Comment by andy_ppp | Hacker News Reader

Comment by andy_ppp | Hacker News Reader

I don't really understand all the negativity - I've delivered amazing robust solutions at about 10x my previous rate I think and can make dramatic cross code changes on awful legacy code bases with ease. I just added some complex prev/next navigation across a load of detail pages pages that rely on the current search, a new PDF generation system that uses a queue and workers and absolutely tones of changes to a legacy ERP system that would be unworkable without AI.

Dealing with legacy messes I used to get frustrated and bored of making the improvements, now it's easy to clean up code bases and write loads of tests. I asked Astra to come up with a plan for Playwright testing the whole App, I have not built it yet but the flows suggested were fantastic as was the ephemeral database we plan to create for CI.

I built my friends portfolio website almost entirely vibe coded in 4 hours and it looks unbelievable, we added so much slickness (he's a designer) just prompting together. I used a CMS I had never used once before and it was so so easy to do without any of the usual need to read docs about everything.

I've done so much devops now I'm actually fairly confident that me and an AI can do anything you want in terms of deployment/infra and scaling from AWS to Terraform to whatever.

Anyway my main concern about this technology is not that it is crap at coding it's that the improvements in how it codes and thinks are absolutely dramatic which is extremely scary - it has come so far in a year I wonder what the next year will bring.

When coding agents first came out, the overwhelming narrative was how bad they were, they don't know what they're doing, the code they write just sucks and they hallucinate APIs.

While these criticisms were technically true, they were stated mostly out of a sense of insecurity from people whose jobs were basically spending years and years just glueing code together and mixing APIs to display some CRUD apps rather than out of a genuine concern for whether LLMs were actually producing poor products.

Nowadays those concrete criticisms don't really work anymore, LLMs are pretty good now and surpass most developers when it comes to writing the majority of shovelware that people have been employed, and so the narrative is changing from concrete criticisms about how LLMs were genuinely not capable of writing software... to these kinds of abstract and philosophical arguments that are really hard to argue against because they make no concrete claims.

If you say an LLM can't implement a feature, we'll we can test that claim concretely and LLMs are getting much better with every new release. If you say its code is slower, buggier, or less maintainable, those claims too can be measured and once again they're getting really good at these. If you say it takes longer to complete a task or requires more human intervention, we can compare it and measure etc...

But now the objection has shifted not to LLMs are incapable, but people are now incapable and LLMs represent a degradation of the "craft". And here there is nothing left to test or falsify. The argument has stopped being about whether the LLMs work, because that's verifiable and they are now at a point where it's hard to argue against their ability to actually produce functioning software, so now the argument is about whether people are morally, culturally, or intellectually permitted to use it.

I'm with you here. If we skate to the puck, LLMs will continue to write tighter and tighter code, comments, unit tests, integration tests, etc. I would also assume that it will become increasingly good at code organization, architecture, and understanding intent. i feel like I am a series of monthly shifting of the goal posts...."LLMs can't autocomplete code", "LLMs can't write a high quality function", "LLM's can't understand small repos". "LLM's can't understand legacy code bases".....

If it's this easy for you it's just as easy for anyone else. What do you think will happen to your salary when no particular skills are required to do your job?

So what exactly are you proposing I do - just ignore the fantastic gains and great software that people are using day in day out?

Next year you may be unemployed (because your boss will cut by half the engineering department), or perhaps your salary will be cut by half (because your boss will route your other half of your salary to openai/anthropic), or perhaps you will get half insane (because your boss will ask you 10X the output you used to have but within the same timeframe)

Whatever the path is, regular engineers (90% of the people around here) will get screwed up one way or another. But hey, playing with LLM agents is cool!

Yes I agree we have all signed our own death warrants. But this does not just apply to coding.

Are you suggesting not using the tools? A kind of technical version of the Amish way of life?

I dunno I think my guidance and testing is very important and I make sure not to ship things with bugs and code that is really awful. I'm still just about necessary for now.

You may not be at a company where people are dropping AI slop into the codebase faster than it can be cleaned up. I've thought about my options for going "single operator", so I don't end up with a mismatch between people who use AI thoughtfully and those those who don't.

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