Ask HN: Is it time for "organic" coding? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Is it time for "organic" coding?

5 pointslexi-k10 comments

Yesterday at work I was testing my library's changes with my college in their system.

As AI first engineers we just prompted Claude to make progress.

After 2 hours of integration lazyness of letting AI run the tests, make changes and fix bugs I just suddenly decided to make the final changes myself.

You know like move the code, fix the bug, rename the function, run formatter, but even write the commit message and push upstream.

Then I looked at my college funny and said - you will love my last change, it will finally work as it's an organic commit. And this got me thinking.

Is it already time for the term "organic" to be used in coding?

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AI can catch some failure modes, especially common ones, but it doesn’t really have the context of how your system behaves in production — traffic, retries, data size, edge cases, etc.

That’s usually where things break.

So the real difference isn’t organic vs AI, it’s whether someone understands the system they’re shipping into.

If you know how to code a particular fix, be an Engineer first, AI assisted. If you have no idea about codebase and less confidence, then become AI first engineer

Disagree on the second sentence - that attitude is how I'm seeing production systems break all over the place these days. "I don't know, so the AI output must be correct."

hymm. interesting perspective. curious to know where you see AI will fit in in our coding task?

I see it as not having authority to deploy code to production without a human review. And that review cannot be done unless you understand the systems you are working on.

Believe me, I absolutely hear all the people saying you need to be all-in on AI coding. But I disagree because that doesn't resonate with what I'm seeing in the real world, which is breakage, outages, incidents, and pissed off customers.

I am completely aligned with you.

I am all-in to support AI-assisted coding.

I totally disagree AI first coding.

It's been a decade coding for me. Strong in fundamentally and my mental model wired in and out in coding now. AI is making writing faster me. But not sure how would younger generation would navigate this clouded AI coding maze and down in 10 years make them resilient.

If our "organic" codes are valuable than Agent's, and there is someone who demands organic, I could say yes.

Hybrid-coding, organic implies a complex cause-n-effect organism, not single a human with probabylistic search engine.

I prefer artisan coding :)

This is new term for me but I love it

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