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Comment by SpicyLemonZest | Hacker News Reader

Yes, I think AI has eliminated writing code. Everyone I personally know working in software stopped writing code some time between December and March. (It's true that AI continues to routinely make errors; if you've heard the term "agentic workflows", that's the standard strategy for mitigating the error rate by allowing the AI to check its own work.) That's why I think Amodei's January 2026 prediction that AI could eliminate 50% of entry level white collar jobs in 1-5 years remains plausible.

Your second article says something different, but this is because it's full of misquotes. The link supporting "50% of jobs" specifically says entry level, and the link supporting "reframed automation... not as a destroyer of jobs" has Amodei saying not that jobs won't be destroyed but that new jobs may be created to replace them. If AI moves sufficiently slowly to let that happen, which he explicitly cautions it may not.

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> Yes, I think AI has eliminated writing code.

Then you are dead wrong. Anyone who gives a shit about doing a good job is still writing code.

No, that’s not accurate. I’m not sure what to tell you. It’s like hearing that no serious programmer uses Python, it’s so far from my experience and that of everyone I know in the field that I don’t know how to engage.

Do you think that everyone in the Linux kernel team write their code using AI only? What about Emacs? And cURL?

Ok, how about Ladybird: https://ladybird.org/posts/adopting-rust/

> I used Claude Code and Codex for the translation. This was human-directed, not autonomous code generation. I decided what to port, in what order, and what the Rust code should look like. It was hundreds of small prompts, steering the agents where things needed to go. After the initial translation, I ran multiple passes of adversarial review, asking different models to analyze the code for mistakes and bad patterns.

Sounds to me like "wrote their code using AI only".

And from the creator of Redis, antirez: https://antirez.com/news/158

> It is simply impossible not to see the reality of what is happening. Writing code is no longer needed for the most part.

I guess when you have 65k tests you can use an AI for transpiling, and it still seems it took an enormous amount of hand holding. That is very far from actually writing new code. But you tell me, are you a software developer? Write or have code written everyday? I am one and for me and everyone I know AI has been mostly just a (fantastic) replacement for google search.

> took an enormous amount of hand holding

There's a big difference between "not writing any code by hand" (which still might involve lots of non-manual-coding effort!), and "vibecoding", and as I understand this thread was about the former.

edit: yes, I'm a software developer, and if I have a change in mind larger than 2 lines I've been using Claude Code (with English input) rather than a text editor to do it, since about January.

Can't speak for everyone involved in this thread, but your workflow sounds identical to mine and that's what I was intending to describe. I agree there's a different thing sometimes called "vibecoding" which doesn't work well for software that has to be even mildly robust.

Right? Like the tool is the same (Claude Code, in my case, but there are many like it these days) but the operation of it is totally different:

"Write a function that will <do a thing the code does in 3 places>, put it in utils, and refactor the 3 locations that need to do that thing to use that function instead." (and then hundreds more prompts like that)

vs.

"Write an app that lets you trade crypto"

Just totally different activities.

GP posting "Everyone I personally know working in software stopped writing code" on HN is such an obvious tell of blinkered delusion.

Literally all HN talks about is AI these days, and it is very, very clear that plenty of people are still writing lots of code, many finding AI makes them slower and causes more problems, and many making the reverse claims. There is always a rich mix of opinions and experiences here.

You would have to believe that literally everyone on HN is a bot (and also everyone on Reddit, Twitter, astralcodexten, or anywhere else online) to discount all these differing opinions in favor of "everyone I personally know" .

If you can describe the code you want to write, AI can write it exactly the way you would have, but faster than you every time. That is the floor now.

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