YES. I don't know how many multi WEEK sessions of debugging I've been through in my career. Frustrating, but so many valuable lessons learned in the process. LLMs are absolutely causing us to lose something very important.
Having a tool that instantly searches through the first 50 pages of google and comes up with a reasonable solution is just speeding up what I would have done manually anyways.
Would I have learned more about (and around) the system I‘m building? Absolutely. I just prefer making my system work over anything else, so I don’t mind losing that.
The multi week debugging sessions weren't fun, but that doesn't mean they weren't valuable and important and a growth and learning opportunity that we now will no longer experience.
IMO the more salient point is that bugs requiring multiple weeks of human work aren't going away! Claude has actually not been trained on, say, a mystifying and still poorly-explained Java concurrency bug I experienced in 2012, which cost a customer $150,000. Now in 2026 we have language-side tooling that mitigates that bug and Claude can actually help a lot with the rewrite. But we certainly don't have language tooling around the mysterious (but now perfectly well-explained) bug I experienced in 2017 around daylight saving's time and power industry peak/off-peak hours. I guess I haven't asked, but I can almost guarantee Claude would be no help there whatsoever.
Just so many confusing things go wrong in real-world software, and it is asinine to think that Mythos finding a ton of convoluted memory errors in legacy native code means we've solved debugging. People should pay more attention to the conclusion of "Claude builds a C compiler" - eventually it wasn't able to make further progress, the code was too convoluted and the AI wasn't smart enough. What if that happens at your company in 2027, and all the devs are too atrophied to solve the problem themselves?
I don't think we're "doomed" like some anti-AI folks. But I think a lot of companies - potentially even Anthropic! - are going to collapse very quickly under LLM-assisted technical debt.
Seems like there's a good argument to be made that we'll have plenty of opportunities for valuable growth and learning, just about different things. Just like it's always been with technology. The machine does some of the stuff I used to do so now I do some different stuff.
Geez you guys need to spend some time in orgs where your paycheck is depends on getting the bugs fixed and deployed. If your direct deposit happens whether you deliver or not then you’re missing the most valuable career lesson of all.
It's third major on my memory: first, cagw/global warming, then covid, and now this.
Many minor happened along, like crypto+nft stuff or renaming master branches and adding codes of conduct. I think it's just human nature. Fascinating nevertheless.
This does depend on who you are; If you're a senior with 10+ years of experience, it's a failure of your abilities to cut your losses or know when to seek help if you take far too long debugging something.
But for juniors, it's invaluable experience. And as a field we're already seeing problems resulting from the new generations of juniors being taught with modern web development, whose complexity is very obstructing of debugging.
There are definitely situations where you can't ask for help and you can't turn your back on the bug.
I worked on a project that depended on an open source but deprecated/unmaintained Linux kernel module that we used for customers running RHEL[1]. There were a number of serious bugs causing panics that we encountered, but only for certain customers with high VFS workloads. I spent days to a week+ on each one, reading kernel code, writing userland utilities to repro the problem, and finally committing fixes to the module. I was the only one on the team up to the task.
We couldn't tell the customers to upgrade, we couldn't write an alternative module in a reasonable timeframe, and they paid us a lot of money, so I did what I had to do.
I'm sure there are lots of other examples like this out there.
[1] Known for its use of ancient kernels with 10000 patches hand-picked by Red Hat. At least at the time (5-10 years ago).
For sure! I had a bug that crashed our system once every 14 days or so and every coredump had a different stack trace. The "star programmer" managed to shift the bug onto me, the newbie graduate, after failing. This was a long time ago and I had to sort of invent fuzz-testing (as far as I knew!) to reproduce the problem in a short enough time that it could be debugged. That bug took weeks to find and there was nobody to help and only a manager kicking my arse every day. Instead of a medal I got brickbats for solving it but they did carry on using my testing system...
What LLMs are you all using that solves every problem in 5 minutes? It is fast at some various classes of problems but the idea that they solve complex bugs that took serious engineers significant time, I'm just not seeing that. Where is all this amazing software and revolution we were promised? Why are there even bugs?
And if I were your boss you would immediately be fired if you spent weeks trying to debug an issue a junior developer solved just by launching Claude and telling it the symptoms of the issue because you refused to use an LLM.
I am a lead consultant and depending on the size of the project, I do have a team of less senior consultants who are dotted line reports. If I ever found one of my reports who missed deadlines because they refused to do something as simple as launch Claude (with our $5000 a month allowance a piece) and ask it to debug an issue, yes I would write them up.
There is a direct easy to measure line about the revenue that anyone below me makes the company. My revenue per hour isn’t as exact since I support pre-sales and follow on work.
> LLMs are absolutely causing us to lose something very important
The time wasted thinking our craft matters more than solving real world problems?
The amount of ceremony we're giving bugs here is insane.
Paraphrasing some of y'all,
> "I don't have to spend a day stepping through with a debugger hoping to repro"
THAT IS NOT A PROBLEM!
We're turning sand into magic, making the universe come alive. It's as if we just got electricity and the internet and some of us are still reminiscing about whale blubber smells and chemical extraction of kerosene.
The job is to deliver value. Not miss how hard it used to be and how much time we wasted finding obscure cache invalidation bugs.
Only algorithms and data structures are pure. Your business logic does not deserve the same reverence. It will not live forever - it's ephemeral, to solve a problem for now. In a hundred years, we'll have all new code. So stop worrying and embrace the tools and the speed up.
I mean, I know this may seem alien to you, but not everyone's life is about being a corpo good-boy. I don't know what career level you are but many people got into computing because they were really interested in it, not like a grad from 2016 that majored in CS because their dad said there was money in it and they should change their major from marketing. Also, there is something to be said for having people that still actually know what a computer is. What if your friends Altman and Amodei decide to start charging actual money for these tools? Sounds incredibly unlikely, I know, but it might be useful one day to have people that still know what the stack or the heap are.
I mean to cause a stir! Let me invoke every logical fallacy and dirty rhetorical device I can if it draws attention.
Too many of our engineering conversations are dominated by veneration of the old. Let me be hyperbolic so that I can interrupt your train of thought and say this:
We're starting to live in the future.
Let go of your old assumptions. Maybe they still matter, but it's also likely some of them will change.
The old ways of doing things should be put under scrutiny.
In ten years we might be writing in new languages that are better suited for LLMs to manipulate. Frameworks and libraries and languages we use today might get tossed out the door.
All energy devoted to the old way of doing things is perhaps malinvested into a temporary state of affairs. Don't over-index on that.
