Notices by Baldur Bjarnason (baldur@toot.cafe)

"The two worlds of programming: why developers who make the same observations about LLMs come to opposite conclusions"

https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2026/the-two-worlds-of-programming/

It comes down to whether you think "more of the same" is a good thing or a bad thing for software.

Just heard “in the wild” for the first time about a non-coder quitting their job hoping to get rich from the app they vibe coded, so I’m guessing we’re still ways yet to go before the bubble peaks. Stories of regular folks going all-in are usually thick on the ground as bubbles peak

“Amazon holds engineering meeting following AI-related outages”

https://www.ft.com/content/7cab4ec7-4712-4137-b602-119a44f771de

Magnify dysfunction through automation and all you get is more dysfunction.

LLMs exaggerate and exacerbate existing market and industry dysfunctions. They've hastened media's descent into fabrications and clickbait, accelerated the devaluation of writing and illustration. And in software it has fuelled an existing crisis and exposed a divide at the core of the industry

This has led to a field whose standard practices are a cluster of bad habits and superstition. Most of the ideas of user-centred design are alien to modern devs. Misconceptions about test-driven dev abound.

When devs says that LLMs make them more productive, you need to keep in mind that THIS is what they're automating: dysfunction, tampering as a design strategy, superstition-driven coding, and software whose quality genuinely doesn't matter

There is little to no downside to poor software quality and the upside of doing the job well is limited compared to tactics like lock-in, dishonest subscription models, and monopolies

Some corners of the software industry are less affected. Others, such as web dev, are more affected

For example, the stock price for Crowdstrike, even in a stock market affected by the Iran war, is up 12% today over its peak before it

Massive worldwide economic harm, no real consequences

Our current software crisis—we've had a few—has been ramping up IMO since the post-2007 bailouts. Instead of regulating finance, the US let the finance industry take over, which hasn't been great overall, but for software it's meant that "quality" stopped mattering

Well-funded startups capture market share with subsidised products.

Big tech is a cluster of oligopolies and monopolies.

Internal software projects are driven by their potential effects on stock prices

And they are right. LLMs make it easier for devs to do work that doesn't matter in an industry that doesn't care, where the only thing that's measured is some bullshit measure that's disconnected from actual outcomes

Many of those most vocal about the dysfunctions of LLM-coding were ALREADY WARNING ABOUT THE DYSFUNCTIONS OF THE SOFTWARE INDUSTRY BEFORE "AI". The dysfunctions predate this particular bubble and many in software have been concerned about them for years.

There is nothing either group can say to the other to shift them because the disagreement is down to a fundamental difference in world view

But if you aren't in tech and are wondering which to trust, just ask yourself: do you really think the chucklefucks of tech, the clowns who have been running the show over the past couple of decades, have got coding completely figured out?

/end

Equally, most those most vocal about the benefits of LLM-coding were bullish about dev before the bubble. They didn't see the flaws of the earlier state of affairs so they don't see what's wrong with magnifying that dysfunction 10x

Hence the divide in the discourse

Both see LLMs as a mechanism for scaling up existing software practices with minimal human observation

One group thinks this'll make the world 10x richer. The other thinks it'll be a catastrophe

If you had any doubt that the rise of LLM tools is a threat to F/OSS, even beyond the fact that its trained on it without permission, and is now frequently used to replace it (why import a battle-tested library when you can have an "agent" half-ass it?), people are now using LLMs to create derivative rewrites of open source projects to give them cover for bullshit relicensing attempts.

https://github.com/chardet/chardet/issues/327

(Following thread was prompted by people pointing out that the Bluesky dev team seems heavily into vibe-coding now and originally posted on said vibe-coded Bluesky platform that is now constantly failing.)

Over the past year, every single time one of the apps or services I use suddenly became less reliable and more buggy, I never have to look far for the "Claude is amazing and now writes most of my code" post for the devs involved.

Devs are so disconnected from the output of their work that many of the norms of the industry are outright illegal: there's a good chance that if you follow popular practices for a React project, for example, you'll end up with a site or product that violates accessibility law in several countries

Few devs would even know where to begin to look to answer the question "does my software work for the people forced to use it?"

Few devs have a reference point for genuinely working software. Usability labs were disbanded over 20 years ago. Very few companies do actual user research, so their designs are based on fiction. Bugs are the norm

Alienation is also the norm for devs, both socially and organisationally. Whether it works for the end user doesn't cross their mind. Whether the design fulfils business needs is not their problem. Bugs are a future problem. Ship insecure software and patch it as user data gets stolen

Best part? It's always somebody with years of experience. Exactly the demographic that is supposedly able to use this shit safely, but my impression is they're just as bad as the novices

This is happening IMO because of one of the fundamental issues with software dev (and this predates "AI" and was one of the themes of my first book):

Most software projects fail and most of what gets shipped doesn't work. The way the industry is set up means there is little downside to shipping broken software

Because the element of coercion and a complete disregard for consent is now an integral part of how the industry works, but that's a topic for another day.

"Ars Technica Fires Reporter After AI Controversy Involving Fabricated Quotes"

https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/ars-technica-fires-reporter-ai-quotes

Seeing a lot of people assume that this reporter got fired for making one mistake during a sick day, something most people could see themselves doing

I think it's safe to assume that the reporter's version of events downplayed his culpability to a substantial degree

Didn't know I needed this today, but turns out I did. Maybe you do too.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7fyufPkXLbs

The word “vibe” is going to be near unusable for non-bullshit purposes for the next decade, isn’t it?

“Are AI-generated summaries suitable for studying and research?”

https://www.tue.nl/en/our-university/library/library-news/24-02-2026-are-ai-generated-summaries-suitable-for-studying-and-research

> But it’s already safe to conclude that one popular use case is, in fact, a bad one: AI-generated summaries.

This goes into some of the specifics why LLMs are in fact very bad at summarising