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Comment by matt_cogito | Hacker News Reader

All production code will be written by AI. The question is not if. It is WHEN.

What we are seeing right in front of our eyes is how the boundaries of what is possible in the realm of software programming has gone from AI/LLMs poorly writing simple scripts, to being able to "zero-shoot" and "vibe code" a complex system, with a set of instructions written in natural language.

What we might be seeing in 2025 is how programming, the way it has been for the last decades, be disappearing and becoming a rare artisanal craft, not meant for being productive, but for showing off skill, for intellectual entertainment of the programmer.

I know how hard this hits the real coders. I am one, too. But I cannot unsee, what I have seen. The progress is so undeniable, there is no doubt left in me.

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Statistically salient answers are not necessarily correct.

Real "AI" may happen some day, but it is unlikely going to be an LLM. =3

I’m also surprised at the progress but don’t quite share the “AI is doing a good job” perspective.

It’s fine. Some things it’s awful at. The more you know about what you’re asking for the worse the result in my opinion.

That said a lot of my complaints are out of date apis being referenced and other little nuisances. If ai is writing the code, why did we even need an ergonomic api update in the first place. Maybe apis stabilize and ai just goes nuts.

LLMs are doing a great job at generating syntactically correct output related to the prompt or task at hand. The semantics, hierarchy, architecture, abstraction, security, and maintainability of a code base is not being handled by LLMs generating code.

So far, the syntax has gotten better in LLMs. More tooling allows for validation of the syntax even more, but all those other things are still missing.

I feel like my job is still safe: but that of less experienced developers is in jeopardy. We will see what the future brings.

Yeah I think its over, it will take a while for the effects to ripple through society, but writing code will be seen as something like wood working

I'm more curious how society will look when half the population is living in tents.

what a time to be alive!

"all computer engineering will be replaced by software"

"all code will be generated by compilers from basic prose"

"enterprise software will be trivialized by simple SQL prompts that anyone can write"

...

The progress is so unreliable, there is doubt left in me.

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