Can developers agree on what the best programming language is? The best framework? The best OS?
AI is a diverse technology and will work differently for everyone, just like JS is a really, really bad technology for many, yet widely used.
On top of that it (as coding agent) is brand new, just a few years old. Looking at the history of technology it will probably take a few decades for it to settle into some sort of stability. Which does not mean it does not provide value during this time of exploration, however there is no trodden path leading you there.
I don't agree with many statements in the article. It almost seems like an article from about a year ago, despite it being posted yesterday. Not sure if the author had the idea a long time ago and just took his time to finish it up, but the "vibe-coding" he describes surely isn't the current way of using LLMs in a codebase.
While LLMs are surely used to generate a lot of slop-code and overwhelm (open source) code bases, this surely isn't the only thing they can do. I dislike discussing the potential of a technology exclusively by looking at its negative impact.
LLMs in proper hands don't create code which is "stolen", they also shouldn't create unnecessary code and definitely don't remove any of the ownership of the programmer, at least not any more than using a mighty IDE does.
The problem seems to be in the usage of LLMs. These effects definitely do happen when just releasing an agent on a codebase without any oversight. But they can also largely be mitigated by using frameworks such as Openspec or Spec-Kit, properly designing a spec, plan, granular tasks and manually reviewing all code yourself. The LLM should not be responsible for any creative idea, it should at most verify the practicality against the codebase. When doing that, the entire creative control is in the hands of the programmer and so is the mechanical execution. The LLM is reduced to a very powerful autocomplete with a strict harness around it. Obviously this also doesn't lead to 10x or even 100x improvements in speed like some AI merchants promise, but in my personal experience the speedup is still significant enough to make LLMs a very, very useful technology.
A forklift is "lifting" things, despite using a completely different mechanical process as a human "lifting" things. The only real similarity between these kinds of "lifting" is the end result, something is higher up than it was before.
> but it's really helpful when it comes to fixing your mistakes, allowing you to be successful.
It would be helpful if they'd take a loss as a learning opportunity. But as stated in the original quote they threw a tantrum and accused the opponent of cheating, taking away no lesson to improve the next time around.
Unions in Germany aren't really split up by profession, but by industry. So if you e.g. work in the car or manufacturing industry, there's a good chance that most workers in your company are part of "IG Metall", which is the biggest union in Germany. And that union then negotiates the salary & working conditions for every normal employee, even if you aren't part of the union. So if you ever met a developer from Siemens, Mercedes, BMW, Bosch, etc. they are probably enjoying the benefits of a union.
AI is a diverse technology and will work differently for everyone, just like JS is a really, really bad technology for many, yet widely used.
On top of that it (as coding agent) is brand new, just a few years old. Looking at the history of technology it will probably take a few decades for it to settle into some sort of stability. Which does not mean it does not provide value during this time of exploration, however there is no trodden path leading you there.