by zjp | 2026-03-13 19:47:23+00:00
There is no such thing as "after coders": https://zjpea.substack.com/p/embarrassingly-solved-problems

This excerpt:

>A.I. had become so good at writing code that Ebert, initially cautious, began letting it do more and more. Now Claude Code does the bulk of it.

is a little overstated. I think the brownfield section has things exactly backwards. Claude Code benefits enormously from large, established codebases, and it’s basically free riding on the years of human work that went into those codebases. I prodded Claude to add SNFG depictions to the molecular modeling program I work on. It couldn’t have come up with the whole program on its own and if I tried it would produce a different, maybe worse architecture than our atomic library, and then its design choices for molecules might constrain its ability to solve the problem as elegantly as it did. Even then, it needed a coworker to tell me that it had used the incorrect data structure and needed to switch to something that could, when selected, stand in for the atoms it represented.

Also this:

>But A.I.-generated code? If it passes its tests and works, it’s worth as much as what humans get paid $200,000 or more a year to compose.

Isn’t really true. It’s the free-riding problem again. The thing about an ESP is that the LLM has the advantage of either a blank canvas (if you’re using one to vibe code a startup), or at least the fact that several possibilities converge on one output, but, genuinely, not all of those realities include good coding architecture. Models can make mistakes, and without a human in the loop those mistakes can render a codebase unmaintainable. It’s a balance. That’s why I don’t let Claude stamp himself to my commits even if he assisted or even did all the work. Who cares if Claude wrote it? I’m the one taking responsibility for it. The article presents Greenfield as good for a startup, and it might be, but only for the early, fast, funding rounds, when you have to get an MVP out right now. That’s an unstable foundation they will have to go back and fix for regulatory or maintenance reasons, and I think that’s the better understanding of the situation than framing Aayush’s experience as a user error.

Even so, “weirdly jazzed about their new powers” is an understatement. Every team including ours has decades of programmer-years of tasks in the backlog, what’s not to love about something you can set to pet peeves for free and then see if the reality matches the ideal? git reset --hard if you don't like what it does, and if you do all the better. The Cuisy thing with the script for the printer is a perfect application of LLMs, a one-off that doesn’t have to be maintained.

Also, the whole framing is weirdly self limiting. The architectural taste that LLMs are, again, free riding off of, is hard won by doing the work more senior engineers are giving to LLMs instead of juniors. We’re setting ourselves up for a serious coordinated action problem as a profession. The article gestures at this a couple times

The thing about threatening LLMs is pretty funny too but something in me wants to fall back to Kant's position that what you do to anything you do to yourself.