Missing the Psychosis Forest for the AI Trees

From the desk of Benji Welner in Stanford, CA. I do not believe that software engineering is undergoing a tectonic shift due to large language models. I have, at this point, seen a large enough sample of code produced by the frontier of so-called artificial intelligence: it is often impressive but always incomplete. The nature of a computer program is that it does exactly what you tell it to do. Any programmer would tell you that bugs are almost never an error on the computer’s side of things, but rather of our own misrepresented instructions. This makes Claude and friends, in my eyes, practically useless: if I want something done, I want it done right. Programmers are in the business of perfection. So why is the field in crisis? I. Preamble Because of course, I’m not ignorant enough to suggest that there’s not something going on. I don’t think there has been a real shift in software engineering, but there has unquestionably been a shift in the vibes. Aaron Horwath recently asked why…