The section on IDEs/agent swarms/fallibility resonated a lot for me; I haven't gone quite as far as Karpathy in terms of power usage of Claude Code, but some of the shifts in mistakes (and reality vs. hype) analysis he shared seems spot on in my (caveat: more limited) experience.

> "IDEs/agent swarms/fallability. Both the "no need for IDE anymore" hype and the "agent swarm" hype is imo too much for right now. The models definitely still make mistakes and if you have any code you actually care about I would watch them like a hawk, in a nice large IDE on the side. The mistakes have changed a lot - they are not simple syntax errors anymore, they are subtle conceptual errors that a slightly sloppy, hasty junior dev might do. The most common category is that the models make wrong assumptions on your behalf and just run along with them without checking. They also don't manage their confusion, they don't seek clarifications, they don't surface inconsistencies, they don't present tradeoffs, they don't push back when they should, and they are still a little too sycophantic. Things get better in plan mode, but there is some need for a lightweight inline plan mode. They also really like to overcomplicate code and APIs, they bloat abstractions, they don't clean up dead code after themselves, etc. They will implement an inefficient, bloated, brittle construction over 1000 lines of code and it's up to you to be like "umm couldn't you just do this instead?" and they will be like "of course!" and immediately cut it down to 100 lines. They still sometimes change/remove comments and code they don't like or don't sufficiently understand as side effects, even if it is orthogonal to the task at hand. All of this happens despite a few simple attempts to fix it via instructions in CLAUDE . md. Despite all these issues, it is still a net huge improvement and it's very difficult to imagine going back to manual coding. TLDR everyone has their developing flow, my current is a small few CC sessions on the left in ghostty windows/tabs and an IDE on the right for viewing the code + manual edits."

It's been a bit like the boiling frog analogy for me

I started by copy pasting more and more stuff in chatgpt. Then using more and more in-IDE prompting, then more and more agent tools (Claude etc). And suddenly I realise I barely hand code anymore

For sure there's still a place for manual coding, especially schemas/queries or other fiddly things where a tiny mistake gets amplified, but the vast majority of "basic work" is now just prompting, and honestly the code quality is _better_ that it was before, all kinds of refactors I didn't think about or couldn't be bothered with have almost automatically

And people still call them stochastic parrots

> And people still call them stochastic parrots

Both can be true. You're tapping into every line of code publicly available, and your day-to-day really isn't that unique. They're really good at this kind of work.

I find myself even for small work, telling CC to fix it for me is better as it usually belongs to a thread of work, and then it understands the big picture better.

I've had the opposite experience, it's been a long time listening to people going "It's really good now" before it developed to a permutation that was actually worth the time to use it.

ChatGPT 3.5/4 (2023-2024): The chat interface was verbose and clunky and it was just... wrong... like 70+% of the time. Not worth using.

CoPilot autocomplete and Gitlab Duo and Junie (late 2024-early 2025): Wayyy too aggressive at guessing exactly what I wasn't doing and hijacked my tab complete when pre-LLM type-tetris autocomplete was just more reliable.

Copilot Edit/early Cursor (early 2025): Ok, I can sort of see uses here but god is picking the right files all the time such a pain as it really means I need to have figured out what I wanted to do in such detail already that what was even the point? Also the models at that time just quickly descended into incoherency after like three prompts, if it went off track good luck ever correcting it.

Copilot Agent mode / Cursor (late 2025): Ok, great, if the scope is narrowly scoped, and I'm either going to write the tests for it or it's refactoring existing code it could do something. Like something mechanical like the library has a migration where we need to replace the use of methods A/B/C and replace them with a different combination of X/Y/Z. great, it can do that. Or like CRUD controller #341. I mean, sure, if my boss is going to pay for it, but not life changing.

Zed Agent mode / Cursor agent mode / Claude code (early 2026): Finally something where I can like describe the architecture and requirements of a feature, let it code, review that code, give it written instructions on how to clean it up / refactor / missing tests, and iterate.

But that was like 2 years of "really it's better and revolutionary now" before it actually got there. Now maybe in some languages or problem domains, it was useful for people earlier but I can understand people who don't care about "but it works now" when they're hearing it for the sixth time.

And I mean, what one hand gives the other takes away. I have a decent amount of new work dealing with MRs from my coworkers where they just grabbed the requirements from a stakeholder, shoved it into Claude or Cursor and it passed the existing tests and it's shipped without much understanding. When they wrote them themselves, they tested it more and were more prepared to support it in production...

Are game developers vibe coding with agents?

It's such a visual and experiential thing that writing true success criteria it can iterate on seems like borderline impossible ahead of time.

Vibe coding in Unreal Engine is of limited use. It obviously helps with C++, but so much of your time is doing things that are not C++. It hurts a lot that UE relies heavily on blueprints, if they were code you could just vibecode a lot of that.

I don't "vibe code" but when I use an LLM with a game I usually branch out into several experiments which I don't have to commit to. Thus, it just makes that iteration process go faster.

Or slower, when the LLM doesn't understand what I want, which is a bigger issue when you spawn experiments from scratch (and have given limited context around what you are about to do).

I'm trying it out with Godot for my little side projects. It can handle writing the GUI files for nodes and settings. The workflow is asking cursor to change something, I review the code changes, then load up the game in Godot to check out the changes. Works pretty well. I'm curious if any Unity or Unreal devs are using it since I'm sure its a similar experience.

A big problem is that a lot of game logic is done in visual scripting (e.g unreal blueprints) which AI tools have no idea about

It might be biased to Reddit/Twitter users but from what I've seen game developers seem to be much more averse towards using AI (even for coding) than other fields.

Which is curious since prototyping helps a lot in gamedev.

Great point about expansion vs speedup. I now have time to build custom tools, implement more features, try out different API designs, get 100% test coverage.. I can deliver more quickly, but can also deliver more overall.

> - How much of society is bottlenecked by digital knowledge work?

Any qualified guesses?

I'm not convinced more traders on wall street will allocate capital more effectively leading to economic growth.

Will more programmers grow the economy? Or should we get real jobs ;)

Most of this countries challenges are strictly political. The pittance of work software can contribute is most likely negligible or destructive (e.g. software buttons in cars or palantir). In other words were picked all the low hanging fruit and all that left is to hang ourselves.

I actually disagree. Having software (AI) that can cut through the technological stuff faster will make people more aware of political problems.

edit: country's* all that is left*

The AGI vibes with Claude Code are real, but the micromanagement tax is heavy. I spend most of my time babysitting agents.

I expect interviews will evolve into "build project X with an LLM while we watch" and audit of agent specs

Sounds great to me. Leetcode is outdated and heavily abused by people who share the questions ahead of time in various forums and chats.

From what I've heard, what few interviews there are for software engineers these days, they do have you use models and see how quickly you can build things.

The interviews I’ve given have asked about how control for AI slop without hurting your colleagues feelings. Anyone can prompt and build, the harder part, as usual for business, is knowing how and when to say, ‘no.’

I've been doing vibe code interviews for nearly a year now. Most people are surprisingly bad with AI tools. We specifically ask them to bring their preferred tool, yet 20–30% still just copy-paste code from ChatGPT.

fun stats: corelation is real, people who were good at vibe code, also had offer(s) with other companies that didn't run vibe code interviews.

Interesting you say that, feels like when people were too stupid to google things and "googling something" was a skill that some had and others didn't.

Copy pasting from chatgpt is the most secure option.

Not going from home is the most secure way of going out.

It doesn’t work you can’t be productive without agent capable of doing queries to db etc

>Not going from home is the most secure way of going out.

What? I can't parse this sentence. Maybe get an ai to rewrite it?

Also the method that will result in the higher quality codebase.

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