The article’s central tension is real - Burke went from skeptic to believer by building four increasingly complex apps in rapid succession using Opus 4.5. But his evidence also reveals the limits of that belief.
Notice what he actually built: Windows utilities, a screen recorder, and two Firebase-backed CRUD apps for his wife’s business. These are real applications solving real problems, but they’re also the kinds of projects where you can throw away the code if something goes wrong. When he says “I don’t know how the code works” and “I’m maybe 80% confident these applications are bulletproof,” he’s admitting the core problem with the “AI replaces developers” narrative.
That 80% confidence matters. In your Splink work, you’re the sole frontend developer - you can’t deploy code you’re 80% confident about. You need to understand the implications of your architectural decisions, know where the edge cases are, and maintain the system when requirements change. Burke’s building throwaway prototypes for his wife’s yard sign business. You’re building production software that other people depend on.
His “LLM-first code” philosophy is interesting but backwards. He’s optimizing for AI regeneration rather than human maintenance because he assumes the AI will always be there to fix problems. But AI can’t tell you why a decision was made six months ago when business requirements shift. It can’t explain the constraints that led to a particular architecture. And it definitely can’t navigate political and organizational context when stakeholders disagree about priorities.
The Firebase examples are telling - he keeps emphasizing how well Opus knows the Firebase CLI, as if that proves general capability. But Firebase is extremely well-documented, widely-discussed training data. Try that same experiment with your company’s internal API or a niche library with poor documentation. The model won’t be nearly as capable.
What Burke actually demonstrated is that Opus 4.5 is an excellent pair programmer for prototyping with well-known tools. That’s legitimately valuable. But “pair programmer for prototyping” isn’t the same as “replacing developers.” It’s augmenting someone who already knows how to build software and can evaluate whether the generated code is good.
The most revealing line is at the end: “Just make sure you know where your API keys are.” He’s nervous about security because he doesn’t understand the code. That nervousness is appropriate - it’s the signal that tells you when you’ve crossed from useful tool into dangerous territory.
> We age gate other harmful objects: firearms, alcohol, driving, et cetera.
We can easily prove those have harms.
> trouble you can cause with an Internet connection
Why don't we age gate hands? Number one source of human problems right there. Perhaps we should outfit our children like Harrison Bergeron until they reach the age of majority?
Hands are part of your body. Pornhub is a commercial website distributing age-restricted content. We already require ID for buying alcohol, cigarettes, and lottery tickets without it being a constitutional crisis. Requiring age verification to access porn isn't a First Amendment issue any more than carding someone at a liquor store is. This comparison makes no sense.
Pornhub is always age gated everywhere in the world. Because internet access typically involves you to prove you're an adult.
Just like the liquor store, verification happens at point of sale. Past that, all bets are off.
If I got buy a beer, verify my age, and then go home and give it to a kid, there's nothing anyone can reasonably be expected to do about that. Similarly, if I buy internet access, and then turn around and just give it to my kid, there's nothing anyone can reasonably be expected to do about that.
We don't expect the store clerk to follow you home and watch you drink the beer.
Making this sort of reductio ad absurdum doesn't make you seem witty or clever. It just makes you seem pedantic and unable to reason about things like a functioning adult.
I don't think you're adding anything to this discussion with that kind of comment.
The idea of age-gating hands is to demonstrate that overly broad age gating IS ridiculous and the lack of sufficient targetting by Texas is precisely why the judge is throwing it out.
Please try to engage with commenters with a little bit more respect and hopefully better understanding.
It's discrimination, should be 65 like everywhere else.
Seriously, I won't limit the maximum age, but would rather use a cognitive ability assessment. It in fact already exists, e.g. as the TV debates for presidential candidates. Were the voters paying attention,..
I've been working on a little SPA that manipulates tabular data and allows the user to insert rows. This is exactly the API I've been using. Like a lot of other commenters it never occurred to me that people wouldn't know this API exists.
Aside: I started with Perl CGI scripts, then ColdFusion, and finally Classic ASP back in the 90s. I had a chuckle a couple years ago dealing with a younger developer who was shocked that and oldster like me was up on new-fangled SSR patterns.
