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Software engineer here. Counterpoint: no it’s not.

the thought of what will logically happen if we use it to replace most entry level devs in a few short years both gives me job security but also terrifies me in terms of the future of software

That’s harsh on software developers. Some of us can see beyond our keyboards, and externalities matter. Better division: if you’re a mindless consumer it’s all upside. If your role in society is to advance it with new knowledge, this world is a horror show.

I guess if you're bad at developing software then yeah

…This is what PR reviews are for.

It depends on the developer

I read and wrote about that paper at length when it came out simonwillison.net/2025/Jul/12/...

the paper doesn't show that and the authors said so!

Lol lmao

I have never seen the benefit as a software engineer.

as a software developed I find that they improve some things (can be good for automated code review, though cant replace human review), are different but not better for others (writing code), can be much worse (enabling people to write too much code that others have to maintain and review)

this is also bullshit.

if you are an author or an artist or a human being

As a mechanical engineer, all AI has done is add noise and make senior management think software will solve mechanical problems

This is only true if your acceptance criteria for art and writing are so superficial that it's impossible to have acceptance criteria for software that superficial. If you care about quality, all the same problems apply.

As a network engineer, I'm also against almost all forms of generative AI. I've yet to find a valid use case. Any maintenance plans/scripts some PM tries to generate "to save Chuckles some time" require more time/effort correcting than just writing it myself, ditto for meeting notes or RCA reports.

This piece links a lot of sources, but the source it doesn’t seem to link (or maybe I’m missing it) is water usage by AI data centers, which is the single piece of information it needs to back up.

This was due to farm runoff....

What about energy? www.cnbc.com/amp/2025/11/...

I linked to it - that piece is, I think, very well researched and itself links to credible sources that informed it

Maybe if you read the article, you’d see that AI is not a problem in the grand scheme of water usage in Arizona

The thing that everyone near a data center can demonstrate on video from any faucet is the fake one, and you say I can read about it on a website that's famous for pushing neo-nazi advertisements? AI truly has done amazing things to the human mind.

There was a study done recently. Developers *thought* AI speeded up their code, and in fact it got slower. metr.org/blog/2025-07... N=16, still interesting.

I know about the METR one that said programmers over-estimate how much it helps them, what others have you seen?

Lots of cool people in the responses there, you didnt see their replies?

I can imagine, which is one reason I disagree the pros outweigh the cons for devs

This is my CC experience, it's what I assume walking a very enthusiastic dog is like

HAHAHAHAHAHA HAHA HAHAHAHAHA "if you have no talent but are good at math or very much makes up for your lack of creativity" yeah we get it ghoul

my partner is a software engineer and he doesn't agree with you. what now?

🙋I've sucked at coding for over 20 years. So maybe that's why this year I've found some occasional uses for LLM generated code. I don't distribute my code to others (directly or in compiled form), so you don't have to worry about that.

Software developers still get paid no matter how many copies they ship. Indeed, most developers work on software that will never "ship", their work is used only by their employer. It's a completely different economic relationship.

Lol collapsing all of human culture into “yeah it’s all derivative” what absolute bullshit from a singular minded STEM brain who never read a book that made them feel anything.

It makes software developers take longer and they end up dumber than not using ai

Also wrong.

You could have some ethics as a software developer. It’s free and easy! By the by that guy is a racist DHH bootlicker.

If you are any living thing on Earth, the cons of generative "AI" outweigh the pros. Some software developers being fools does not change this.

Sounds like “software developer” is a job that shouldn’t be allowed to exist in the future

If you’re curious here’s one real numbers about the environmental impact from people who know what they’re talking about and don’t have billions of reasons to lie to us: www.eesi.org/articles/vie...

simonwillison.net/2025/Aug/8/p... simonwillison.net/tags/ai-ener... simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/26/... simonwillison.net/2025/Aug/15/...

I’m a software developer. AI is dogshit.

if you're a software developer your work is being stolen too. ffs the first thing that happened when they made github copilot available is it started spitting out things from private repos that it wasn't supposed to be training on.

Short term, perhaps. I think AI is an even bigger threat to developers' livelihood in the long run. Software is a means to an end, and I expect we'll all be redundant in due time. Art, by its nature, is a human expression. So there's got to be a cultural component as well, explaining the difference.

Honestly, I suspect more far more software jobs are on the line.

It definitely makes some parts of my job easier, but it also makes some parts harder in a way which can only be solved by adding even more AI.

bro has never logged into GitHub to see 10 AI-generated PRs submitted by junior devs that didn't read anything before committing.

Plus, while you may try to inject your soul into every part of a book, a program is likely made of a lot of boilerplate, and only a small part is really creative. For this, AI is ideal. You'll rarely see people laying bricks, saying it's a creative endeavor; most would gladly automate that.

Lmao the opposite is absolutely not true for software developers, put the pipe down and quit dreamin

Only if you’re a software developer who doesn’t care about people or ethics? Lol

If you are someone that works you don’t like AI. If you are a lazy thief then you do.

this is by no means the first such statement he has made which i'm sure you're aware of and i really think you should reconsider lending your public support regardless of how much you may agree with his statements. i deeply respect the PSF's decision and feel this undermines it.

"Thing I don't think is racist: <position that in practice requires genocide that is actively happening as we speak>"

I’m a photographer (&writer) uh it’s deeply mixed when you realize it’s an incremental change since like literally the 1970s The problem is mostly race to bottom + cost of viewing crap vs cost of making crap. But people like cheap crap!

"My work has been stolen without my consent so billionaires can profit from it" feels like the other meaning of"con" tbh lol

Most of the generative AI discourse is two groups of people talking over each other, which is why there will never be reconciliation. Then you have some software developers saying “AI Agents can’t do anything” which is then extrapolated to represent all software engineers.

I works in games everyone I know is an artist, author, or software developer and they all universally hate this shit

There are literally no pros to ai for creators and anyone who tells you otherwise is bad at creating

bro eat shit nobody wants whatever garbage you’re working on

There is no benefit to AI period. FULL. STOP. The rest is just propaganda. LLMs dont lead to intelligence. This has been proven over and over. They lead to delirium. In humans and in LLMs.

Just like a corporate CEO benefits from kneecapping the NLRB, where the rest of us can just.. GET FUKT

If you are a junior software developer it’s also a pain because a lot of companies are trying to replace junior roles with AI. I also enjoy what I do so having the word masher do it for me isn’t appealing at all.

Software developers work with a code assistant. Artists and other creative people are fighting a machine that figuratively digests their work and turns it into shitposts. LLMs are basically just digital colons, artistically speaking.

Huh, l can’t imagine why the artists getting their stuff stolen and the people trying to figure out how to monetise that theft see things differently.

It's possible to both like LLMs and dislike generative image models at the same time

Speaking as someone who's had their repos slurped off github despite explicit copyright notices; hahahahahano

AI just takes in and regurgitates existing information. It does nothing creative. A stagnating society is the biggest of cons.

We asked a new-hire contractor to add a small feature. He checked it in, we later found a small bug. We asked him to fix the bug and also add in one other small thing. He did both in 1 commit (bad). The diff was 100%. We fired him. He was not hired to use AI to do his job.

I’m a software developer and the cons of generative AI outweigh the pros.

Sure. futurism.com/companies-hi...

as a professional software developer, wrong bitch

Microwave: great for frozen peas. Less great for steak.

But you’re writing technical works, though, aren’t you?

I’ve tried lobbing some softball questions from my job (that don’t include any proprietary info) at LLMs and found them all to be hilariously confidently wrong. I have no doubt that LLMs are okay at rote work like mapping properties between objects, but that’s not revolutionary.

In Anathem, Neal Stephenson introduces Diax’s Rake (a parallel to Occam’s Razor) - it’s the yard implement your friends are to beat you with if they find you believing something only because you want it to be true. bsky.app/profile/josh...

I am a software developer. I do not want that shit.

Nope. A platform that relies on theft and energy waste is what it is, even if it could also provide me with a useful service.

The cons are against the whole planet.

And if you are aware of the first group, and have any sense of solidarity with their humanity, no “pros” matter. The cons are essentially infinite.

The core division is people who possess and implement critical thinking skills and those who don’t.

I propose that if you are _actually_ creative, a "generative" AI will not help you generate anything good, because it will not be as creative as you, and will not have your experience in the craft. There are plenty of creative software developers.

I'm an author whose day job is in software and I'm thoroughly unimpressed with Gen AI. It hasn't come close to being the miraculous time-saver or labor-saver that it was hyped to be. I think the bubble is going to burst, and soon.

The pros: i hate the environment and dont care about facts or basic humanity. So ai is good. The cons: ai devours all creative things and produces mindless slop and then devours that because it can't tell the difference. Soon it will produce a grey square and call that art and literature.

tbh, the cons for generative AI also probably outweigh the pros for software developers, too, they just have to care about them those cons more than how fast it will write code for them.

No, I'm not a software dev & see the benefits of being able to sift through large amounts of data in a fraction of the time to put it in a digestible format. You still have to gate keep AI to make sure it didn't go rogue, but it's helped me in my work for sure. Needs to stay out of the arts though.

Nah, you use the magick contained in electric sand to work for you, then sit on it until an acceptable time has passed.

Buddy the whole world is a majority of copying and pasting from old forum posts

Eh not so much, it was often people that had cludgy code and didn’t know if something bad was in it. It’s also where the AI probably pulls most its programming stuff from, so a lot of that bad stuff is in their also

That is still better than AI-written software. At least a human will copy and paste the same block of code for the same purpose, know what they did and why and where to find it, which makes debugging, maintenance, etc much more workable.

Trawling through old forum posts so I don't have to register an account to use their shitty forum search function is legit my favourite use case for LLMs.

It’s the same code in both examples.