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Comment by bitwize | Hacker News Reader

It's still going to take a knowledgeable person to steer an LLM. The point is that code written entirely by humans is finished as a concept in professional work—if you're writing it yourself you're not working efficiently or employing industry best practice.

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I think it's dramatic to say it's the end of hand written code. That's like saying it's the end of bespoke suits. There are scenarios where carefully hand written and reviewed code are still going to have merit - for example the software for safety critical systems such as space shuttles and stations, or core logic within self-driving vehicles.

Basically when every single line needs to be reviewed extremely closely the time taken to write the code is not a bottleneck at all, and if using AI you would actually gain a bottleneck in the time spent removing the excess and superfluous code it produces.

And my intuition is that the line between those two kinds of programming - let's call them careful and careless programming to coin an amusing terminology - I think that line may not shrink as far back as some think, and I think it definitely won't shrink to zero.

You are aware of software verification? The AI can prove (mathematically) that its code implements the spec.

That just takes you back to the debate about the code being the spec.

The code lets you shoot yourself in the foot in a lot more ways than a spec does, though. Few people would make specs that include buffer overflows or SQL injection.

"and don't have any security vulnerabilities" isn't a spec though. As soon as you get specific you're right back in it.

That is akin to saying if you aren't using an IDE you are not working efficiently or employing industry best practice, which is insane when you consider people using Vi often run rings around people using IDEs.

AI usage is a useless metric, look at results. Thus far, results and AI usage are uncorrelated.

I keep hearing anecdata that suggest significant to huge productivity increases—"a task that would have taken me weeks now takes hours" is common. There is currently not a whole lot of research that supports that, however:

1) there hasn't been a whole lot of research into AI productivity period;

2) many of the studies that have been done (the 2025 METR study for example) are both methodologically flawed and old, not taking into account the latest frontier models

3) corporate transitions to AI-first/AI-native organizations are nowhere near complete, making companywide productivity gains difficult to assess.

However, it isn't hard to find stories on Hackernews from devs about how much time generative AI has saved them in their work. If the time savings is real, and you refuse to take advantage of it, you are stealing from your employer and need to get with the program.

As for IDEs, if you're working in C# and not using Visual Studio, or Java and not using JetBrains, then no—you are not working as efficiently as you could be.

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