The difference between corporate salaried programming and freelance programming is who is on the hook in a direct sense for the bug the LLM introduced, or for maintaining the massive pile of code or the cognitive burden of ownership.

My experience of freelancing is that most of the people I am competing against for the work care less about the code (and things like quality, security, appropriateness, user burden), are faster, are happy to nickle-and-dime the bill, will charge more to fix their own bugs, churn out meaningless requirements specs that they cannot stick to, and rely on lack of client knowledge to get through.

So there has always been a problem of competing against the slapdash; they always win the quote. I care about longer-term maintainability, cost control and quality, and I lose out because of it. (I'm often asked to maintain or finish the work of people who beat me to the quote and then failed; nowadays I say no.)

The problem is, those people now use LLMs. For the immediate future, LLMs may actually be improving their output, certainly at the prototype stage, and they will now be including one-shot, vibe-coded demos with their quotes.

So what is a freelancer who still has a sense of ethics to do?

The long bet is that those people who do not care for quality will still be disappointing their clients, but how do you avoid using LLMs while still getting, at least, back to where you were in competing with them?

I think in these contexts AI has an overall positive effect, because it's a bit like having a competent developer that can solve technical debt, albeit in a narrow form.

So I think that software will be better in a certain way due to AI, because even a terrible developer can ask AI to identify the bottlenecks and solve them.

The downside of blindly using AI in software development is that the software becomes poorly defined. AI-generated logic can be arbitrary, and as the codebase grows, more rules and assumptions become unclear.

And in our twice-yearly self-improvement reports, we have to write how we can use AI further. To reach grade 4/4, you need to "trust" the AI.

From my experience, most developers are actually very anxious and scared about their future.

In my day job I have 30 different instances of the coding agent all running simultaneously and it is still not enough to do all that is asked, while simultaneously doing all of the human interaction and do things previously delegated to the project managers they fired. Everything gets shipped half finished before being put on the next hot thing.

That is the best thing I’ve read on this topic in a while.

Of course you can. "You can't ship a nuclear aircraft carrier because no one human comprehends it all." Again, obviously wrong. Humans have been shipping systems that no one person understands for a long time. If it all had to fit in one human's brain, it would quickly stunt the growth of civilization.

The fact that AI agents are really fast at generating code suddenly moves the bottleneck to the review step. The fact that AI agents are great at attacking computer systems moves the bottleneck to log analysis and triage. Neither of these are going to block forward progress for long. AI agents have to be reading the logs, because there are not enough human eyeballs to keep up. AI agents will be reviewing code soon enough, and they already are in high performing organizations.

... or never started caring about comprehension. In which case you are primary audience for the con trick of so-called AI.

I just one shot a plugin for my wife's sketchup(the ability to easily export 2D from sketchup) in Ruby. I don't even know what Ruby looks like.

Simultaneously, I am fine tuning my mail setup(FreeBSD/postfix/dovecot/OpenDKIM/etc) using ChatGPT and Claude.

I set it up long before these AI things was a thing... But I am loving that I can take my rickety server held together by duct tape(though I had done things "right") STRONG, simply because it frees me from tedious, tedious shell scripting. I can focus my energy on that fun shit, not trying to remember the shell dialect I am currently employing...

AI lets me flesh out both hardware and software side projects quickly that I never had time for. Most of them are experiments that won't be shared.

It's nice to have Codex/Claude whip up an SPI DMA driver while I'm doing something more fun, for example.

I consider myself a professional. I lean towards understanding problems, making sure that they're fixed once and for all, and being able to foresee issues that the users will encounter and that product cannot see. And while I enjoy coding, code is secondary to all this. Yet I'm in Hell.

We're losing our ability (and time) to understand problems, we prefer churning out patches fast than actually fixing them, we delegate meaningful choices to an AI that has no ability to predict issues, we remove the opportunity to review and we end up leaving testing to the end user. As far as I can judge, we have stopped building products and are now shipping glorified demos.

Also, I can't speak for other products, but on the type of features I work on, AI is blatantly incompetent, but our C-suite just refuses to believe it, assuring us that it's just us having difficulties with the transition.

The same comparison could be said the other way around: there are entrepreneurs, who care deeply about the product, inside and out; and scammers, who don’t care about the problem itself or the beauty of a a neat solution, but only the sales of the end product.

Entrepreneurs currently are in hell, and a scammers are in heaven.

I don’t think either is more apt or more offensive, they just appeal to whichever side of the fence your on.

Software engineering as we knew it is not coming back, except maybe for very niche fields and your own crafting.

Many other engineering fields have experienced this change long ago, where the majority of the "craft" is done by algorithms. Think chip design, aerospace, automotive, structural engineering, material design.

Their engineering is now focused on higher level design (and even that, less in some cases), and verification.

Programmers are not a special species, immune from this trend. Heck, we are the ones who did it to the other fields, and so it is quite amusing that we're not crying when it is our turn.