”Those claiming we’re mere months away from AI agents replacing most programmers” should think again
AI agents will change the world. But not this year.
“This isn't the first time we've seen outcomes that suggest some of the ambitious ideas about AI agents directly replacing developers are pretty far from reality. There have been numerous studies already showing that even though an AI tool can sometimes create an application that seems acceptable to the user for a narrow task, the models tend to produce code laden with bugs and security vulnerabilities, and they aren't generally capable of fixing those problems…. most researchers agree it remains likely that the best outcome is an agent that saves a human developer a substantial amount of time, not one that can do everything they can do.”
“those claiming we're mere months away from AI agents replacing most programmers should adjust their expectations because models aren't good enough at the debugging part, and debugging occupies most of a developer's time”
These quotes are from a new essay at arstechnica, looking at a new Microsoft study on troubles in getting AI to debug with reliability confirming one of the core claims in my recent critique of Hard Fork’s Kevin Roose on vibe coding: debugging is hard, and a big part of what coders do, and not about to be replaced.
Another recent quote that is quite relevant is from Sir Demis Hassabis, on agents in general, but applicable to fantasies about vibe coding agents, too, “If your Al model has a 1% error rate and you plan over 5,000 steps, that 1% compounds like compound interest.”
The only way we are going to get past this kind of 80:20, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t kind of AI is to change the paradigm.
Gary Marcus is sorry to have to repeat himself. But the big change we need still hasn’t come.
We used to call indeterminate behavior bugs and paid people large sums of money to both fix them and attempt to build systems without them.
Now, they are trying to convince us indeterminate behavior is simply the new way of doing things. Just vibe code it. This is ludicrous.
As a software engineer with over a decade of experience working in startups and big tech I find all of this quite funny now. No one in industry is taking this seriously besides the VCs.
Saying AI isn’t ready to replace software developers because it’s not good at debugging is hilariously ignorant. Software engineering is 99% debugging, especially at post PMF companies with real revenue.
Any JR dev can make something demo-able that will sometimes impress a naive exec with a sales or finance background, but those prototypes take months or even years of hard work to scale and 99% of the work is debugging.
It’ll be fun to watch all these Agentic Bros go to zero!