Boomer Coding: Still Writing Artisanal Functions While the Bots Merge PRs

If you’re taking time carefully golfing functions down into graceful, fluent, minimal functional expressions, alarm bells should ring. You’re yak-shaving. The real work has depleted your focus. You’re not building: you’re self-soothing. – My AI Skeptic Friends Are All Nuts

I still don’t know much about how AI agents work for LLM code generation—or excuse me, vibe coding. I haven’t used the latest LLM-based thingies like Claude Code or Windsurf. I’ve only used Copilot for a bit and have tried Cursor. I’ve mostly done what everyone else is still doing: just asking the chatbot for code and copy-pasting it into the my code editor. When I get stuck on something, I go old school and spend time on Stack Overflow. So I’m sort of still a boomer with all this stuff.

I’m certainly not qualified to give the most informed opinion on how this is affecting the job of the programmer—or whether programmers will even have jobs in the future, or if junior developers are cooked. I never had the opportunity to reach senior level and have since decided to step back from pursuing programming as a career.

I'm just a hobbyist programmer. Always was, always will be.

But I’m very skeptical of the AI critics who are loud online, repeating the same canned arguments like: “Yeah, it’s great for toy projects, but it’s not ready for production,” or “something something technical debt,” or “something something bugs,” or “something something it can’t solve real-world problems.” It’s not that I haven’t seen good arguments against AI coding, but most follow that same line of thinking.

This article articulates far better what I had only a vague hunch about: that a lot of the arguments against LLM-based code generation are mostly bullshit. The author is also way more qualified than me. His main argument is that there are still highly intelligent and experienced programmers that are still dismissing coding with AI because they think that it's just chatting with ChatGPT and copy+pasting code.

I highly recommend you go read it and like he says:

Maybe I persuade you. Probably I don’t. But we need to be done making space for bad arguments.”