I tried really hard to get senior management to understand this where I work. Yes, AI is an accelerator, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's going to accelerate you in the "right" direction.
“I wanted to see if I can get in on this 10x magic. I decided to put my money where my mouth was and I bought $10 worth of DeepSeek credits to use with a project I was working on.“
I'm sure DeepSeek isn't the point here. You can change the name to whatever you prefer and the article still holds.
Actually, I think the author put DeepSeek on purpose to avoid the obvious ChatGPT/Claude comparison — because whatever he chose, there would be a question of why model A and not B, while the point of the article isn't about models comparison at all.
There are some good points, and I ask the question of where is the ground breaking stuff myself, but severely weakened by
* stretching the timeline: the actual real programming ability appeared in LLMs in the last 6-8 months, not 3-4 years,
* using the weakest possible tool: and I bought $10 worth of DeepSeek credits that is a far cry from Claude with Fable.
Also, I know nothing about marathons but for most uses putting the app, database, and background processes on the same server is very much the right starting point. With the next steps being employing Cloudflare or similar solutions long before managing a fleet of servers.
I remember being told in early 2025 that only now has "real programming ability" appeared in LLMs.
And since then there's been 3 more "now real programming ability has been made available and previous stuff was just toy examples" cycles (summer 2025, winter 2025 and spring 2026)
Looking forward to the next "everything before this was trivial and bad, here's the good stuff" moment
'Or else admit this is a dopamine game that makes you feel like The Universe's Most Special Programmer™ when it's really just gamified mass-scale intellectual dependency.'
His AI experience is $10 of DeepSeek - but I think he is right anyway in the main points.
You can most definitely ship crap much faster than you used to. It's obvious to anyone when you're shipping crap. And it seems everywhere I look people are shipping crap. Both software and writing.
The hardest part of shipping quality software is not and has never been "writing the code". The hard parts are product taste, architecture and ensuring your product actually solves the problems it should in an efficient and secure manner.
If you don't have an intuition of those, you will likely still be shipping crap. Just faster.
At least once a week I have to drop what I'm doing and race in to stop the non dev manager from merging a fully vibe coded patch which will blow up production. Claude Code has made this guy a negative 10x developer.
> The chatbot recommended some of the dumbest shit you could possibly do
The "I tried it and it sucked" is borderline conspiratorial at this point. There are enough talented, thoughtful developers saying there's something real here, and it is worth believing them and investing some time to understand it, even if you come out the other side and decide you don't want to use LLMs.
Use a very good model. Set up a good harness. Spend some time on your system prompts and skills. Develop your intuitions about how the model works, what it's good at, how to scope the work, and how to steer it. Recognize when it's alleviating menial work and recognize when it's making choices you really need to understand yourself. Be patient and accept that the failures are going to be very painful for a while.
Don't write it off until you've genuinely seen the upsides.
You describe my experience with Claude (except my gut feeling is that system prompts and especially skills are useless, and I've even done limited testing that agrees with that).
However, your discourse is not the usual borderline religious discourse that's used by LLM advocates. You're not extreme enough either pro or against LLMs :)
> Don't write it off until you've genuinely seen the upsides.
This is ridiculous. Basically you're saying "if you try it and find it sucks, you're wrong, keep at it until you change your mind". That isn't a tool at that point, it's a religion.
If one truly believes it's not in a bubble, then borrow and leverage an unlimited amount and bet the house & your family on creating a business with infinite growth and value. Don't know how to do your own prompts? Borrow and then hire others to do it for you. If those who you hire don't know, they can hire others too.*
[* This is not financial advice. Please don't actually do this.]
You could make the converse argument, too: why don't you borrow and leverage and bet and short these AI companies, if you so vehemently think it's a bubble?
The bottom line is that markets are complicated, useful technologies are often accompanied by bubbles, investors are not always rational, and people generally try to make the best decision with the information they have available. The answer is likely somewhere in the middle, but that's a lot more boring and a lot less inflammatory.
Wow. I guess that’s the punchline!
Actually, I think the author put DeepSeek on purpose to avoid the obvious ChatGPT/Claude comparison — because whatever he chose, there would be a question of why model A and not B, while the point of the article isn't about models comparison at all.
Now with AI I can 10x my output and 10x my bad code!
Why not use actual frontier models, and you know do some real research, before writing a blog post?
* stretching the timeline: the actual real programming ability appeared in LLMs in the last 6-8 months, not 3-4 years,
* using the weakest possible tool: and I bought $10 worth of DeepSeek credits that is a far cry from Claude with Fable.
Also, I know nothing about marathons but for most uses putting the app, database, and background processes on the same server is very much the right starting point. With the next steps being employing Cloudflare or similar solutions long before managing a fleet of servers.
Or B that the ideas are there but are not get released as the code is ai slop?
And since then there's been 3 more "now real programming ability has been made available and previous stuff was just toy examples" cycles (summer 2025, winter 2025 and spring 2026)
Looking forward to the next "everything before this was trivial and bad, here's the good stuff" moment
Disesdi Shoshana Cox
You can most definitely ship crap much faster than you used to. It's obvious to anyone when you're shipping crap. And it seems everywhere I look people are shipping crap. Both software and writing.
The hardest part of shipping quality software is not and has never been "writing the code". The hard parts are product taste, architecture and ensuring your product actually solves the problems it should in an efficient and secure manner.
If you don't have an intuition of those, you will likely still be shipping crap. Just faster.
Seriously, that was the lowest level of skill I saw in 30 years of development.
Now we have people who can't even do that proudly showing off PRs to widely used products.
"B-b-but I do the systems design and hard thinking".
Sure, buddy.
you want more SaaS?
The "I tried it and it sucked" is borderline conspiratorial at this point. There are enough talented, thoughtful developers saying there's something real here, and it is worth believing them and investing some time to understand it, even if you come out the other side and decide you don't want to use LLMs.
Use a very good model. Set up a good harness. Spend some time on your system prompts and skills. Develop your intuitions about how the model works, what it's good at, how to scope the work, and how to steer it. Recognize when it's alleviating menial work and recognize when it's making choices you really need to understand yourself. Be patient and accept that the failures are going to be very painful for a while.
Don't write it off until you've genuinely seen the upsides.
However, your discourse is not the usual borderline religious discourse that's used by LLM advocates. You're not extreme enough either pro or against LLMs :)
This is ridiculous. Basically you're saying "if you try it and find it sucks, you're wrong, keep at it until you change your mind". That isn't a tool at that point, it's a religion.
[* This is not financial advice. Please don't actually do this.]
The bottom line is that markets are complicated, useful technologies are often accompanied by bubbles, investors are not always rational, and people generally try to make the best decision with the information they have available. The answer is likely somewhere in the middle, but that's a lot more boring and a lot less inflammatory.