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Comment by briandw | Hacker News Reader

Code is code. It either does the job or doesn't. If there is nothing that could convince you that AI generated code is trustworthy (for whatever definition of trust) then this is an article of faith, not a rational position.

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> Code is code. It either does the job or doesn't.

Surely that is not the only dimension that matters when evaluating software. Maintainability and readability, for example, are crucial for any long-lived project.

“Does the job” means all of those things. Figure out what’s important, find a way to measure it (could be also be qualitative.) How does the AI generated code do? If you simply say its no good because of the way it was created, it’s not a rational decision process.

That's a straw man. My argument isn't about 'the way it was created'; it's about the point I clarified in my previous comment. If you want to discuss that, great, but calling my take irrational based on an argument I didn't make doesn't make sense (when your position is “YOLO to AI”). To reiterate — Trust is the core of my argument, and there’s no trust without human ownership and proof of work/understanding yet (possibly ever).

Devils advocate: Are they? Why? If LLM's are capable of taking absolute crap and iterating on it to achieve a purpose, then does readability really matter?

In the future, code readability will not really matter, the concept of maintainability will also change: Is it maintainable by AI, if yes, then it's maintainable, we will approach the day where we have virtually ZERO code written by human, so all the tools must be built for AIs, not humans anymore.

Perhaps in the future my grandmother will have wheels… But today radiologists still do radiology (despite AI being better at reading scans), taxi drivers still have work, and truck drivers are still able to put food on the table. It’s still 2026, time traveler, so touch grass…

Radiology is using AI extensively already. I was at a radiology conference in Boston recently; entire session tracks on it. Apparently 80% of FDA-approved AI medical devices are in radiology.

Disagree, it’s already a leap of faith to trust even human code (which is why we try to prove code, or at the very minimum create guardrails with tests). Human reasoning itself is under doubt. It’s even more of a leap of faith (>>) to trust code generated by AI reasoning (which I can only currently call “homunculus reasoning,” it’s not inferior but it’s just got the probabilistic aspect of reasoning). People who YOLO their work to Al are practicing a different form of faith. I like knowing what my code does, and making correct predictions about it. A mental model is very important. My position is very rational, yours is faith-based. This is a technology that has many cool uses, but this is not one of those uses (in 2026). Unless the author can convince me they have as good of a mental model of this rewrite as the makers of the original source code. Maybe they do, I’m sure they would run circles around me, but I need the confidence that this isn’t going to wake me up at 3am because of some bug. And the only way I know that about PG is because I trust the creators.

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