I haven't written an article in a while. But nothing gives you more inspiration to write than an opinion you really, really disagree with. In my case it was I'm done using AI article by Brett Codes. Over around 2000 words, the author explains his negative views on AI and why he decided to stop using it.
I am really no AI evangelist. I am aware of its limits and its problems and the incompetent people causing more harm than good with it. But I also see the goodies, and I am pretty much convinced author's decision was driven less by rationality and more by the false pride.
Let's swallow one bitter, but important pill - no one is paying you solely for being a good developer. You are being paid for delivering a value. And yes - being a good developer greatly contributes towards the ability of delivering apps that work and help businesses yielding the values. And by "work" I mean not only they look good at the first glance, but also being not (too much) buggy, secure and maintainable in the foreseeable future.
Therefore, purely vibe-coded projects driven solely by non-IT people often (if not always) fail. Because their authors don't know what it takes and so they cannot prompt their agents to reason and care about it. We devs do. Some of us know more, some of us know less (yet). The "AI is going to replace all programmers" is a lunatic nonsense.
But so is rejecting AI and sanctifying "good ol' hand work". Does anyone seriously think we should reject modern programming languages and revert into writing in assembly or even better directly in binary code? Do you develop in plain text editor without syntax highlighting? Why are you using containers and not building new on-premise servers every time? Whaat? You use frameworks and 3rd party libraries? You don't implement everything from scratch in the vanilla language? Seriously? Why all those abstractions and shortcuts? They make you lazy and they obfuscate the true principles, aren't they? You are a worse developer if you don't do everything yourself, aren't you?
I'll tell you why. It is one of those:
- You appeared in the industry when it was already a de-facto standard
- You saw it was good and simply start using it because it was good
Either way, despite obvious downsides and despite use-cases where you must avoid them, writing a "I am done using..." article about any of above would look quite silly.
Yet people applaud when someone is ranting about AI tools. Reject modernity, embrace tradition. Because the best way of developing software is right now. My today's workflow cannot be improved. I want my tomorrow being the same as yesterday and I will fight for that...
Of course, even the most capable frontier models today are still imperfect. The tooling around is still imperfect. Many people are using GenAI wrong and creating slops and atrocities instead of contributing with meaningful values. Managers are delusional about what can and cannot be achieved. I'll accept any objection pointing towards any flaw in ways of working with AI today. Let's name it, let's face it, mitigate it, learn from it and improve the process.
But I don't accept someone is not willing to adapt and change. Especially when he already must have adapted in so many ways recently. The technological advancement in the past decades is simply astounding. Do you remember when you got your first smartphone? For me it was 10 years ago. Do you remember times when you don't have internet everywhere? 20 years ago, I was arriving in school an hour early and staying there late in the afternoon after my classes, because they had internet there, I only had expensive dial-up at home. It changed for the better and we get used to it pretty quickly, didn't we?
The world of software development itself is constantly changing. GenAI (and later maybe real AI) is another step forward. It is another tool. It is up to everyone how well the tool will be used. You can take a hammer and smash everything around to pieces. Or you can gently hit a chisel with it and carve out a perfect statue. Hammer is not the reason for success or failure. Would you reject hammers because someone is doing harm with them? I don't think so...
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