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Comment by trvz | Hacker News Reader

For most people employed as programmers, inheriting code from previous people has been a thing.

Also relevant: including libraries written by others in your own software.

As always it comes down to finding a healthy balance.

A big difference with libraries is that (hopefully) a whole lot of other people have used that same library the same way you are going to use it for the same purpose you are using it for. All the significant bugs hopefully were found by them and the library was fixed.

That usually makes it safe to use even if you have no idea how it does things inside.

With AI code there is a very good chance you are the first person to ever use that code.

I've inherited plenty of code bases. AI generated code is a special kind of foobar. With a code base inherited from a human you can at least be assured at least one human has understood each portion for a brief period. With agentic slop all bets are off.

Maybe I'm a bad programmer or have worked at places with terrible dev culture, but honestly I've made changes to code I didn't really understand. The changes I made seemed to accomplish the task I was aiming at, but the downstream effects were sometimes impossible for me to grok. Before vibe coding took over, using AI to help me get a handle on what a bunch of code was doing was actually one of the things that sold me on using AI.

Yeah, I think AI is a great tool to get a handle on a codebase so you understand it. It's just a much more difficult task when that code is AI generated. I don't think agentic coding is worth all the overhead and complexity. Honestly think that as human understanding is prioritized agentic coding will decline. But I don't think human understanding will be prioritized until we see some major crash and burns with agentic.

That's as good a guess about the future as any I suppose! Personally I'd give that about a 30% chance of happening in a large way. For small systems though I don't think I could ever personally go back to the old way. And maybe we should be composing small systems anyway...

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