Post

Skill issue.

Dan Tappan@dantappan.net

Cory Doctorow describes what has been my thesis about “AI” coding: it’s great for small productivity projects, it’s a source of crippling tech debt for production code and libraries.

Accurate that it's a skill issue. Why is being a bit flippant about it but it's accurate. Good engineers know how to get good work out of llms; bad ones produce tech debt. Same as ever

lol I know you're joking but it's been weird how often people seem to think talent and experience aren't still a factor Like, in both directions: 1, rookies don't need to know what you're doing anymore, and 2, experienced engineers aren't capable of evaluating whether AI coding is good or not

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Obviously item 2 gets me pretty frustrated. I'm surrounded by the most talented engineers I've ever met. Seems remarkable to me that they all agree ai coding is effective, and that theyre producing incredible software with it. Seems like we should believe the experts on this

Agree with a caveat that I could imagine talented engineers looking back on 2026 and saying "in retrospect we didn't really know what we were doing back then." But it would be weird to bet against people learning from mistakes and recovering. That is, it would still be a skill issue in the end.

A lot of people who are not engineers or coders have VERY strong opinions about how all this works. Because a writer told them so.

Hmm. While I agree that talented software engineers are very good at using imperfect tools, it's also true that software engineers tend to overestimate their productivity, the quality of the code they generate, and the impact of tools. (And I say that as a long-time software tool developer!)

So ... I dunno. If your team has been using AI more extensively over the last year, at least from the outside it doesn't seem like it's translated to significant additional functionality, improved quality, or delivering improvements that would lead to user growth.

An honest accounting of this would be, it started about 6 months ago, has delivered huge immediate benefits to the internal systems management, and the outward facing software projects are grander in scope than before and require commiserate rigor - meaning they still take time

It'll be really interesting once we figure out exactly what the divide is between people who can't get good output from coding agents and those who can Because it's not "the people getting good output are idiots shilling technology" nor is it "the people getting bad output are just dumb"

Like is there something in the way those with a negative experience are prompting? Are those who are getting better output just less prescriptive with their evaluation? Like I prompt like I'm talking to a coworker, are others prompting like they're talking to a machine doing their bidding?

Some of it probably is picking your battles. Llms at a minimum are really good for doing things you know should be a general shape, but don't have time to do. Then you just verify it like any code review.

Heh yeah probs I mean, when we evaluate candidates now it's almost entirely about the depth of knowledge. We watch them write prompts and it's like peering into their brain. How well people understand the engineering principles at play seems determinant

we unironically need models trained for specific job functions. senior dev? you can use Claude Fable. junior dev? here's a model trained just for you that explains concepts well, checks itself for accuracy at the expense of speed, and refuses to answer easy questions you can google