Cory Doctorow: The people who tell you ‘AI is changing everything’ are lying

On the contrary - the people who tell you AI doesn’t add any value and will disappear in a few years are either lying, dumb, or completely ignorant of what AI can already do.

I’m a software developer since the 90s, basically before the internet, we had some C books for reference and that’s it. I can tell you that I started last year to use copilot in vscode and some chatgpt on a web page, and it basically changed my world, and all my 50+ years old coworkers are amazed by what it can do really.

You are right it will not fade at all in software development.

Completely disagree. The difficult part of software development was never writing code OR speed of delivery. It was understanding requirements and problem solving. LLMs still can not do either of those things and there is no evidence they ever will be able to.

An example of how harmful LLMs actually are to development can succinctly be described with an issue I had a few weeks ago. I found an issue in an open source project, code was fine if a bit hard to understand. I came up with a PR to fix the problem.

In the time from me checking out the code to submitting the PR, a little less than 24 hours, the maintainer had completely rewritten the entire project with Claude. It was complete nonsense. Incredibly difficult to understand. Abstracting things that didn’t need abstracting. My PR was useless, because the entire project was new. The maintainer definitely didn’t understand the changes either. If a bug came up there’s no way AI would be able to solve it (the bug was still there even though the code was entirely new).

LLMs don’t understand the code. They just make things that look like they will work. And then a human has to maintain it (or keep paying billions of dollars for Claude to try to fix it).

I’m not a kid doing some vibe coding, of course I know what I want and basically know how to implement it, the AI is just helping me writing it, auto-complete and all.

The overwhelming majority of software development occurs on a team. You understanding what you’ve asked an AI to do doesn’t mean jack when you need to make sure an entire team can understand it five years from now. And LLMs tend to write code that is incomprehensible to another person the next day.