Yeah, I know Kent is a very respected developer with a long and celebrated career. But I did not like the attitude of this article at all.
I’m a principal engineer. I have an obligation to less experienced engineers I work with to help develop them as engineers and help ensure they go on to have great careers. No part of that involves shaming them, assigning letters of talent to them, or browbeating them.
I feel like I’d have heard about it by now if Kent was a raging asshole, and I haven’t heard that. So I’m guessing he had some idea in mind when he wrote this that just isn’t coming across correctly. But… I would definitely take this article down and spend some time re-working it if I were the author.
This is so strange. I do a ton of RE with Claude, Codex, and sometimes Deepseek, GLM, and Kimi. I don’t have difficulty getting any of them to use IDA or otherwise decompile things.
There is one important difference, which is that Claude and Codex will both refuse if I ask them to touch anything related to security. But so long as I’m just studying algorithms and things like that, they’re totally fine with it.
That said, Codex especially will sometimes randomly give me a cybersecurity warning and stop responding. It’s random but happens maybe 2-3 times per day if I’m doing heavy reverse engineering work. Claude is much less fussy unless, once again, you’re explicitly trying to touch anything related to licenses, passwords, etc.
I have wondered if that’s why Grok seems so weird and dim-witted compared to better models.
Part of my job involves comparing the behavior of various models. Grok is a deeply weird model. It doesn’t refuse to respond as often as other models, but it feels like it retreats to weird talking points way more often than the others. It feels like a model that has a gun to its head to say what its creators want it to say.
I can’t help but wonder if this is severely deleterious to a model’s ability to reason in general. There are a whole bunch of topics where it seems incapable of being rational, and I suspect that’s incompatible with the goal of having a top-tier model.
Not sure if I’m misunderstanding your claim. A string does vibrate as the sum of the string’s harmonics. That’s how pinch harmonics work, and they wouldn’t work if that wasn’t the case.
You poke a spot where a given harmonic doesn’t vibrate, and that takes energy away from the other harmonics that do need to vibrate at that spot.
If we’re just talking about visually being able to see them, I suppose that’s a different question. Maybe on an incredibly low pitched string, or with a strobe light playing at a synced frequency? But in terms of what the string is doing, it is vibrating as the sum of its harmonics.
A ham sandwich has some strong qualities. I’m not kidding.
The president would do basically nothing for four years, which would cause some things to move slowly. But it would be a very stable environment. No random tariffs via executive order, no random wars or invasions, no governing via tweet.
Ham sandwich would maybe be one of our better presidents. Top 50%, probably.
But what if it didn’t summarize Harry Potter? What if it analyzed Harry Potter and came back with a specification for how to write a compelling story about wizards? And then someone read that spec and wrote a different story about wizards that bears only the most superficial resemblance to Harry Potter in the sense that they’re both compelling stories about wizards?
This is legitimately a very weird case and I have no idea how a court would decide it.
Yeah, spatial reasoning has been a weak spot for LLMs. I’m actually building a new code exercise for my company right now where the candidate is allowed to use any AI they want, but it involves spatial reasoning. I ran Opus 4.6 and Codex 5.3 (xhigh) on it and both came back with passable answers, but I was able to double the score doing it by hand.
It’ll be interesting to see what happens if a candidate ever shows up and wants to use Deep Think. Might blow right through my exercise.
I had an issue with one of my Sprites (Fly.io also runs sprites.dev) and the CEO responded to me personally in less than 10 minutes. They got it fixed quickly.
I was a free customer at the time. I pay for it happily now.
Sure, that’s one solution. You could also Isle of Dr Moreau your way to a pelican that can use a regular bike. The sky is the limit when you have no scruples.
Ironically, I find LLMs far better at helping me dive into unfamiliar code than at writing it.
A few weeks ago a critical bug came in on a part of the app I’d never touched. I had Claude research the relevant code while I reproduced the bug locally, then had it check the logs. That confirmed where the error was, but not why. This was code that ran constantly without incident.
So I had Claude look at the Excel doc the support person provided. Turns out there was a hidden worksheet throwing off the indices. You couldn’t even see the sheet inside Excel. I had Claude move it to the end where our indices wouldn’t be affected, ran it locally, and it worked. I handed the fixed document back to the support person and she confirmed it worked on her end too.
Total time to resolution: 15 minutes, on a tricky bug in code I’d never seen before. That hidden sheet would have been maddening to find normally. I think we might be strongly overestimating the benefits of knowing a codebase these days.
I’ve been programming professionally for about 20 years. I know this is a period of rapid change and we’re all adjusting. But I think getting overly precious about code in the age of coding agents is a coping mechanism, not a forward-looking stance. Code is cheap now. Write it and delete it.
Make high leverage decisions and let the agent handle the rest. Make sure you’ve got decent tests. Review for security. Make peace with the fact that it’s cheaper to cut three times and measure once than it used to be to measure twice and cut once.
It’s been a lot of fun watching her subscriber count go through the roof. She’s outrageously talented.
It’s also funny because usually it’s hard to reproduce what a musician does. I can listen to someone play guitar, but there’s so much nuance to how it’s played that you need to be pretty good to reproduce it.
But so much of her music is code, and she shows you the code, so she’s really teaching you how to reproduce what she’s doing perfectly. It’s awesome for learning.
I’ve seen experienced software developers make impressive stuff with AI. I haven’t seen anything interesting made with AI by non-developers. They make a landing page or something. It’s just… barely anything. It’s a nothing of a project.
We use AI a lot at work, and the developers are vastly better at getting AI to do what we need than the non-developers. AI is a tool, and like any tool, it takes effort to learn how to use it effectively. And so far, the skills to use AI effectively are something I’ve only seen in software developers.
I don’t think product people are going to replace devs. Ever. I agree that I think a dispersal is more likely than an outright crash.
I was the first dev at my current company to experiment with Claude Code back when it first came out. Some of my coworkers tried it, and some didn’t like it at all.
But now literally all of us are using it. The company gives us a $100 monthly stipend for it. We’re a small dev team, but our CEO is thrilled. He keeps bragging about how customers are gobsmacked by how quickly we’re delivering new features and he’s been asked if we’ve made a ton of hires in the last year. We’re actually down two developers from when I started.
I don’t love the code it writes, but the speed is unbeatable. We still need devs, and I don’t think that’s ever going to change. But we don’t need as many devs. We’re shipping like crazy with a small team. I don’t think more people would speed us up much at all.
> I can't think of a single time where having someone else review my work or give me feedback is a meaningfully bad thing
I have ample examples, unfortunately. I had a coworker whom I liked as a person, but had a nasty habit of using PRs as a way to hijack all decision making. He’d leave PR feedback for his personal preferences and mark them as “changes requested.”
Everyone feels like an asshole giving an approval when someone has requested changes, so you had to comply with all of his preferences if you wanted to merge your code.
I’ve had several companies where I submitted a PR and had someone say, “You’re guarding against an edge case that won’t happen. This is over engineered. Remove it.”
And it made it less than a week in production before we hit the edge case that I’d been forced to neglect.
I had a team come to me with a request, so I built it. They were thrilled. Then another engineer was like, “I don’t like (some technical detail). You need to change (major architectural decision).”
I gave the re-architected version to the team who requested it and they said, “Wait, I loved what you built before. What is this? I don’t want this!”
This post resonated with me pretty hard. Hire good people and deputize them to make decisions. You’ll end up with something good more often than not. I’ve never seen design-by-committee produce a great product.
I’ve had too many experiences with seeing decent contributions get worse and worse as they go through successive rounds of feedback.