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Cory Doctorow: The people who tell you ‘AI is changing everything’ are lying
(www.thenerve.news)
this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2026
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Technology
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I'm sorry but to me your comment is a bit misguided. You raise extremely valid point and are completely right in what you say, and yet all your argument fails to prove that software development hasn't changed.
The difficult part was understanding requirements and problem solving: absolutely true. Yet most of the time of a developer was spent in writing code. Now it's spent refining the analysis so that the LLM stops producing slop. And many programmers are doing it, even with all its downsides, because for them the fun part is understanding the requirements and problem solving, not writing code nor delivering fast. They are delegating those tasks to a machine, even with all the risks and issues.
Your second point (and the anecdote) further proves how programming changed. Before it was unthinkable that some random person, likely with no clue about what they are doing, would refactor an entire codebase in a night.
Both are massive changes. For the best? Arguably not, but I seriously doubt there will be any going back now.
The thing is that actually doing this isn't faster than writing the code, robs the practitioner of learning, and more often than not doesn't actually happen, so you have a harder to maintain codebase with more bugs and less knowledgeable developers to maintain it.
Edit: and as a fun bonus accelerates glacier melting!
I think you're right in general. I think juniors and those who havent yet had experience are not going to understand a goddamn thing and produce broken, insecure, unmaintainable slop.
I've written my share of garbage code -- completely by hand! And i'm much better for it.
Once you have that experience, once you've written a few backends and frontends, there's not much left to understand. Move the data from here to there. Display it, transform it, slice it up. For webdev AI is a huge force multiplier. I can make a dozen features or apps in the time it used to take me to learn one framework I was curious about. It even helps me learn faster because of how quickly I can test new patterns and ideas.
There's certainly a right way to use it if you want to continue being edified, burning the planet down aside.
If we only used AI for codegen, this probably wouldn’t be much of an issue. Those cat videos take more energy than building a complete app. Also, it’s all pretty new and the newest tech 40 years ago would have filled a warehouse and had the computational power of a potato, but here we are now. I expect we’ll get more efficient at it and in the ways we use it. And there’s already a huge worldwide shift in energy capture (America aside…)