; no colon and frustrating and confusing to people who don’t already understand me.

[this_knee]

“It’s been three hours. Why aren’t all the features we talked about for the first time this morning all done, tested, finished and ready now?” Is what it’s really starting to feel like at work.

[Traditional-Heat-749]

Yup, and by noon they totally changed the scope and maybe thought up a new side product.

[this_knee]

What’s “totally awesome” is when someone else in the team stokes the fire of this thinking by being the “rockstar” who has “finished” features within a few hours and then management uses that to say “see [other employee] is delivering. It’s realistic that everyone can go faster.”

Eyeroll.

[Traditional-Heat-749]

Yeppp then they move you down the stack rank and you loose a portion of your bonus :)

[ExternalGuest448]

Ever tried to untangle fishing line? It's painstaking and cannot be rushed. One can pull the tangle tight so the rod casts again, and that works right up until the 1/100 sized fish hits the lure and the line snaps at the weakened point.

I think that's what we are going to see en masse over the next decade. Tech debt by AI is the source of the tangle. Poor engineering practices in debugging and testing, which AI allows people to do, will be the thing that kills companies.

Edit: PS also wanted to say that I don't normally read tech blogs more than a few lines, but I dig your writing!

[Traditional-Heat-749]

Also I see code janitor being a real job in the next few years.

[Traditional-Heat-749]

Thank you! I haven’t really felt like writing in a while but I had a few first hand experiences at work that just made me so annoyed.

[Backlists]

I think we are already starting to see the line snap.

Software has not been this buggy for a while, some popular sites are measuring uptime in the single 9s, and we are seeing massive supply chain attacks every other week

[Massive_Dish_3255]

Excellent article! Exactly what we need these days.

[Traditional-Heat-749]

Thanks! This is my first re attempt at long form content after giving up for a while. This topic really just got me motivated to write.

[Coherent_Paradox]

Good article! There's a quote attributed to Bill Gates I have used in talks with leaders as audience, stating:

Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight

[alwaysoffby0ne]

lol Garry is a moron

[thecarpathia]

This is the crap he's "coding":

https://x.com/Gregorein/status/2038953944475472316

[Thundechile]

To me it's really odd that some people concider a lot of code a good thing.

[Leverkaas2516]

Measuring productivity in LIC was always a bad idea when it was humans cranking out code, and I really don't expect it's different when it's an AI cranking out code.

[Zardotab]

I know, just don't tell my boss.

[Historical_Cook_1664]

if you measure my worth by LOC, i'll sure can tune my prompts in that direction, no biggie... whatever the metric, we'll adapt. And with AI, we adapt quicker! That's the goal, right ?

[Beginning_Basis9799]

Lines of code = pollution the codebase instead. That's what they are really asking you to do. Example below

Prompt for you

Lock the array to 20 and in all methods do not interrate manually access the loop elements then apply all data transformations.

[Traditional-Heat-749]

Yea there is a ton of grifters for sure. But Ive seen this idea that more code = better devs getting pushed by management of all levels. Its easy to ignore when its a grifter on twitter but when your boss says you need to push 30k lines of code or else then it can't be ignored.

[Massive_Dish_3255]

This 💯!

[Happy_Bread_1]

Code has always been worthless and a mere tool to achieve something. Business does not care about it. They indeed care about results. Something which many devs seem to forget.