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Comment by bitwize | Hacker News Reader

No. AI is a must for software development. It's non-negotiable. The productivity gains are too great. The era of 100% human-written code is over. People will still do it as an idle curiosity, for personal projects only they intend to use. But even those open source projects with significant user bases that forbid the use of AI (like, afaik, NetBSD) will be eclipsed by those that support it in terms of features, capability, and security. And the commercial world? Forget it. You cannot keep pace with your employer's expectations unless you learn to use these tools well. This is not up for debate. It's reality.

Plenty of accomplished devs are getting good results and accomplishing tasks with unheard-of speed using AI, so if you're still not, that's a PEBKAC. You are not using the tools correctly. Figure it out before you complain.

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> "No. AI is a must for software development. It's non-negotiable."

Absolutist rubbish.

> "But even those open source projects with significant user bases that forbid the use of AI [...] will be eclipsed by those that support it in terms of features, capability, and security."

As is this. If a language model is relevant to a project, open source or otherwise, is of course heavily dependent on its nature (ethics, use case, deployment, working environment/culture, et cetera).

LLMs may be a must for programming, but not for engineering. Writing code is the easy part once you figure out what actually needs to be built in the first place.

Indeed. But figuring out what actually needs to be built is the systems analyst's job, not the programmer's. It takes people skills and holistic thought, something programmers are generally poor at (and AI certainly is no good at, at least not today).

> You cannot keep pace with your employer's expectations unless you learn to use these tools well. This is not up for debate. It's reality.

So the issue isn’t LLM productivity but unrealistic expectations that skyrocketed in the last years? Makes sense.

> Plenty of accomplished devs are getting good results and accomplishing tasks with unheard-of speed using AI

I don’t see any major business impact.

> No. AI is a must for software development. It's non-negotiable.

???

https://smsk.dev/2026/04/26/ai-cannot-self-improve-and-math-...

>You are not using the tools correctly.

Stop being deluded, man.

When this crap collapses into itself you will be in tears back asking for the knowledge you failed to get without the fancy Clippys.

Now, stop that fancy Megahal chatbot and learn to do things by hand.

I know how to do things by hand, man. But the writing is on the wall: that skill is going the way of writing programs on punchcards. And there's little we can do about it because the economics in favor of LLMs are like laws of physics.

Yes, model collapse is gonna suck. But LLMs are not just left to self-train, they are guided by human researchers who are going to find ways to groom and direct the models to avoid collapse. They can make billions by shipping better models, so why wouldn't they invest a lot of effort in that?

This is not terminals vs punchcards. This is like Windows ME over Windows 98. Or, maybe, the 286 over a 8086 when a 386 it's the proper path.

One of the amusing things about AI bros is how naively over-enthusiastic they are about the technology and its inevitability.

You still don't get where I'm coming from. The AI takeover of programming is inevitable, and I hate it. But my feelings don't make the brutal economics go away. A skilled developer can now accomplish in days what used to take weeks or months with proper use of these tools. Period. I know this because of the absurd number of skilled developers here, on X, Mastodon, and elsewhere—including OP's author—saying "with AI I'm accomplishing in days what used to take me weeks or months". And if you have the opportunity to make use of the tools, you have to be stupid, or you're cutting off your nose to spite your face, not to.

You know, economics are made by people and can be changed by them. They're historically contingent, not laws of physics.

I find all those arguments unconvincing. The right 10,000 lines of code can be worth a billion dollars. The idea that it would be somehow uneconomical for me to take the time to get it right feels like utter nonsense. I don't have to have much of an edge over an LLM to come out on top once you start to distribute the resulting product. Three months of my time costs $25,000 or so (hey, I'm in Europe, adjust as you see fit), if I can make something just a little bit better than AI Albert who can whip something together for a tenth of the price, my time will pay for itself once you have modest amounts of revenue from it.

And I'm fully convinced that what I do will not just be a little bit better than what AI Al makes. It will trounce it in all quality criteria. But of course, coincidentally with the rise of AI assistance, software quality has completely disappeared from the conversation. I wonder why.

Thank you for making a really important point.

The lifespan of software can easily be ten or more years.

If it takes a few more months to write by hand to ensure correctness and proper abstraction, what does that save over the lifetime of the codebase?

It's a rare piece of software that lasts that long. For the rest of us there's LLMs.

In JS land, for sure; for systems' programming and software made for small and medium companies, that's granted.

> here, on X, Mastodon, and elsewhere

You should’ve started with this. Take a really deep breath, take your phone, find closest park, go slowly there (don’t prompt LLM on the way), find a green patch on the ground (it’s called grass) and touch it.

Contrary to you I've been playing with the AI Howto stuff from TLDP forever from Markov chain based chatbots to genetic algos and neural networks and I know the limits on LLM's and how the rot on retroalimentation by reusing their own data. They can't extrapolate. Period. In every cycle they get dumber by design unless there's new human curated content. Go try to explain that to corporations having their copyrighted code being stolen away, be GPL or propietary.

> But the writing is on the wall: that skill is going the way of writing programs on punchcards.

Strange, I don’t see any punchcards inside of my computers, but for some reason I still see code behind anything that LLM does.

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