The Manifesto is now free and open-source: Why I put my book on GitHub. open.substack.com/pub/marcusâŠ
Marcus Raitner retweeted
The main thing that LLMs have done in software is bring back the idea that productivity is measured in lines of code per day.
An idea that has been debunked, disproven, and discredited repeatedly every few years in my long software career.
Marcus Raitner retweeted
Pulse: Schlankes Micro-Journaling fĂŒr das iPhone ift.tt/F9GXaPu
Digitale Erschöpfung: Wieso KI Wissensarbeit intensiviert statt uns zu entlasten.
Wer davon trĂ€umte, kĂŒnftig lĂ€ssig aus der HĂ€ngematte heraus, Agenten dirigieren zu können, erlebt gerade ein böses Erwachen.
raitner.de/2026/05/digitale-âŠ
Marcus Raitner retweeted
âPeople who enjoy meetings should not be in charge of anything.â
â Thomas Sowell
Marcus Raitner retweeted
âAs Cory Doctorow, author of Enshittification, is fond of observing: you wonât be replaced because an AI can do your job, youâll be replaced because an AI salesman convinces your boss that it canâ
Conned by a chatbot ft.com/content/eb6f5398-6635âŠ
Marcus Raitner retweeted
Compiler construction is one of the oldest, best understood CS fields. It's decades of work by the brightest minds, and it's grounded in logic, informed by experience and strictly deterministic.
Comparing that with LLM-based coding agents is just wrong.
xitter.cf/IceSolst/status/205025âŠ
Interesting article on treating agent output like compiler output (and why)
skiplabs.io/blog/codegen_as_âŠ
Marcus Raitner retweeted
Adding agents to a late software project makes it later.
(Fred Brooksâ observation, revised.)
Marcus Raitner retweeted
Having been part of the industry for 50 years, I can confidently report that none of this is true.
Sure, writing code has a non-zero cost; this is true of any artifact.
But you know what costs even more, Jonathan?
Writing bad code; writing unnecessary code; writing more code than you really need simply because you think you might need it someday or you are too lazy or sloppy to clean up after yourself.
Anything that costs nothing is often worth nothing as well, and results in significant unintended consequences.
For 50 years, software engineering ran on code rationing. Writing code was expensive, so we rationed it carefully through roadmaps, RFCs, prioritization meetings, and scope reviews.
This created a role: the No Engineer. No, that won't scale. No, we don't have bandwidth. No, that's out of scope. No, we need a design doc first. The No Engineer was valuable for 50 years. Every "no" saved real money. Their judgment was the rationing system.
LLMs will be the end of code rationing. Code is cheap now. And while the No Engineer is explaining why something can't be done, the Yes Engineer has already shipped three versions of it.
If you're a Yes Engineer, the next decade is yours.
Marcus Raitner retweeted
As an engineer, Iâd much rather write every line of code myself than review every line of code generated by an LLM
Marcus Raitner retweeted
Very soon, âno AI was usedâ will be a premium service category in nearly every industry.
Mark this.
Marcus Raitner retweeted
There's a disturbing trend of developers I've known for years now suddenly being unable to discuss even basic aspects of software development. They have become so dependent on LLMs, they can't even describe how to design a system anymore. Feels like losing friends to dementia. đą
Marcus Raitner retweeted
Its safe to say software developer jobs are fine despite AI
I have 15 years experience in software development, and I know what to prompt, but still it takes hundreds of prompts to create an app with AI
If you have 0 experience, you dont even know what to ask it.
then what do you do when the app breaks ?
non-devs have no chance to vibecode a production app
devs on the other hand seem to get superpowers
Marcus Raitner retweeted
Anyone who thinks Claude or something similar can already replace a developer(I didnât say replace coding, I said replacing a developer) has clearly never used it on a serious, large scale project.
There's marketing hype and then there's the truth.
It looks revolutionary if you don't code yourself. âšâšAll of these âinfluencersâ using these tools have never hit the market with a working app. They all just yap how they were marketers and now their Claude codes while their sleep. With that velocity they should be hitting the market with new app every week, yet we donât see it at all.
If we pretend experienced developers are now obsolete based on viral videos, we're heading straight into an era of widespread, low quality code.âšâšAnd I canât wait to charge a premium for fixing someoneâs disaster.
Marcus Raitner retweeted
A common dynamic I observe with AI: it feels most impressive when you donât know much about the subject, donât care or donât have a clear idea of what the you want.
This applies across design, code, legal, and more. If I donât know code very well, every piece of code it writes feels very impressive.
Once you know what something should feel or look like, it becomes almost impossible to guide AI there. And you definitely canât one-shot it.
