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Comment by solenoid0937 | Hacker News Reader

These comments are so bizarre when we are what, 1-2 years away from AGI?

Like - you really think models won't be able to clean up the tech debt they created!? They are very good at this already. Ask Opus 5.5 to clean up the tech debt from some Opus 4.6 vibe coded app.

Code is cheap now. The most important thing is to ship, ship, ship. If you are handwringing over "tech debt" you have already lost - and you deeply misunderstand how good this technology is getting!

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We get it, the future can't come fast enough for you. Code is a commodity and the only important thing is scale. Congratulations on leapfrogging the midwits on the path to the C-suite!

Did I say anything about tech debt? What's the point of "ship, ship, ship" if AI will be able to do it in a couple of years? Don't you see where this is going? We're rapidly losing our ability to think.

The point of "ship, ship, ship" is to cash in (in terms of your career or company) before AGI renders you jobless.

If we get to post-scarcity you never needed the money. But if we end up in some dystopian hellhole where people have no jobs but capitalism still exists, you'll be thankful.

Correct code is not cheap. And some places you need a very correct code. Like in mission critical systems.

The fundamentals of writing correct code have become dramatically cheaper by orders of magnitude. I have been involved in hiring dozens of developers. Fable/Opus 5.5 would be a superior drop-in replacement for perhaps 75% of those hires at roughly 1/100 the cost.

Perhaps for writing boilerplate, or generic websites from scratch, or early stage prototypes.

I work in embedded systems where it's harder to offload the burden of testing and maintenance. Systems knowledge is important: experienced developers can be costly to replace.

LLMs make a lot of things easier, but costs have certainly not fallen by 2 orders of magnitude.

How many people on HN work on mission critical systems? The discussion is not currently constrained to that. I agree, but the exception proves the rule.

Define "mission critical" and then maybe we can come up with a reasonable estimate.

Defined as "people die if your code has a mistake".

And even in these systems AI will be better than humans at finding issues.

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