Prodding an LLM into solving a problem is just not the same thing. I understand that the results of prompting could be more exciting than programming to some, but the idea that manual coding is “over” feels dismissive of hobbyists at the very least. Perhaps the author is suggesting that manual programming in the industry is over, but I don’t buy that either. Thesis being, there will eventually be a cost to employing “experts” that lack understanding.
> If agents can handle the code, could we finally work directly with the logic, interfaces, and data models we want?
Aren’t high-level programming languages very refined encodings of “logic, interfaces, and data models?” Why would using natural language be more efficient at such things than special-purpose languages developed over decades?
I feel like I would be hard pressed to explain what I want in English more concisely than just writing a SQL query.
https://htmx.org/essays/yes-and/
Leaving aside the power you are giving to the AI companies by entirely giving up on coding. I say this as someone who uses AI extensively, if ambivalently.
With the right high-level abstractions, I can write code as fast as trying to convert that thought into English (for some tasks).
How fast can you scaffold new ideas and delete them when they don't work?
i'm not having problems yet in my biggest ai-only codebase, which is over 100k lines now. i haven't had any model hiccup, actually, but the smaller models take more wall time to get it done.
i have the models writing in rust, i believe it helps. ymmv.
i don't think it always architects well or anything, but it has quit building broken shit. it gets lazy, builds dumb UI, puts way too much text everywhere--but only if i don't remember to give it some better guidelines, or a visual reference.
i think with the right context, they build the right thing, and we haven't totally solved that just yet. but close enough for me; i'm so thrilled. i just want opus 5.5 to be crazy fast, like chatjimmy.
But due to the sunk cost fallacy and the belief that others have made this work you'll keep plowing money into the AI Slot machine.
Don’t waste your time.
I hope these hyperbolic takes can be over, forever.
I wonder if the author also agrees with DHH’s racist opinions.
HN commentary becomes closer to reddit by the day.
Suppose you hold viewpoint A, and so does DHH. Suppose further you have no idea who DHH is. I, for example, had never heard of him before 2024.
Suppose now that you discover DHH also has racist opinions.
By the sentiment you express in your comment, logic demands that you now change your preexisting viewpoint A because it’s now shared with a racist. Is that what you’re advocating?
At this point, our entire community knows about his racist views so why promote his racist ass further.
Which seems like a pretty good argument to me, given the amount of slip out there and how increasingly performative these pieces are.
It is, it's disrespectful of the reader. Like others have said time and again across HN: why should I spend my time reading an article the "author" couldn't even spend their own time writing?
> Not to mention the fact that you seem to be unaware of the fact that it's theoretically impossible to discern human writing from LLM writing unless there is an explicit signature in the writing.
Huh? No it's not lol
The same reasons you might spend your cycles running code the "author" couldn't even spend their own time writing.
Like if someone gave you a magic wand that let you conjure a mature open source library that did most of what you needed for your project, that would be amazing right? Would you refuse to use it because you miss writing your own database or API framework? Or would you just get to build way more ambitious things?
Software is already stitching a bunch of things together in most cases, why not stitch together things made by a machine instead of by an open source developer? What percent of developers primarily work on bare metal algorithms? .0001%? Everything else is stitching together existing pieces at some level of abstraction.
The real difference seems to be the non-determinism, not that the code is produced automatically. And I think a lot of the work right now that people don’t like seems to be people dealing with the non-determinism, not that so much code can now get generated.
I have read accounts of people have similar freak outs about higher level languages, object oriented programming and web services, and all of those just made more demand for software because the potential of software has not nearly been reached. I wonder if the extreme growth of the field has resulted in most people feeling like those huge changes that reduced the amount of code that had to be written per unit of functionality have been around since the dawn of time, and now that another level of code generation has been reached it’s the end of the world (again).
Trusted engineers (of open source projects) can deliver me stone, both the authors and the community (often >100,000 devs) have checked that a specific block is stone and can bear the load.
AI is proven to output all sorts of random stuff. Sometimes a pebble, sometimes foam. It almost always looks like stone to most analysis. However as soon as it's load bearing it's likely to crumble.
Agentic agents have a habit of rebuilding the pyramid and randomly replacing stone blocks with "something else" but we don't know what just yet.
I’m also not ready yet to conclude that that option, as opposed to a more modest version of AI assisted coding, will remain open to me indefinitely. We now have financials confirming that Anthropoic, too, is running a -200% profit margin, which leaves serious cause for concern about whether either GPT or Claude models will still be around in another year or two. And the judge is still out on whether local models can perform well enough to actually do all my coding for me.
It's defensible to say "October 2026 is not yet the time when we should be 100% deferring code writing to AI (let alone not even looking at the code any longer)". But the writing is very obviously on the wall. It's likely not going to take longer than 10 years.
Then we saw the capabilities really take off, and it was obvious how things would go.
I did not know when it would become so practical that I'd not feel much desire to hand-write code, but I was pretty confident it was coming.
(Also, I think some of the concerns about calculators at those times actually were valid, even though I wouldn't argue that society should not have adopted their use.)
and then, at some point, that will cease to be able to happen. they'll be good enough.
i predict that happens before March 2027.