I think it is going to continue to get better, and I don't think we'll be having this argument in two years time. Our entire industry will look very different.

We're not at the stage to measure yet. We may be behind others, not sure. Actually, this isn't quite true. I was interested, so a created an ad-hoc report (with AI) on PRs landed per week over time. This has gone up over the last 6 momths. But that is hard to say why that is. It might just be people are raising smaller PRs because it becomes easy to have the AI split things up, while before, people were too lazy to do this.

Our bottleneck is still that we want humans to review. Sometimes we spot errors, but our pre-existing testing frameworks are very robust already, so if these pass, we're very confident to release to production, and the agent is excellent at understanding the existing testing frameworks and adding to them for new stuff.

So in our team, we don't often see blatant logic errors. It is mostly to do with things like using a pattern that is used elsewhere in the codebase (or not at all) and doesn't belong in our specific section of the code (we have a large monorepo). These become fewer as we enhance our ruleset (AGENTS.md or CLAUDE.md) for our particular developers.

Not really. This is a discussion about what code looks like if AI can write applications that are as good, stable, correct as humans.

I think they can, better than most programmers at the moment, with the correct guardrails and supervision. But in time, I think we may not need to review the code at all, but instead verify correctness and performance only. The AI can write the code however it likes.

Obviously I don't have a proof for this, but based on the progress I've seen so far, if someone forced me to bet one way or the other, this is what I'd bet on.

This is a lie. Provably so. Exhibit the other post replying to you.

But this is not unexpected, the entire brexit campaign was one lie after another, and the supporters lied about it continually too.

For much hilarity, read this. I still laugh each time:

https://www.reaction.life/p/britain-looks-like-brexit

That is the entire purpose of "quality of code".

If the end user experiences a correctly performing application, now, and in the future, they don't care at all what the code looks like.

AIs could resort to a single global array of primitives and forget all about functions, and just use gotos if it helped them (it probably doesn't).

If AIs can generate code that looks ridiculous to humans but over time has the correct performance, the correct behaviour, no-one outside of software engineers will know or care.

And at my own firm, I think every developer is generating most of their code using agentic coding. We're still sceptical enough that we are doing the usual heavy handed human review process, so we're not seeing a huge speed up in delivery times, but we are seeing a volume increase. That is because writing the changes and raising the PRs is much faster, but also a lot of boring admin and support work is now mostly done by LLMs. Reports of instability, vague client requests, etc? Throw the LLM at them and it usually figure it out why I continue to engineer.

So I know, first hand, that these things are very good. I also know second and third hand that pretty much every fintech in the industry is as heavily using agentic coding as we are.

And then I come to HN or reddit and I see people telling us that they cannot write decent production code, and this is just wrong. This isn't opinion wrong, it is objectively wrong. Any fintech that wants to keep up will tell you this.

I can't speak for other industries but I can't imagine they're different.

So, I'm not sure what to conclude from this. I don't want to be uncharitable, but when HN/reddit posts just don't match the reality I see for myself, I have no choice but to categorise them as being emotionally driven to stick to a particular narrative, and so I can dismiss them.

Would you mind talking about your experience making the 2 godot games? Which agent and model did you use? I've been wanting to dabble here and interested to hear stories.

I don't wacth/read his content at all because I find AI-doomers really boring and tiresome.

What would your reformed EU look like?

Agreed, it is pooling sovereignty. The UK already does that with a union of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Pooling sovereignty is often regarded as a benefit on the whole.

I am willing to bet your mother never encountered anything of the sort. Most of the old very rough areas in London are now gentrified (people complain about it). You can pretty much walk around anywhere in London, at night, without any issues. Phone snatching is the major problem, but general crime, violent crime, ghettoism, etc are all down since 2000.

I know this, because I am an immigrant from a 3rd world country, have lived in London for 25+ years. And the stats show it too.

Your post really makes me angry.

What do you mean by "vibe engineering"?

It really depends on what you mean by this on how people can agree or disagree with you.

My guess is that in any sense that you mean it, you're almost certainly wrong. AI coding and engineering will continue to improve until any developer who refuses to use it will be unemployable at corporate gigs, and outcompeted even in freelance stuff.

Yes, I agree, wealth inequality is massively skewed. But that is a different argument. In the end, if productivity increases and share prices go up, you and I are share holders (I presume you're saving for retirement), and we benefit. As does virtually every other person saving for retirement in the market.

Again, inequality is real, and is going to have to be addressed, but it is not the argument here.

You mean our pension funds?