My wild hot take prediction is that we’re going to see a resurgence of writing code by hand.
Not fully without using an LLM, but more of the human writing the code and the LLM assisting with knowledge, compiler errors, etc
This will probably age like milk, but it’s definitely where I’m feeling myself going.
Amusing: I'm hearing that at several tech companies, a more frequent topic on internal knowledge sharing sessions is about efficient AI usage.
Cannot really remember topics like "techniques for faster CI/CD" or "how to speed up builds" being THIS widely discussed in the past!
CEOs are quietly realizing the AI replacement plan has a problem.
Two problems, actually.
One: the token costs for running AI agents are now exceeding what they were paying the employees they fired.
Two: when the tokens run out, the AI stops. Just stops. No continuity. No workaround. Just a spinning wheel where your workforce used to be.
You fired humans to save money and bought a subscription that bills you into a corner.
The employees you let go knew what to do when things broke.
The AI just invoices you for the outage.
And then there’s the permission problem nobody wants to talk about.
To do its job, the AI agent needs access. Full access. Your systems, your patents, your contracts, your future plans. Everything you spent years building, handed over to a process that has no loyalty, no discretion, and no skin in the game.
You didn’t hire a replacement.
You gave a stranger with no soul the keys to everything you own.
Enjoy.
Uber’s COO has said that it’s getting “harder to justify” its AI costs because there was no way to show a link between AI spend and any meaningful increase in useful features. This is the first time I’ve seen a company say this directly.
https://t.co/xUhZvtpwah
I've yet to see, or hear of a company that is winning against its competition, because said company is spending more on AI tools, or using it better than the competition.
Ways I see companies win:
- better product
- better marketing
- cheaper prices
- better unit economic
- more funds raised
etc
I'm still writing 95% of all my production code by hand. I let it write tests, fix bugs, answer questions, analyze data, build prototypes, but I do not at work let the thing just rip on an architecture I know will have to be maintained into the future.
The amount of effort these AI companies are putting into replacing software engineers......
If they put that much effort into solving real-world problems, the world would have been a better place
Maybe I'm dating and deprecating myself in a single stroke, but I genuinely struggle seeing a productivity increase from agentic coding. I try, I retry, like every 2-3 weeks. I always end up tired and slow, either from hand-holding in real time or spending hours undoing the slop.