I have no problem with experienced senior devs using agents to write good code faster. What I have a problem with is inexperienced "vibecoders" who don't care to learn and instead use agents to write awful buggy code that will make the product harder to build on even for the agents. It used to be that lack of a basic understanding of the system was a barrier for people, but now it's not, so we're flooded with code written by imperfect models conducted by people who don't know good from bad.
We're in a transition phase, but this will shake out in the near future. In the non-professional space, poorly built vibecoded apps simply won't last, for any number of reasons. When it comes to professional devs, this is a problem that is solved by a combination of tooling, process, and management:
(1) Tooling to enable better evaluation of generated code and its adherence to conventions and norms
(2) Process to impose requirements on the creation/exposure of PRDs/prompts/traces
(3) Management to guide devs in the use of the above and to implement concrete rewards and consequences
Some organizations will be exposed as being deficient in some or all of these areas, and they will struggle. Better organizations will adapt.
Where are you encountering all this slop code? At my work we use LLMs heavily and I don't see this issue. Maybe I'm just lucky that my colleagues all have Uni degrees in CS and at least a few years experience.
> Maybe I'm just lucky that my colleagues all have Uni degrees in CS and at least a few years experience.
That's why. I was using Claude the other day to greenfield a side project and it wanted to do some important logic on the frontend that would have allowed unauthenticated users to write into my database.
It was easy to spot for me, because I've been writing software for years, and it only took a single prompt to fix. But a vibe coder wouldn't have caught it and hackers would've pwned their webapp.
You can also ask Claude to review all the code for security issues and code smells, you'd be surprised what it finds. We all write insecure code in our first pass through if we're too focused on getting the proof of concept worked out, security isnt always the very 1st thing coded, maybe its the very next thing, maybe it comes 10 changes later.
The issue isn't when the programmers start using it. It's when the project managers start using it and think that they're producing something similar to the programmers
But if you try some penny-saving cheap model like Sonnet [..bad things..]. [Better] pay through the nose for Opus.
After blowing $800 of my bootstrap startup funds for Cursor with Opus for myself in a very productive January I figured I had to try to change things up... so this month I'm jumping between Claude Code and Cursor, sometimes writing the plans and having the conversation in Cursor and dump the implementation plan into Claude.
Opus in Cursor is just so much more responsive and easy to talk to, compared to Opus in Claude.
Cursor has this "Auto" mode which feels like it has very liberal limits (amortized cost I guess) that I'm also trying to use more, but -- I don't really like to flip a coin and if it lands up head then waste half hour discovering the LLM made a mess the LLM and try again forcing the model.
Perhaps in March I'll bite the bullet and take this authors advice.
Yeah, I can’t recommend gpt-5.3-codex enough, it’s great! I’ve been using it with the new macOS app and I’m impressed. I’ve always been a Claude Code guy and I find myself using codex more and more. Opus is still much nicer explaining issues and walking me through implementations but codex is faster (even with xhigh effort) and gets the job done 95% of the time.
I was spending unholy amounts of money and tokens (subsidized cloud credits tho) forcing Opus for everything but I’m very happy with this new setup. I’ve also experimented with OpenCode and their Zen subscription to test Kimi K2.5 an similar models and they also seem like a very good alternative for some tasks.
What I cannot stand tho is using sonnet directly (it’s fine as a subagent), I’ve found it to be hard to control and doesn’t follow detailed instructions.
> Along the way I have developed a programming philosophy I now apply to everything: the best software for an agent is whatever is best for a programmer.
Not a plug but really that’s exactly why we’re building sandboxes for agents with local laptop quality. Starting with remote xcode+sim sandboxes for iOS, high mem sandbox with Android Emulator on GPU accel for Android.
No machine allocation but composable sandboxes that make up a developer persona’s laptop.
The author is correct in that agents are becoming more and more capable and that you don't need the IDE to the same extent, but I don't see that as good. I find that IDE-based agentic programming actually encourages you to read and understand your codebase as opposed to CLI-based workflows. It's so much easier to flip through files, review the changes it made, or highlight a specific function and give it to the agent, as opposed to through the CLI where you usually just give it an entire file by typing the name, and often you just pray that it manages to find the context by itself. My prompts in Cursor are generally a lot more specific and I get more surgical results than with Claude Code in the terminal purely because of the convenience of the UX.
But secondly, there's an entire field of LLM-assisted coding that's being almost entirely neglected and that's code autocomplete models. Fundamentally they're the same technology as agents and should be doing the same thing: indexing your code in the background, filtering the context, etc, but there's much less attention and it does feel like the models are stagnating.
I find that very unfortunate. Compare the two workflows:
With a normal coding agent, you write your prompt, then you have to at least a full minute for the result (generally more, depending on the task), breaking your flow and forcing you to task-switch. Then it gives you a giant mass of code and of course 99% of the time you just approve and test it because it's a slog to read through what it did. If it doesn't work as intended, you get angry at the model, retry your prompt, spending a larger amount of tokens the longer your chat history.
But with LLM-powered auto-complete, when you want, say, a function to do X, you write your comment describing it first, just like you should if you were writing it yourself. You instantly see a small section of code and if it's not what you want, you can alter your comment. Even if it's not 100% correct, multi-line autocomplete is great because you approve it line by line and can stop when it gets to the incorrect parts, and you're not forced to task switch and you don't lose your concentration, that great sense of "flow".
Fundamentally it's not that different from agentic coding - except instead of prompting in a chatbox, you write comments in the files directly. But I much prefer the quick feedback loop, the ability to ignore outputs you don't want, and the fact that I don't feel like I'm losing track of what my code is doing.
I don't trust the idea of "not getting", "not understanding", or "being out of touch" with anti-LLM (or pro-LLM) sentiment. There is nothing complicated about this divide. The pros and cons are both as plain as anything has ever been. You can disagree - even strongly - with either side. You can't "not understand".
> There is nothing complicated about this divide [...] You can't "not understand"
I beg to differ. There are a whole lot of folks with astonishingly incomplete understanding about all the facts here who are going to continue to make things very, very complicated. Disagreement is meaningless when the relevant parties are not working from the same assumption of basic knowledge.
The negative impacts of generative AI are most sharply being felt by "creatives" (artists, writers, musicians, etc), and the consumers in those markets. If the OP here is 1. a programmer 2. who works solely with other programmers and 3. who is "on the grind", mostly just consuming non-fiction blog-post content related to software development these days, rather than paying much attention to what's currently happening to the world of movies/music/literature/etc... then it'd be pretty easy for them to not be exposed very much to anti-LLM sentiment, since that sentiment is entirely occurring in these other fields that might have no relevance to their (professional or personal) life.
"Anti-LLM sentiment" within software development is nearly non-existent. The biggest kind of push-back to LLMs that we see on HN and elsewhere, is effectively just pragmatic skepticism around the effectiveness/utility/ROI of LLMs when employed for specific use-cases. Which isn't "anti-LLM sentiment" any more than skepticism around the ability of junior programmers to complete complex projects is "anti-junior-programmer sentiment."
The difference between the perspectives you find in the creative professions vs in software dev, don't come down to "not getting" or "not understanding"; they really are a question of relative exposure to these pro-LLM vs anti-LLM ideas. Software dev and the creative professions are acting as entirely separate filter-bubbles of conversation here. You can end up entirely on the outside of one or the other of them by accident, and so end up entirely without exposure to one or the other set of ideas/beliefs/memes.
(If you're curious, my own SO actually has this filter-bubble effect from the opposite end, so I can describe what that looks like. She only hears the negative sentiment coming from the creatives she follows, while also having to dodge endless AI slop flooding all the marketplaces and recommendation feeds she previously used to discover new media to consume. And her job is one you do with your hands and specialized domain knowledge; so none of her coworkers use AI for literally anything. [Industry magazines in her field say "AI is revolutionizing her industry" — but they mean ML, not generative AI.] She has no questions that ChatGPT could answer for her. She doesn't have any friends who are productively co-working with AI. She is 100% out-of-touch with pro-LLM sentiment.)
I think this is an interesting point, my one area of disagreement is that there is no "anti-LLM sentiment" in the programming community. Sure, plenty of folks expressing skepticism or disagreement are doing so from a genuine place, but just in reading this site and a few email newsletters I get I can say that there is a non-trivial percent in the programming world who are adamantly opposed to LLMs/AI. When I see comments from people in that subset, it's quite clear that they aren't approaching it from a place of skepticism, where they could be convinced given appropriate evidence or experiences.
> "Anti-LLM sentiment" within software development is nearly non-existent.
Strong disagree right there. I remember talking to a (developer) coworker a few months ago who seemed like the biggest AI proponent on our team. When we were one-on-one during a lunch though, he revealed that he really doesn't like AI that much at all, he's just afraid to speak up against it. I'm in a few Discord channels with a lot of highly skilled (senior and principal programmers) who mostly work in game development (or adjacent), and most of them either mock LLMs or have a lot of derision for it. Hacker News is kind of a weird pro-AI bubble, most other places are not nearly as keen on this stuff.
>"Anti-LLM sentiment" within software development is nearly non-existent
This is certainly untrue. I want to say "obviously", so clearly there's some kind of disconnect. Below are some examples of negative sentiments programmers have - can you explain why you are not counting these?
NOTE: I am not presenting these as an "LLMs are bad" argument. My own feelings go both ways. There is a lot that's great about LLMs, and I don't necessarily agree with every word I've written below - some of it is just my paraphrasing of what other people say. I'm only listing examples of what drives existing anti-LLM sentiment in programmers.
1. Job loss, loss of income, or threat thereof
These two are exacerbated by the pace of change, since so many people already spent their lives and money establishing themselves in the career and can't realistically pivot without becoming miserable - this is the same story for every large, fast change - though arguably this one is very large and very fast even by those standards. Lots of tech leadership is focusing even more than they already were on cheap contractors, and/or pushing employees for unrealistic productivity increases. I.e. it's exacerbating the "fast > good" problem, and a lot of leadership is also overestimating how far it reduces the barrier to creating things, as opposed to mostly just speeding up a person's existing capabilities. Some leadership is also using the apparent loss of job security as leverage beyond salary suppression (even less proportion of remote work allowed, more surveillance, worse office conditions, etc).
2. Happiness loss (in regards to the job itself, not all the other stuff in this list)
This is regarding people who enjoy writing/designing programs but don't enjoy directing LLMs; or who don't enjoy debugging the types of mistakes LLMs tend to make, as opposed to the types of mistakes that human devs tend to make. For these people, it's like their job was forcibly changed to a different, almost unrelated job, which can be miserable depending on why you were good at - or why you enjoyed - the old job.
3. Uncertainty/skepticism
I'm pushing back on your dismissal of this one as "not anti-LLM sentiment" - the comparison doesn't make sense. If I was forced to only review junior dev code instead of ever writing my own code or reviewing experienced dev code, I would be unhappy. And I love teaching juniors! And even if we ignore the subset of cases where it doesn't do a good job or assume it will soon be senior-level for every use case, this still overlaps with the above problem: The mistakes it makes are not like the mistakes a human makes. For some people, it's more unnatural/stressful to keep your eyes peeled for the kinds of mistakes it makes. For these people, it's a shift away from objective, detail-oriented, controlled, concrete thinking; away from the feeling of making something with your hands; and toward a more wishy-washy creation experience that can create a feeling of lack of control.
4. Expertise loss
A lot of positive outcomes with LLMs come from being already experienced. Some argue this will be eroded - both for new devs and existing experienced devs.
The real insight buried in here is "build what programmers love and everyone will follow." If every user has an agent that can write code against your product, your API docs become your actual product. That's a massive shift.
I'm very much looking forward to this shift. It is SO MUCH more pro-consumer than the existing SaaS model. Right now every app feels like a walled garden, with broken UX, constant redesigns, enormous amounts of telemetry and user manipulation. It feels like every time I ask for programmatic access to SaaS tools in order to simplify a workflow, I get stuck in endless meetings with product managers trying to "understand my use case", even for products explicitly marketed to programmers.
Using agents that interact with APIs represents people being able to own their user experience more. Why not craft a frontend that behaves exactly the the way YOU want it to, tailor made for YOUR work, abstracting the set of products you are using and focusing only on the actual relevant bits of the work you are doing? Maybe a downside might be that there is more explicit metering of use in these products instead of the per-user licensing that is common today. But the upside is there is so much less scope for engagement-hacking, dark patterns, useless upselling, and so on.
All metaphors break down at a certain point, but power tools and generative AI/LLMs being compared feels like somebody is romanticizing the art of programming a bit too much.
Copyright law, education, just the sheer scale of things changing because of LLMs are some things off the top of my head why "power tools vs carpentry" is a bad analogy.
if that someone is clumsy, had an active war going on against basic tools before, and wandered into the carpentry from completely different area, then power tools might be a bad idea.
So that you can be using the current frontier model for the next 8 months instead of twiddling your thumbs waiting for the next one to come out?
I think you (and others) might be misunderstanding his statement a bit. He's not saying that using an old model is harmful in the sense that it outputs bad code -- he's saying it's harmful because some of the lessons you learn will be out of date and not apply to the latest models.
So yes, if you use current frontier models, you'll need to recalibrate and unlearn a few things when the next generation comes out. But in the meantime, you will have gotten 8 months (or however long it takes) of value out of the current generation.
You also don't have to throw away everything you've learnt in those 8 months, there's some things that you'll subtly pickup that you can carry over into the next generation as well.
It's not like you need to take a course. The frontier models are the best, just using them and their harnesses and figuring out what works for your use case is the 'investing in learning'.
> Agent harnesses have not improved much since then. There are things Sketch could do well six months ago that the most popular agents cannot do today.
I think this is a neglected area that will see a lot of development in the near future. I think that even if development on AI models stopped today - if no new model was ever trained again - there are still decades of innovation ahead of us in harnessing the models we already have.
Consider ChatGPT: the first release relied entirely on its training data to answer questions. Today, it typically does a few Google searches and summarizes the results. The model has improved, but so has the way we use it.
Really? I hardly think it's neglected. The Claude Code harness is the only reason I come back to it. I've tried Claude via OpenCode or others and it doesn't work as well for me. If anything, I would even argue that prior to 4.6, the main reason Opus 4.5 felt like it improved over months was the harness.
Curious what you mean by "agent harness" here... are you distinguishing between true autonomous agents (model decides next step) vs workflows that use LLMs at specific nodes? I've found the latter dramatically more reliable for anything beyond prototyping, which makes me wonder if the "model improvement" is partly better prompting and scaffolding.
Hi, author here. I mean the piece of code that calls the model and executes the tool calls. My colleague Philip calls it “9 lines of code”: https://sketch.dev/blog/agent-loop
We have built two of them now, and clearly the state of the art here can be improved. But it is hard to push too much on this while the models keep improving.
> I am having more fun programming than I ever have, because so many more of the programs I wish I could find the time to write actually exist. I wish I could share this joy with the people who are fearful about the changes agents are bringing.
It might be just me but this reads as very tone deaf. From my perspective, CEOs are seething at the mouth to make as many developers redundant as possible, not being shy about this desire. (I don't see this at all as inevitable, but tech leaders have made their position clear)
Like, imagine the smugness of some 18th century "CEO" telling an artisan, despite the fact that he'l be resigned to working in horrific conditions at a factory, to not worry and think of all the mass produced consumer goods he may enjoy one day.
It's not at all a stretch of the imagination that current tech workers may be in a very precarious situation. All the slopware in the world wouldn't console them.
I bought Steve Yegge's "Vibe Coding" book. I think I'm about 1/4th of the way through it or so. One thing that surprised me is there's this naivete on display that workers are going to be the ones to reap the benefits of this. Like, Steve was using an example of being able to direct the agent while doing leisure activities (never mind that Steve is more of an executive/thought leader in this company, and, prior to LLMs, seemed to be out of the business of writing code). That's a nice snapshot of a reality that isn't going to persist..
While the idea of programmers working two hours a day and spending the rest of it with their family seems sunny, that's absolutely not how business is going to treat it.
Thought experiment... CEO has a team of 8 engineers. They do some experiments with AI, and they discover that their engineers are 2x more effective on average . What does the CEO do?
a) Change the workweek to 4 hours a day so that all the engineers have better work/life balance since the same amount of work is being done.
b) Fire half the engineers, make the 4 remaining guys pick up the slack, rinse and repeat until there's one guy left?
Like, come on. There's pushback on this stuff not because the technology is bad, (although it's overhyped), but because the no sane person trusts our current economic system to provide anything resembling humane treatment of workers. The super rich are perfectly fine seeing half the population become unemployed, as far as I can tell, as long as their stock numbers go up.
Look, I'm very negative about this AI thing. I think there is a great chance it will lead to something terrible and we will all die, or worse. But on the other hand, we are all going to die anyway. Some of us, the lucky ones, will die of a heart attack and will learn of our imminent demise in the second it happens, or not at all. The rest of us will have it worse. It has always been like that, and it has only gotten more devastating since we started wearing clothes and stopped being eaten alive by a savanna crocodile or freezing to death during the first snowfall of winter.
But if AI keeps getting better at code, it will produce entire in-silico simulation workflows to test new drugs or even to design synthetic life (which, again, could make us all die, or worse). Yet there is a tiny, tiny chance we will use it to fix some of the darkest aspects of human existence. I will take that.
> In 2000, less than one percent lived on farms and 1% of workers are in agriculture. That was a net benefit to the world, that we all don't have to work to eat.
The jury's still out on that one, because climate change is an existential risk.
In the past couple days I've become less skeptical of the capabilities of LLMs and now more alarmed by them, contra the author. I think if we as a society continue to accept the development of LLMs and the control of them by the major AI companies there will be massively negative repercussions. And I don't mean repercussions like "a rogue AI will destroy humanity" per se, but these things will potentially cause massive social upheaval, a large amount of negative impacts on mental health and cognition, etc. I think if you see LLMs as powerful but not dangerous you are not being honest.
First, we currently have 4 frontier labs, and a bunch of 2nd tier ones following. The fact that we don't have just oAI or just Anthropic or just Google is good in the general sense, I would say. The 4 labs racing each other and trading SotA status for ~a few weeks is good for the end consumer. They keep each other honest and keep the prices down. Imagine if Anthropic could charge 60$ /MTok or oAI could charge 120$ /MTok for their gpt4 style models. They can't in good part because of the competition.
Second, there's a bunch of labs / companies that have released and are continuing to release open mdoels. That's as close to "intelligence on tap" as you can get. And those models are ~6-12 months behind the SotA models, depending on your usecase. Even though the labs have largely different incentives to do so, a lot of them are still releasing open models. Hopefully that continues to hold. So not all control will be in the hands of big tech, even if the "best" will still be theirs. At some point "good enough" is fine.
There's also the thing about geopolitics being involved in this. So far we've seen the EU jumping the gun on regulation, and we're kinda sorta paying for it. Everyone is still confused about what can or cannot be done in the EU. The US seems to be waiting to see what happens, and China will do whatever they do. The worst thing that can happen is that at some point the big players (Anthropic is the main driver) push for regulatory capture. That would really suck. Thankfully atm there's this lingering thinking that "if we do it, the others won't so we'll be on the back foot". Hopefully this holds, at least until the "good enough" from above is out :)
I'm not just concerned about control by one company, I'm concerned by control for the profit motive, and probably concerned about the wisdom of using these things for anything except extremely limited use cases (breakthrough scientific research, etc.). I think tech people have a bad tendency of viewing this through the lens of platform wars type stakes, and there are much bigger problems with AI. The fact that an alarming number of ex-and-current Anthropic people I've met think the world is going to end is something we should take heed of!
The AI labs started down this path using the Manhattan Project as a metaphor and guess what? It's a good metaphor and we should embrace most of the wider implications of that (though I'd love to avoid all the MAD/cold war bullshit this time).
I see them as powerful and dangerous. The goal for decades now is to reduce the human population to 500 million. All human technology was pushed to this end, covertly. If we suddenly have a technology that renders white collar workers useless, we will get to that number faster than expected.
I don't believe that is true, but if it WAS true that human technology was covertly pushed to this end: there are people out there who are demanding that this technology come up with social manipulations (using language) to reduce the human population to a SPECIFIC 500 million.
Or less.
And I don't think it's collar color they're going to be checking against.
So I guess I'm saying I agree that this is powerful and dangerous. These are language models, so they're more effective against humans and their languages. And self-preservation, empathy, humanity do not play a role as there is nobody in there to be offended at the notion of intentionally killing more than 9/10 of humanity… for some definitions of humanity, ones I'm sympathetic to.
I have no problem with experienced senior devs using agents to write good code faster. What I have a problem with is inexperienced "vibecoders" who don't care to learn and instead use agents to write awful buggy code that will make the product harder to build on even for the agents. It used to be that lack of a basic understanding of the system was a barrier for people, but now it's not, so we're flooded with code written by imperfect models conducted by people who don't know good from bad.
We're in a transition phase, but this will shake out in the near future. In the non-professional space, poorly built vibecoded apps simply won't last, for any number of reasons. When it comes to professional devs, this is a problem that is solved by a combination of tooling, process, and management:
(1) Tooling to enable better evaluation of generated code and its adherence to conventions and norms (2) Process to impose requirements on the creation/exposure of PRDs/prompts/traces (3) Management to guide devs in the use of the above and to implement concrete rewards and consequences
Some organizations will be exposed as being deficient in some or all of these areas, and they will struggle. Better organizations will adapt.
Where are you encountering all this slop code? At my work we use LLMs heavily and I don't see this issue. Maybe I'm just lucky that my colleagues all have Uni degrees in CS and at least a few years experience.
> Maybe I'm just lucky that my colleagues all have Uni degrees in CS and at least a few years experience.
That's why. I was using Claude the other day to greenfield a side project and it wanted to do some important logic on the frontend that would have allowed unauthenticated users to write into my database.
It was easy to spot for me, because I've been writing software for years, and it only took a single prompt to fix. But a vibe coder wouldn't have caught it and hackers would've pwned their webapp.
You can also ask Claude to review all the code for security issues and code smells, you'd be surprised what it finds. We all write insecure code in our first pass through if we're too focused on getting the proof of concept worked out, security isnt always the very 1st thing coded, maybe its the very next thing, maybe it comes 10 changes later.
> We all write insecure code in our first pass through
no, we don't
The issue isn't when the programmers start using it. It's when the project managers start using it and think that they're producing something similar to the programmers
the number of experienced, senior programmers though, who are in “anti-LLM” camp, is still fairly staggering.
I mean when the tag line is "this will replace senior engineers and you, the senior engineer, must be forced to use it"
Then yeah, it makes sense.
Opus in Cursor is just so much more responsive and easy to talk to, compared to Opus in Claude.
Cursor has this "Auto" mode which feels like it has very liberal limits (amortized cost I guess) that I'm also trying to use more, but -- I don't really like to flip a coin and if it lands up head then waste half hour discovering the LLM made a mess the LLM and try again forcing the model.
Perhaps in March I'll bite the bullet and take this authors advice.
Just use Codex 5.3 in codex cli, the $20/mo plan is basically limitless at least for me and I keep reasoning efforts high.
You can enjoy it while it lasts, OpenAI is being very liberal with their limits because of CC eating their lunch rn.
Yeah, I can’t recommend gpt-5.3-codex enough, it’s great! I’ve been using it with the new macOS app and I’m impressed. I’ve always been a Claude Code guy and I find myself using codex more and more. Opus is still much nicer explaining issues and walking me through implementations but codex is faster (even with xhigh effort) and gets the job done 95% of the time.
I was spending unholy amounts of money and tokens (subsidized cloud credits tho) forcing Opus for everything but I’m very happy with this new setup. I’ve also experimented with OpenCode and their Zen subscription to test Kimi K2.5 an similar models and they also seem like a very good alternative for some tasks.
What I cannot stand tho is using sonnet directly (it’s fine as a subagent), I’ve found it to be hard to control and doesn’t follow detailed instructions.
> Along the way I have developed a programming philosophy I now apply to everything: the best software for an agent is whatever is best for a programmer.
Not a plug but really that’s exactly why we’re building sandboxes for agents with local laptop quality. Starting with remote xcode+sim sandboxes for iOS, high mem sandbox with Android Emulator on GPU accel for Android.
No machine allocation but composable sandboxes that make up a developer persona’s laptop.
If interested, a quick demo here https://www.loom.com/share/c0c618ed756d46d39f0e20c7feec996d
muvaf[at]limrun[dot]com
The author is correct in that agents are becoming more and more capable and that you don't need the IDE to the same extent, but I don't see that as good. I find that IDE-based agentic programming actually encourages you to read and understand your codebase as opposed to CLI-based workflows. It's so much easier to flip through files, review the changes it made, or highlight a specific function and give it to the agent, as opposed to through the CLI where you usually just give it an entire file by typing the name, and often you just pray that it manages to find the context by itself. My prompts in Cursor are generally a lot more specific and I get more surgical results than with Claude Code in the terminal purely because of the convenience of the UX.
But secondly, there's an entire field of LLM-assisted coding that's being almost entirely neglected and that's code autocomplete models. Fundamentally they're the same technology as agents and should be doing the same thing: indexing your code in the background, filtering the context, etc, but there's much less attention and it does feel like the models are stagnating.
I find that very unfortunate. Compare the two workflows:
With a normal coding agent, you write your prompt, then you have to at least a full minute for the result (generally more, depending on the task), breaking your flow and forcing you to task-switch. Then it gives you a giant mass of code and of course 99% of the time you just approve and test it because it's a slog to read through what it did. If it doesn't work as intended, you get angry at the model, retry your prompt, spending a larger amount of tokens the longer your chat history.
But with LLM-powered auto-complete, when you want, say, a function to do X, you write your comment describing it first, just like you should if you were writing it yourself. You instantly see a small section of code and if it's not what you want, you can alter your comment. Even if it's not 100% correct, multi-line autocomplete is great because you approve it line by line and can stop when it gets to the incorrect parts, and you're not forced to task switch and you don't lose your concentration, that great sense of "flow".
Fundamentally it's not that different from agentic coding - except instead of prompting in a chatbox, you write comments in the files directly. But I much prefer the quick feedback loop, the ability to ignore outputs you don't want, and the fact that I don't feel like I'm losing track of what my code is doing.
The other thing about non-agent workflows is they’re much, much less compute intensive. This is going to matter.
I don't trust the idea of "not getting", "not understanding", or "being out of touch" with anti-LLM (or pro-LLM) sentiment. There is nothing complicated about this divide. The pros and cons are both as plain as anything has ever been. You can disagree - even strongly - with either side. You can't "not understand".
> There is nothing complicated about this divide [...] You can't "not understand"
I beg to differ. There are a whole lot of folks with astonishingly incomplete understanding about all the facts here who are going to continue to make things very, very complicated. Disagreement is meaningless when the relevant parties are not working from the same assumption of basic knowledge.
The negative impacts of generative AI are most sharply being felt by "creatives" (artists, writers, musicians, etc), and the consumers in those markets. If the OP here is 1. a programmer 2. who works solely with other programmers and 3. who is "on the grind", mostly just consuming non-fiction blog-post content related to software development these days, rather than paying much attention to what's currently happening to the world of movies/music/literature/etc... then it'd be pretty easy for them to not be exposed very much to anti-LLM sentiment, since that sentiment is entirely occurring in these other fields that might have no relevance to their (professional or personal) life.
"Anti-LLM sentiment" within software development is nearly non-existent. The biggest kind of push-back to LLMs that we see on HN and elsewhere, is effectively just pragmatic skepticism around the effectiveness/utility/ROI of LLMs when employed for specific use-cases. Which isn't "anti-LLM sentiment" any more than skepticism around the ability of junior programmers to complete complex projects is "anti-junior-programmer sentiment."
The difference between the perspectives you find in the creative professions vs in software dev, don't come down to "not getting" or "not understanding"; they really are a question of relative exposure to these pro-LLM vs anti-LLM ideas. Software dev and the creative professions are acting as entirely separate filter-bubbles of conversation here. You can end up entirely on the outside of one or the other of them by accident, and so end up entirely without exposure to one or the other set of ideas/beliefs/memes.
(If you're curious, my own SO actually has this filter-bubble effect from the opposite end, so I can describe what that looks like. She only hears the negative sentiment coming from the creatives she follows, while also having to dodge endless AI slop flooding all the marketplaces and recommendation feeds she previously used to discover new media to consume. And her job is one you do with your hands and specialized domain knowledge; so none of her coworkers use AI for literally anything. [Industry magazines in her field say "AI is revolutionizing her industry" — but they mean ML, not generative AI.] She has no questions that ChatGPT could answer for her. She doesn't have any friends who are productively co-working with AI. She is 100% out-of-touch with pro-LLM sentiment.)
I think this is an interesting point, my one area of disagreement is that there is no "anti-LLM sentiment" in the programming community. Sure, plenty of folks expressing skepticism or disagreement are doing so from a genuine place, but just in reading this site and a few email newsletters I get I can say that there is a non-trivial percent in the programming world who are adamantly opposed to LLMs/AI. When I see comments from people in that subset, it's quite clear that they aren't approaching it from a place of skepticism, where they could be convinced given appropriate evidence or experiences.
> "Anti-LLM sentiment" within software development is nearly non-existent.
Strong disagree right there. I remember talking to a (developer) coworker a few months ago who seemed like the biggest AI proponent on our team. When we were one-on-one during a lunch though, he revealed that he really doesn't like AI that much at all, he's just afraid to speak up against it. I'm in a few Discord channels with a lot of highly skilled (senior and principal programmers) who mostly work in game development (or adjacent), and most of them either mock LLMs or have a lot of derision for it. Hacker News is kind of a weird pro-AI bubble, most other places are not nearly as keen on this stuff.
>"Anti-LLM sentiment" within software development is nearly non-existent
This is certainly untrue. I want to say "obviously", so clearly there's some kind of disconnect. Below are some examples of negative sentiments programmers have - can you explain why you are not counting these?
NOTE: I am not presenting these as an "LLMs are bad" argument. My own feelings go both ways. There is a lot that's great about LLMs, and I don't necessarily agree with every word I've written below - some of it is just my paraphrasing of what other people say. I'm only listing examples of what drives existing anti-LLM sentiment in programmers.
1. Job loss, loss of income, or threat thereof
These two are exacerbated by the pace of change, since so many people already spent their lives and money establishing themselves in the career and can't realistically pivot without becoming miserable - this is the same story for every large, fast change - though arguably this one is very large and very fast even by those standards. Lots of tech leadership is focusing even more than they already were on cheap contractors, and/or pushing employees for unrealistic productivity increases. I.e. it's exacerbating the "fast > good" problem, and a lot of leadership is also overestimating how far it reduces the barrier to creating things, as opposed to mostly just speeding up a person's existing capabilities. Some leadership is also using the apparent loss of job security as leverage beyond salary suppression (even less proportion of remote work allowed, more surveillance, worse office conditions, etc).
2. Happiness loss (in regards to the job itself, not all the other stuff in this list)
This is regarding people who enjoy writing/designing programs but don't enjoy directing LLMs; or who don't enjoy debugging the types of mistakes LLMs tend to make, as opposed to the types of mistakes that human devs tend to make. For these people, it's like their job was forcibly changed to a different, almost unrelated job, which can be miserable depending on why you were good at - or why you enjoyed - the old job.
3. Uncertainty/skepticism
I'm pushing back on your dismissal of this one as "not anti-LLM sentiment" - the comparison doesn't make sense. If I was forced to only review junior dev code instead of ever writing my own code or reviewing experienced dev code, I would be unhappy. And I love teaching juniors! And even if we ignore the subset of cases where it doesn't do a good job or assume it will soon be senior-level for every use case, this still overlaps with the above problem: The mistakes it makes are not like the mistakes a human makes. For some people, it's more unnatural/stressful to keep your eyes peeled for the kinds of mistakes it makes. For these people, it's a shift away from objective, detail-oriented, controlled, concrete thinking; away from the feeling of making something with your hands; and toward a more wishy-washy creation experience that can create a feeling of lack of control.
4. Expertise loss
A lot of positive outcomes with LLMs come from being already experienced. Some argue this will be eroded - both for new devs and existing experienced devs.
5. The training data ownership/morality angle
The real insight buried in here is "build what programmers love and everyone will follow." If every user has an agent that can write code against your product, your API docs become your actual product. That's a massive shift.
I'm very much looking forward to this shift. It is SO MUCH more pro-consumer than the existing SaaS model. Right now every app feels like a walled garden, with broken UX, constant redesigns, enormous amounts of telemetry and user manipulation. It feels like every time I ask for programmatic access to SaaS tools in order to simplify a workflow, I get stuck in endless meetings with product managers trying to "understand my use case", even for products explicitly marketed to programmers.
Using agents that interact with APIs represents people being able to own their user experience more. Why not craft a frontend that behaves exactly the the way YOU want it to, tailor made for YOUR work, abstracting the set of products you are using and focusing only on the actual relevant bits of the work you are doing? Maybe a downside might be that there is more explicit metering of use in these products instead of the per-user licensing that is common today. But the upside is there is so much less scope for engagement-hacking, dark patterns, useless upselling, and so on.
Related. Others?
How I program with agents - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44221655 - June 2025 (295 comments)
> It sounds like someone saying power tools should be outlawed in carpentry.
I see this a lot here
All metaphors break down at a certain point, but power tools and generative AI/LLMs being compared feels like somebody is romanticizing the art of programming a bit too much.
Copyright law, education, just the sheer scale of things changing because of LLMs are some things off the top of my head why "power tools vs carpentry" is a bad analogy.
if that someone is clumsy, had an active war going on against basic tools before, and wandered into the carpentry from completely different area, then power tools might be a bad idea.
> Using anything other than the frontier models is actively harmful
If that is true, why should one invest in learning now rather than waiting for 8 months to learn whatever is the frontier model then?
So that you can be using the current frontier model for the next 8 months instead of twiddling your thumbs waiting for the next one to come out?
I think you (and others) might be misunderstanding his statement a bit. He's not saying that using an old model is harmful in the sense that it outputs bad code -- he's saying it's harmful because some of the lessons you learn will be out of date and not apply to the latest models.
So yes, if you use current frontier models, you'll need to recalibrate and unlearn a few things when the next generation comes out. But in the meantime, you will have gotten 8 months (or however long it takes) of value out of the current generation.
You also don't have to throw away everything you've learnt in those 8 months, there's some things that you'll subtly pickup that you can carry over into the next generation as well.
It's not like you need to take a course. The frontier models are the best, just using them and their harnesses and figuring out what works for your use case is the 'investing in learning'.
How could it be actively harmful if it wasn't harmful last month when it was the frontier model?
Because you might want to use LLMs now. If not, it's definitely better to not chase the hype - ignore the whole shebang.
But if you do want to use LLMs for coding now, not using the best models just doesn't make sense.
snarky answer: so you can be that 'AI guy' at your office that everyone avoids in the snackroom
> Agent harnesses have not improved much since then. There are things Sketch could do well six months ago that the most popular agents cannot do today.
I think this is a neglected area that will see a lot of development in the near future. I think that even if development on AI models stopped today - if no new model was ever trained again - there are still decades of innovation ahead of us in harnessing the models we already have.
Consider ChatGPT: the first release relied entirely on its training data to answer questions. Today, it typically does a few Google searches and summarizes the results. The model has improved, but so has the way we use it.
Really? I hardly think it's neglected. The Claude Code harness is the only reason I come back to it. I've tried Claude via OpenCode or others and it doesn't work as well for me. If anything, I would even argue that prior to 4.6, the main reason Opus 4.5 felt like it improved over months was the harness.
Curious what you mean by "agent harness" here... are you distinguishing between true autonomous agents (model decides next step) vs workflows that use LLMs at specific nodes? I've found the latter dramatically more reliable for anything beyond prototyping, which makes me wonder if the "model improvement" is partly better prompting and scaffolding.
Hi, author here. I mean the piece of code that calls the model and executes the tool calls. My colleague Philip calls it “9 lines of code”: https://sketch.dev/blog/agent-loop
We have built two of them now, and clearly the state of the art here can be improved. But it is hard to push too much on this while the models keep improving.
An agent harness is what enables the user to seamlessly interact with both a model and tool calls. Claude Code is an agent harness.
Here's an example of a harness with less code: https://github.com/badlogic/pi-mono/blob/fdcd9ab783104285764...> I am having more fun programming than I ever have, because so many more of the programs I wish I could find the time to write actually exist. I wish I could share this joy with the people who are fearful about the changes agents are bringing.
It might be just me but this reads as very tone deaf. From my perspective, CEOs are seething at the mouth to make as many developers redundant as possible, not being shy about this desire. (I don't see this at all as inevitable, but tech leaders have made their position clear)
Like, imagine the smugness of some 18th century "CEO" telling an artisan, despite the fact that he'l be resigned to working in horrific conditions at a factory, to not worry and think of all the mass produced consumer goods he may enjoy one day.
It's not at all a stretch of the imagination that current tech workers may be in a very precarious situation. All the slopware in the world wouldn't console them.
I bought Steve Yegge's "Vibe Coding" book. I think I'm about 1/4th of the way through it or so. One thing that surprised me is there's this naivete on display that workers are going to be the ones to reap the benefits of this. Like, Steve was using an example of being able to direct the agent while doing leisure activities (never mind that Steve is more of an executive/thought leader in this company, and, prior to LLMs, seemed to be out of the business of writing code). That's a nice snapshot of a reality that isn't going to persist..
While the idea of programmers working two hours a day and spending the rest of it with their family seems sunny, that's absolutely not how business is going to treat it.
Thought experiment... CEO has a team of 8 engineers. They do some experiments with AI, and they discover that their engineers are 2x more effective on average . What does the CEO do?
a) Change the workweek to 4 hours a day so that all the engineers have better work/life balance since the same amount of work is being done.
b) Fire half the engineers, make the 4 remaining guys pick up the slack, rinse and repeat until there's one guy left?
Like, come on. There's pushback on this stuff not because the technology is bad, (although it's overhyped), but because the no sane person trusts our current economic system to provide anything resembling humane treatment of workers. The super rich are perfectly fine seeing half the population become unemployed, as far as I can tell, as long as their stock numbers go up.
Look, I'm very negative about this AI thing. I think there is a great chance it will lead to something terrible and we will all die, or worse. But on the other hand, we are all going to die anyway. Some of us, the lucky ones, will die of a heart attack and will learn of our imminent demise in the second it happens, or not at all. The rest of us will have it worse. It has always been like that, and it has only gotten more devastating since we started wearing clothes and stopped being eaten alive by a savanna crocodile or freezing to death during the first snowfall of winter.
But if AI keeps getting better at code, it will produce entire in-silico simulation workflows to test new drugs or even to design synthetic life (which, again, could make us all die, or worse). Yet there is a tiny, tiny chance we will use it to fix some of the darkest aspects of human existence. I will take that.
> In 2000, less than one percent lived on farms and 1% of workers are in agriculture. That was a net benefit to the world, that we all don't have to work to eat.
The jury's still out on that one, because climate change is an existential risk.
Existential? Maybe to beachfront property owners
Everybody gangsta until the permafrost starts leaking massive amounts of methane.
Did you know that 10% of the world's population lives in coastal zones at low elevations?
The author has a github.
In the past couple days I've become less skeptical of the capabilities of LLMs and now more alarmed by them, contra the author. I think if we as a society continue to accept the development of LLMs and the control of them by the major AI companies there will be massively negative repercussions. And I don't mean repercussions like "a rogue AI will destroy humanity" per se, but these things will potentially cause massive social upheaval, a large amount of negative impacts on mental health and cognition, etc. I think if you see LLMs as powerful but not dangerous you are not being honest.
There are some good things here:
First, we currently have 4 frontier labs, and a bunch of 2nd tier ones following. The fact that we don't have just oAI or just Anthropic or just Google is good in the general sense, I would say. The 4 labs racing each other and trading SotA status for ~a few weeks is good for the end consumer. They keep each other honest and keep the prices down. Imagine if Anthropic could charge 60$ /MTok or oAI could charge 120$ /MTok for their gpt4 style models. They can't in good part because of the competition.
Second, there's a bunch of labs / companies that have released and are continuing to release open mdoels. That's as close to "intelligence on tap" as you can get. And those models are ~6-12 months behind the SotA models, depending on your usecase. Even though the labs have largely different incentives to do so, a lot of them are still releasing open models. Hopefully that continues to hold. So not all control will be in the hands of big tech, even if the "best" will still be theirs. At some point "good enough" is fine.
There's also the thing about geopolitics being involved in this. So far we've seen the EU jumping the gun on regulation, and we're kinda sorta paying for it. Everyone is still confused about what can or cannot be done in the EU. The US seems to be waiting to see what happens, and China will do whatever they do. The worst thing that can happen is that at some point the big players (Anthropic is the main driver) push for regulatory capture. That would really suck. Thankfully atm there's this lingering thinking that "if we do it, the others won't so we'll be on the back foot". Hopefully this holds, at least until the "good enough" from above is out :)
I'm not just concerned about control by one company, I'm concerned by control for the profit motive, and probably concerned about the wisdom of using these things for anything except extremely limited use cases (breakthrough scientific research, etc.). I think tech people have a bad tendency of viewing this through the lens of platform wars type stakes, and there are much bigger problems with AI. The fact that an alarming number of ex-and-current Anthropic people I've met think the world is going to end is something we should take heed of!
The AI labs started down this path using the Manhattan Project as a metaphor and guess what? It's a good metaphor and we should embrace most of the wider implications of that (though I'd love to avoid all the MAD/cold war bullshit this time).
I see them as powerful and dangerous. The goal for decades now is to reduce the human population to 500 million. All human technology was pushed to this end, covertly. If we suddenly have a technology that renders white collar workers useless, we will get to that number faster than expected.
I don't believe that is true, but if it WAS true that human technology was covertly pushed to this end: there are people out there who are demanding that this technology come up with social manipulations (using language) to reduce the human population to a SPECIFIC 500 million.
Or less.
And I don't think it's collar color they're going to be checking against.
So I guess I'm saying I agree that this is powerful and dangerous. These are language models, so they're more effective against humans and their languages. And self-preservation, empathy, humanity do not play a role as there is nobody in there to be offended at the notion of intentionally killing more than 9/10 of humanity… for some definitions of humanity, ones I'm sympathetic to.