I think for a lot of people the turn off is the constant churn and the hype cycle. For a lot of people, they just want to get things done and not have to constantly keep on top of what's new or SOTA. Are we still using MCPs or are we using Skills now? Not long ago you had to know MCP or you'd be left behind and you definitely need to know MCP UI or you'll be left behind. I think. It just becomes really tiring, especially with all the FUD.
I'm embracing LLMs but I think I've had to just pick a happy medium and stick with Claude Code with MCPs until somebody figures out a legitimate way to use the Claude subscription with open source tools like OpenCode, then I'll move over to that. Or if a company provides a model that's as good value that can be used with OpenCode.
It reminds me a lot of 3D Printing tbh. Watching all these cool DIY 3d printing kits evolve over years, I remember a few times I'd checked on costs to build a DIY one. They kept coming down, and down, and then around the same time as "Build a 3d printer for $200 (some assembly required)!" The Bambu X1C was announced/released, for a bit over a grand iirc? And its whole selling point was that it was fast and worked, out of the box. And so I bought one and made a bunch of random one-off-things that solved _my_ specific problem, the way I wanted it solved. Mostly in the form of very specific adapter plates that I could quickly iterate on and random house 'wouldn't it be nice if' things.
That's kind of where AI-agent-coding is now too, though... software is more flexible.
> For a lot of people, they just want to get things done and not have to constantly keep on top of what's new or SOTA
That hasn’t been tech for a long time.
Frontend has been changing forever. React and friends have new releases all the time. Node has new package managers and even Deno and Bun. AWS keeps changing things.
You really shouldn't use the absolute hellscape of churn that is web dev as an example of broader industry trends. No other sub-field of tech is foolish enough to chase hype and new tools the way web dev is.
I think the web/system dichotomy is also a major conflating factor for LLM discussions.
A “few hundred lines of code” in Rust or Haskell can be bumping into multiple issues LLM assisted coding struggles with. Moving a few buttons on a website with animations and stuff through multiple front end frameworks may reasonably generate 5-10x that much “code”, but of an entirely different calibre.
3,000 lines a day of well-formatted HTML template edits, paired with a reloadable website for rapid validation, is super digestible, while 300 lines of code per day into curl could be seen as reckless.
Exactly this. At work, I’ve seen front-end people generating probably 80% of their code because when you set aside framework churn, a lot of it is boilerplatey and borderline trivial (sorry). Meanwhile, the programmers working on the EV battery controller that uses proprietary everything and where a bug could cause an actual explosion are using LLMs as advanced linters and that’s it.
There's a point at which these things become Good Enough though, and don't bottleneck your capacity to get things done.
To your point, React, while it has new updates, hasn't changed the fundamentals since 16.8.0 (introduction of hooks) and that was 7 years ago. Yes there are new hooks, but they typically build on older concepts. AWS hasn't deprecated any of our existing services at work (besides maybe a MySQL version becoming EOL) in the last 4 years that I've worked at my current company.
While I prefer pnpm (to not take up my MacBook's inadequate SSD space), you can still use npm and get things done.
I don't need to keep obsessing over whether Codex or Claude have a 1 point lead in a gamed benchmark test so long as I'm still able to ship features without a lot of churn.
> There's a point at which these things become Good Enough though
Well sure. Like there's McDonalds and let's just not care about health or better tastes. The world keeps improving or you're left behind.
> While I prefer pnpm (to not take up my MacBook's inadequate SSD space), you can still use npm and get things done.
I haven't touched nom in a long time. No it can't get things done. I dread running it and would cancel it before I can wait for it to complete. Luckily we did get yarn, pnpm and then Bun and life is improving.
> To your point, React, while it has new updates, hasn't changed the fundamentals since
They have e.g. RSC i.e. React Server Components? See... point proven. You need to keep up. Things like Vercel force it on you.
I'm embracing LLMs but I think I've had to just pick a happy medium and stick with Claude Code with MCPs until somebody figures out a legitimate way to use the Claude subscription with open source tools like OpenCode, then I'll move over to that. Or if a company provides a model that's as good value that can be used with OpenCode.