Max Woolf and DHH are clearly experienced developers who continue to write code for money.
Linus too - 11 commits to the kernel today! https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commits?author=torvalds
Plus this very thread is full of experienced developers who are saying that "coding agents are now useful when they weren't before":
- ACS_Solver: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49052570#49057367
- suzzer99: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49052570#49060743
- IshKebab: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49052570#49056074
- smrtinsert: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49052570#49055294
- qarl2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49052570#49053318
A few bonuses:
Mitchell Hashimoto: https://mitchellh.com/writing/my-ai-adoption-journey
> While I was still a heavy AI skeptic [... through to ...] At this point I was firmly in the "no way I can go back" territory.
Steve Klabnik: https://steveklabnik.com/writing/getting-started-with-claude...
> 2025 was an interesting year in many ways. One way in which it was interesting for me is that I went from an AI hater to a pretty big user.
Nolan Lawson: https://nolanlawson.com/2026/01/24/ai-tribalism/
> 2025 was a weird year for me. If you had asked me exactly a year ago, I would have said I thought LLMs were amusing toys but inappropriate for real software development. [...] Today, I would say that about 90% of my code is authored by Claude Code.
Funny coming from a guy using Linus saying "There's no doubt AI is useful today" and interpreting that as "Yeah last year AI coding agents were garbage but now they're really useful".
There's no denying AI is useful. I use AI, my project at work is all about using LLMs. They're even useful for coding, when I don't give a fuck about the quality of the output (which is almost never in a work scenario).
But to claim that there has been some magical shift late last year is simply laughable. Anyone working as a software engineer and claims that is either lying to themselves or simply bad.
Oh and don't try with the "you're not prompting it right".
Or to strengthen the case for Linus, here he is on June 16th 2926 saying: https://youtu.be/YKkEe-PxW10?t=1687
> we certainly saw more junk being generated by LLMs than we saw useful code up until the like early this year
The world needs to SEE what is coming out of all this spending. Guess what? It aint much! Thats why firms are in a hurry to review their expenditures and switch to chinese offerings.
I hate to break it to you - but wake up. You are not living in reality.
Oh yes, dev celebs that rely on constant validation through social media. Very reliable source of data.
> November was, for me and many others in tech, a great surprise. Before, A.I. coding tools were often useful, but halting and clumsy. Now, the bot can run for a full hour and make whole, designed websites and apps that may be flawed, but credible. I spent an entire session of therapy talking about it.
Max Woolf is a good one: https://minimaxir.com/2026/02/ai-agent-coding/
> The real annoying thing about Opus 4.6/Codex 5.3 is that it’s impossible to publicly say “Opus 4.5 (and the models that came after it) are an order of magnitude better than coding LLMs released just months before it” without sounding like an AI hype booster clickbaiting, but it’s the counterintuitive truth to my personal frustration. [...] A year ago, I was one of those skeptics who was very suspicious of the agentic hype.
DHH - https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/dhhs-new-way-of-w...
> Six months ago, in an episode of the Lex Fridman podcast, David shared how he doesn’t use AI tools to write code: he types out all his code. But things have changed a lot since then.
> In this episode, we discuss his approach to building software, how it’s changed in the last six months, and why he now takes an agent-first approach, and how he barely writes any code by hand.
Linus Torvalds, two weeks ago (though I don't have evidence that he was a skeptic before) https://lore.kernel.org/linux-media/CAHk-=wi4zC+Ze8e+p3tMv8T...
> There are other questions around AI (like what the economy of it will actually look like in the end), but "is it useful" is no longer one of those questions. Anybody who doubts that clearly hasn't actually used it.
Donald Knuth! https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/papers/claude-cyc...
> Shock! Shock! I learned yesterday that an open problem I'd been working on for several weeks had just been solved by Claude Opus 4.6 - Anthropic's hybrid reasoning model that had been released three weeks earlier! It seems that I'll have to revise my opinions about "generative AI" one of these days. What a joy it is to learn not only that my conjecture has a nice solution but also to celebrate this dramatic advance in automatic deduction and creative problem solving.