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The coming coordination calamity
(surfingcomplexity.blog)
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this post was submitted on 25 May 2026
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Programming
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Nobody's asking you to do anything. If it works for you, then that's fine.
People are talking about the tech in general and their own experiences with it, alongside relevant research they have found. You are more than welcome to disagree with each other. Nobody is forced to change their opinions or how they work over a short internet conversation.
As an aside, LLMs, like everything else in life, require nuance to evaluate. They excel at specific tasks that are built for them, and are terrible at the wide array of tasks that are not built for them. It's entirely possible that your work primarily lies in the former while others work in the latter space.
They are however widely known to be terrible at code, at least compared to an advanced coder. They introduce not only more bugs even after human review, but new kinds of more insideous bugs.
I like to say the main problems with most projects were already the code quality and the bugs, and not that we somehow needed even more low quality lines of code.
(Disclaimer: not talking about passive AI bug analysis here, just using AI to write actual code.)
They are for large tasks. However, for simple pattern repetition tasks, they're generally fine, code or not. I've had success, for example, having them remove pointless, confusing try..except blocks surrounding imports at work. I usually find that I just rewrite anything myself if it's anything more complex than that because the code it produces makes no sense and taught me nothing.
Tell me about it lol.
And you may have introduced some dangerous hidden bug that way, which you may not have doing it manually.
(I'm not saying that makes it not worth it, this is just what the studies are saying. I personally think it's not worth it, but I realize there is some subjectivity here.)
You act like I can't read some import statements and see if they match the import statements on the other side of the diff lol.
There was no bug introduced. All the dependencies were required. If any of the imports did error, then that's a bug with that package that got surfaced instead.
Yeah absolutely agree. In another thread I pointed out the difference between a pro using it and a novice using it.
Currently the loudest people seem to be the novices using it, even journalists? Maybe it’s just hatred and determination of people to make it sound bad to fulfill their fantasy of it sucking. Theres definitely an echo chamber effect going around also, a hivemind of “ai sucks”.
Anyhow, I like to add my experience with AI to discussions to counter all the negativity.
Quoting studies to actually back up one's point is in my opinion far less of an echo chamber and a fantasy than anecdotes of "but for me it feels faster". Especially when AI is known to slow people down while making them feel faster.
Yes, that must be wonderful to live in academic world and to throw around papers and shit but down here on the ground a lot of us actually get shit done and we aren’t the delusional ones that are pretending like somethings making us faster because we don’t have the money to waste if it’s not actually making us faster.
Are you an engineer? I’m trying to get a feel for what type of people don’t think that LLMs are useful for software engine
FYI in many countries the term "engineer" is protected. Software devs would not be allowed to call themselves engineers without some kind of certification.
All that aside, I think you'll find that a majority of people on this instance write code regularly, whether as a hobby or day job. Also, at my software dev day job, we actually regularly discuss the academic research around LLMs primarily because it has a major impact on our work.
Personally speaking, what I've seen over the past few years is that it creates pretty demos really quickly that fall apart the minute you need to actually develop for real. The code becomes an unmaintainable amalgamation of random libraries used to do the same thing multiple ways, and my coworkers who rely on it heavily have learned basically nothing about the libraries or tools they use because they ask the LLM to do it all for them. This is also ignoring the complete lack of motivation I have now for PR reviews knowing that the same mistakes will be made again and again in the future because teaching a coworker a better way to do something does nothing to improve the output of a LLM, which cannot learn.
That's not to say you can't use it effectively. There just needs to be a balance between what you do as a developer vs what you have the LLM churn out quickly for you. It requires a lot of direction, enough so that I find it to be a waste of time as opposed to implementing things myself usually. Plus, I actually learn more doing it all myself, like upcoming library versions, changes in the tools and libraries I use since last using them, new language features, and so on.
While I'm not going to do a code review of your linked projects (nor do I believe that would be very useful), it sounds to me like you've found a way to make it work for you. That's awesome. I, unfortunately, am regularly subjected to the slop emitted by it when in the hands of people who are actively destroying what experience they might have once had in favor of doing less work.
Yeah I’m familiar with some places protecting that word.
I find all the workforce productivity related academic papers in the space right now to be sensationalist and subjective. We just haven’t had enough time to let the dust fall.
Totally understand what you’re struggling with. Ppl still need to care about and understand what they’re writing and make sure things are done properly. You don’t oneshot everything.
Also, it depends on what types of systems you’re working on. Integration and glue code in backend systems is where I live most of the time. Using ai removes a lot of tedious boilerplate.