A developer posted this on Reddit, and I haven't stopped thinking about it.

The Manifesto is now free and open-source: Why I put my book on GitHub. open.substack.com/pub/marcus…

The main thing that LLMs have done in software is bring back the idea that productivity is measured in lines of code per day. An idea that has been debunked, disproven, and discredited repeatedly every few years in my long software career.

Pulse: Micro-Journal jetzt kostenlos und quelloffen dlvr.it/TSdL4g

Pulse: Schlankes Micro-Journaling für das iPhone ift.tt/F9GXaPu

Digitale Erschöpfung: Wieso KI Wissensarbeit intensiviert statt uns zu entlasten. Wer davon träumte, künftig lässig aus der Hängematte heraus, Agenten dirigieren zu können, erlebt gerade ein böses Erwachen. raitner.de/2026/05/digitale-…

“People who enjoy meetings should not be in charge of anything.” — Thomas Sowell

“As Cory Doctorow, author of Enshittification, is fond of observing: you won’t be replaced because an AI can do your job, you’ll be replaced because an AI salesman convinces your boss that it can” Conned by a chatbot ft.com/content/eb6f5398-6635…

hahahahhaha

Compiler construction is one of the oldest, best understood CS fields. It's decades of work by the brightest minds, and it's grounded in logic, informed by experience and strictly deterministic. Comparing that with LLM-based coding agents is just wrong. x.com/IceSolst/status/205025…

Adding agents to a late software project makes it later. (Fred Brooks’ observation, revised.)

Having been part of the industry for 50 years, I can confidently report that none of this is true. Sure, writing code has a non-zero cost; this is true of any artifact. But you know what costs even more, Jonathan? Writing bad code; writing unnecessary code; writing more code than you really need simply because you think you might need it someday or you are too lazy or sloppy to clean up after yourself. Anything that costs nothing is often worth nothing as well, and results in significant unintended consequences.

As an engineer, I’d much rather write every line of code myself than review every line of code generated by an LLM

Very soon, “no AI was used” will be a premium service category in nearly every industry. Mark this.

There's a disturbing trend of developers I've known for years now suddenly being unable to discuss even basic aspects of software development. They have become so dependent on LLMs, they can't even describe how to design a system anymore. Feels like losing friends to dementia. 😢

I‘m not a top coder, but I can fully relate to that. Slowing down in the short run and in the long run. And it is just not fulfilling.

Its safe to say software developer jobs are fine despite AI I have 15 years experience in software development, and I know what to prompt, but still it takes hundreds of prompts to create an app with AI If you have 0 experience, you dont even know what to ask it. then what do you do when the app breaks ? non-devs have no chance to vibecode a production app devs on the other hand seem to get superpowers

Anyone who thinks Claude or something similar can already replace a developer(I didn’t say replace coding, I said replacing a developer) has clearly never used it on a serious, large scale project. There's marketing hype and then there's the truth. It looks revolutionary if you don't code yourself. 

All of these “influencers” using these tools have never hit the market with a working app. They all just yap how they were marketers and now their Claude codes while their sleep. With that velocity they should be hitting the market with new app every week, yet we don’t see it at all. If we pretend experienced developers are now obsolete based on viral videos, we're heading straight into an era of widespread, low quality code.

And I can’t wait to charge a premium for fixing someone’s disaster.

A common dynamic I observe with AI: it feels most impressive when you don’t know much about the subject, don’t care or don’t have a clear idea of what the you want. This applies across design, code, legal, and more. If I don’t know code very well, every piece of code it writes feels very impressive. Once you know what something should feel or look like, it becomes almost impossible to guide AI there. And you definitely can’t one-shot it.

All the best programmers I know are starting to write code by hand again