Reasons to Dislike AI Coding

Reasons to Dislike AI Coding lays out common objections to using AI to write software and examines each one in turn. The objections are: that generated code isn’t “real” art because it lacks human creative ineffability; that AI will steal programmers’ jobs by doing the typing; that turning specification work into prompt engineering reduces people to “meat proxies” in an automated production system (illustrated with a Marx quote about machinery absorbing skill); that software engineering consists of rule-based craftsmanship (SOLID, Law of Demeter, “prefer composition over inheritance”) which an AI can’t truly apply; and that using AI props up large companies with harmful incentives. The piece names influences like Bertrand Meyer’s “AI for Smarties” and notes cultural touchstones such as Stack Overflow, Numerical Recipes and historical automation of coding tasks.

Each objection is countered with concrete points: customers pay for outcomes, not for the ritual of typing; the real job is delivering valuable software and automation can raise demand; programming has long relied on copy-and-tweak empiricism and macro-automation; the threat is more the mode of production and corporate concentration than any specific model. The net claim is that technical objections often mask political and economic problems, so the focus should be on governance, alternatives to corporate control, and how tools are integrated into productive processes rather than declaring AI coding inherently illegitimate.