Hacker News Reader

Comment by KronisLV | Hacker News Reader

> they are left with no one who understands a sprawling tangled web of code that is 80% [random people that I can't ask because they don't work here anymore and they didn't care to leave docs or comments] generated, then we'll see who laughs last.

Yes, this matches my experience with codebases before AI was a thing.

View on HN

Yes, but given a feature that should take say 100 lines of code, the average programmer will write in the order of 100 to 500 lines. If they're a heavy OOP user, maybe they'll write 10 classes that total 2000 lines. Regardless, worst case, it will be within ~2 orders of magnitude of a reasonable solution.

It's not that they're not trying to write the biggest clusterfuck possible and maximize suffering in the world, it's just that there's a human limit on how much garbage they can type out in their allocated time.

This is where AI revolutionizes things. You want 25,000 lines of React? On the backend? And a custom useEffect-backed database? Certainly!

Yeah, in the past the limiting factor was the human suffering of the engineer who had to try and fit the sprawling nightmare fuel into their brain.

The machine doesn't suffer. Or if it does nobody cares. People eventually start having panic attacks, the machine can just be reset.

I suspect that the end result is just driving further into the wilderness before reality sets in and you have to call an adult.

> it's just that there's a human limit on how much garbage they can type out in their allocated time.

Another example where removing friction and constraints is a bad thing.

i think the friction has moved upstream - now it's working on the right thing and specifying what correct looks like. i don't think we are going back to a world where we will write code by hand again.

Unless what you want to do isn't well represented in the training set.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com