The Slopping Forecast (LLM/AI Discussion)

[Jubal]

Since we keep coming back to this topic, I thought I'd at least have a thread to keep interesting links or updates in.


Another recent post in the "AI killed my ability to program well and now I'm stopping" genre:
https://blog.bustikiller.com/2026/09/25/one-month-without-ai.html

A thing I do worry about is whether these are actually relatively isolated cases in an industry where very very few people are going to buck the trend. But these sorts of things are definitely persuading me that coding with LLMs just isn't something I want to do at all even if it does become the sole long-term norm for how people write computer code.

A thing I find odd, conversely, is how little any software I use has increased its utility to me in years. We now apparently have faster coding than ever, but I don't think my own use of any software has improved since 2010 except that I can now play some games that hadn't been written yet then. I guess there must be a lot of software engineering that's about building weird proprietary business systems, but I've talked to very few (not zero, but few) people who've mentioned their workplace computer systems really getting noticeably better in recent years either. My workplace got a whole new academic reporting system and it's maybe one step per entry quicker than the old one but most of the effort seems to have gone into looks rather than functional improvement honestly. I guess the point here being: does coding faster actually solve anyone's problems/is that the actual bottleneck?

[Son of the King]

Another recent post in the "AI killed my ability to program well and now I'm stopping" genre:
https://blog.bustikiller.com/2026/09/25/one-month-without-ai.html

This was a good read. A lot of it resonated with me, although my personal use of LLMs has not been very extensive for various reasons.

A thing I do worry about is whether these are actually relatively isolated cases in an industry where very very few people are going to buck the trend. But these sorts of things are definitely persuading me that coding with LLMs just isn't something I want to do at all even if it does become the sole long-term norm for how people write computer code.

Lots of people in the industry are enthusiastically aboard the LLM train at this point. The viewpoint in this article isn't exactly uncommon, but in the last year or so it at least feels like its become more of a minority position.

My personal feeling has always been that LLMs will not fully replace writing code by hand, largely for the reasons outlined in this article. I've never been impressed by the quality of the output when it comes to code generation, although having said that (and I believe this is related to your second point) there is a large amount of similarly low quality code in production software already. LLM code often looks correct but is anecdotally much harder to review and catch bugs in, and often it contains particularly subtle bugs.

There is some utility in LLMs to assist in programming in my experience, none of which are actually using it to generate large amounts of code or "one shot" complex projects. It can be handy to review human-written code, and I think the fancy autocomplete mentioned in the article is also somewhat useful in terms of providing an actual speed improvement rather than just an apparent (but illusory) one. However, this level of usefulness doesn't justify the ethical minefield that LLMs are.

A thing I find odd, conversely, is how little any software I use has increased its utility to me in years. We now apparently have faster coding than ever, but I don't think my own use of any software has improved since 2010 except that I can now play some games that hadn't been written yet then. I guess there must be a lot of software engineering that's about building weird proprietary business systems, but I've talked to very few (not zero, but few) people who've mentioned their workplace computer systems really getting noticeably better in recent years either. My workplace got a whole new academic reporting system and it's maybe one step per entry quicker than the old one but most of the effort seems to have gone into looks rather than functional improvement honestly. I guess the point here being: does coding faster actually solve anyone's problems/is that the actual bottleneck?

Coding speed has never been the bottleneck in software development in my experience, which is why the fixation on "LLMs will make you code so quickly" has never made much sense to me.

I think some of the stagnation of software (which matches my experience on the whole, though some specific things I use have improved a lot in the last 15 years or so) is due to the change in where the money comes from. There's not much value in increasing utility for users, when the users don't pay anything to use your software. Advertising technology has advanced hugely in this same timeframe.