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Comment by zachwills | Hacker News Reader

Thanks for sharing your perspective. I don't agree that code generated by AI will be easily distinguishable from code generated by hand; I think it depends on who is authoring. Also, for what it's worth, if it achieves the business goals, is stable and performant, does it matter?

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I see where you're coming from. Some code may stick, and some generated code actually looks decent. There is a lot of coffee-fueled code that will never see the light of day again as well. It's just that there has been an inflation in code. Almost like the quantity has a positive quality all on its own, when that should be a negative ("Look at this 50k code app made in 1 day"). I think the next generation of code generators should be penalized for writing verbose code. Hopefully they'll ease the burden of maintaining systems instead of adding to it. My experience is that once a code base gets a certain size, agents start to lose the big picture - and often repeats themselves. Adding similar but not quite the same code. Less code will probably help here too. Still. If it works, it works. It's the next phase after the system's first steps I worry about (extending and maintaining).

“if it achieves the business goals, is stable and performant, does it matter?”

Yes, if you want code to be maintainable over time, or to be able to evolve as a coherent foundation that lends itself to a long term direction and vision.

I'd consider that part of the business goals, personally. I also think over time we will end up with more people doing what I talked about in the post, so the code that gets generated by those workflows will become the norm and will impact long-term direction/vision.

FWIW, the vision and direction can and should still be dictated by the human engineer. That's what engineers will be doing IMO vs. coding.

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