The problem with statements like these is that I work with people who make the same claims, but are slowly building useless, buggy monstrosities that for various reasons nobody can/will call out.
Obviously I’m reasonably willing to believe that you are an exception. However every person I’ve interacted with who makes this same claim has presented me with a dumpster fire and expected me to marvel at it.
I'm not going to dispute your own experience with people who aren't using this stuff effectively, but the great thing about the internet is that you can use it to track the people who are making the very best use of any piece of technology.
This line of reasoning is smelling pretty "no true Scotsman" to me. I'm sure there were amazing ColdFusion devs, but that hardly justifies the use of the technology. Likewise "This tool works great on the condition that you need to hire a Simon Willison level dev" is almost a fault. I'm pretty confident you could squeeze some juice out of a Markov Chain (ignoring, of course, that decoder-only LLMs are basically fancy MCs).
In a weird way it sort of reminds me of Common Lisp. When I was younger I thought it was the most beautiful language and a shame that it wasn't more widely adopted. After a few decades in the field I've realized it's probably for the best since the average dev would only use it to create elaborate foot guns.
"elaborate foot guns" -- HN is a high signal environment, but I could read for a week and not find a gem like this. Props.
Destiny visits me on my 18th birthday and says, "Gart, your mediocrity will result in a long series of elaborate foot guns. Be humble. You are warned."
Meh, smart high-agency people can write good software, and they can go on to leverage powerful tools in productive ways.
All I see in your post is equivalent to something like: you're surrounded by boot camp coders who write the worst garbage you've ever seen, so now you have doubts for anyone who claims they've written some good shit. Psh, yeah right, you mean a mudball like everyone else?
In that scenario there isn't much a skilled software engineer with different experiences can interject because you've already made your decision, and your decision is based on experiences more visceral than anything they can add.
I do sympathize that you've grown impatient with the tools and the output of those around you instead of cracking that nut.
But isn't this true of all technologies? I know plenty of people who are amazing Python developers. I've also seen people make a huge mess, turning a three-week project into a half-year mess because of their incredible lack of understanding of the tools they were using (Django, fittingly enough for this conversation).
That there's a learning curve, especially with a new technology, and that only the people at the forefront of using that technology are getting results with it - that's just a very common pattern. As the technology improves and material about it improves - it becomes more useful to everyone.
We have gpt-5 and gemini 2.5 pro at work, and both of them produce huge amounts of basically shit code that doesn’t work.
Every time i reach for them recently I end up spending more time refactoring the bad code out or in deep hostage negotiations with the chatbot of the day that I would have been faster writing it myself.
That and for some reason they occasionally make me really angry.
Oh a bunch of prompts in and then it hallucinated some library a dependency isn’t even using and spews a 200 line diff at me, again, great.
Although at least i can swear at them and get them to write me little apology poems..
On the sometimes getting angry part, I feel you. I don't even understand why it happens, but it's always a weird moment when I notice it. I know I'm talking to a machine and it can't learn from its mistakes, but it's still very frustrating to get back yet another here's the actual no bullshit fix, for real this time, pinky promise.
Via the jetbrains plugin, has an 'agent' mode and can edit files and call tools so on, yes I setup MCP integrations and so on also. Still kinda sucks. shrug.
I keep flipping between this is the end of our careers, to I'm totally safe. So far this is the longest 'totally safe' period I've had since GPT-2 or so came along..
I abandoned Claude Code pretty quickly, I find generic tools give generic answers, but since I do Elixir I’m ”blessed” with Tidewave which gives a much better experience. I hope more people get to experience framework built tooling instead of just generic stuff.
It still wants to build an airplane to go out with the trash sometimes and will happily tell you wrong is right. However I much prefer it trying to figure it out by reading logs, schemas and do browser analysis automatically than me feeding logs etc manually.
