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Comment by sensanaty | Hacker News Reader

> I sincerely don’t understand what the people who say they no longer read any code are doing

Well that one's easy to answer, they're either A) lying, or B) working on the simplest possible software where this kind of stuff doesn't explode. Or the alternative 3rd option of what you mentioned, the initial pre-MVP phase goes decently but then it all collapses inevitably as the slop accumulates and the codebases become unmaintainable grey blobs, but that hardly matters to them because their MVP app never makes it past that initial stage before they jump ship to a new "amazing" idea.

The lying comes down to astroturfing and shilling from the LLM companies that want to sell people on the idea of vibecoding and tokenmaxxing.

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Or C, agentic coders who have been doing this for 20+ years (software engineering) know what they're doing?

Also, when people say 'read the code' do they really mean go line by line, or review the pseudo code? Meaning, read the high level architecture/data flow.

Because IMO the code matters very little if you have the proper testing environment and guardrails, the architecture always matters.

In my circle, the only people who make these claims about AI were all terrible developers whose contributions were slowing down everyone because they needed to go through several reviews and rewrites before they could be accepted.

Now it's basically the same but they love it because it's only their teammates who have to put in the work not them.

This all implodes when the teammates get fed up and just approve everything.

Some people write terrible code. Some people don’t proofread their own code. Some people are writing code in a second (or third!) language and the typos are harder to spot and comments are harder to formulate.

It’s a bit like the variance you could expect from asking a room full of people to write a 1-page short story on a specific topic (e.g. “death of a loved one”). Some of those short stories will be unreadable, and some of the people who wrote those terrible stories will have no idea how bad they are. Except now, enter AI, and the room generates the short story instead - who has the skills to determine whether their short story isn’t terrible?

Also there is also category C: they are not developers and they don't care about the code at all, but also not really much about the product. They just want to tick the boxes.

They blindly accept that LLMs "take time" after the slop grows because they're running several agents at the same time, so they can still claim to be productive.

Does it move the needle, business wise? Not really. But a lot of businesses are "optimising" for maximum token usage and for how many tasks one person can do, not for business value. Is it really surprising?

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