Ask HN: Are developers sad about AI writing more of their code? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Are developers sad about AI writing more of their code?

#21

Post by uncircle » Fri, Aug 01, 2025, 8:38 AM UTC

notorious_pgb wrote: post #6

tl;dr: Yes; at least some of us are. I deeply am. I wouldn't normally post a link to my blog in the comments of another thread -- I'm really not trying to shamelessly plug here -- it's just _incredibly_ relevant, and I've already poured my heart and soul into writing out exactly what I think here, so I think it's germane: https://prettygoodblog.com/p/the-big-secret-that-big-ai-does... > I cannot write the necessary p…

The opening of your post made me think of a scifi writing prompt where, in a dystopic future, people are paying mega tech-corporations thousands of dollars per month to replace their meat brain with a subpar artificial one just to become more productive corporate ~~slaves~~workers.

Re: Ask HN: Are developers sad about AI writing more of their code?

#22

Post by mfalcon » Fri, Aug 01, 2025, 12:04 PM UTC

iExploder wrote: post #15

if you think about it the resource wasteful approach pre-LLM didnt really make sense (thousands of people often times re-implementing similar use cases). LLMs are like global open source repositories of everything known to mankind with search on steroids. we can never go back, if only for this one reason (imagine of how many hours of peoples lives were lost implementing the same function, or yet another CRUD app)...…

I think that we will be reviewers too, we have to know if the AI generated artifact does what we want.

Re: Ask HN: Are developers sad about AI writing more of their code?

#23

Post by notorious_pgb » Fri, Aug 01, 2025, 1:37 PM UTC

uncircle wrote: post #21

notorious_pgb wrote: post #6

tl;dr: Yes; at least some of us are. I deeply am. I wouldn't normally post a link to my blog in the comments of another thread -- I'm really not trying to shamelessly plug here -- it's just _incredibly_ relevant, and I've already poured my heart and soul into writing out exactly what I think here, so I think it's germane: https://prettygoodblog.com/p/the-big-secret-that-big-ai-does... > I cannot write the necessary p…

The opening of your post made me think of a scifi writing prompt where, in a dystopic future, people are paying mega tech-corporations thousands of dollars per month to replace their meat brain with a subpar artificial one just to become more productive corporate ~~slaves~~workers.

It seems to me that once things like Neuralink start being used for more than strictly restoring functionality in injured or disabled individuals -- once there's a competitive advantage to have one -- it'll quickly become an arms race.

Re: Ask HN: Are developers sad about AI writing more of their code?

#24

Post by iExploder » Fri, Aug 01, 2025, 3:20 PM UTC

mfalcon wrote: post #22

iExploder wrote: post #15

if you think about it the resource wasteful approach pre-LLM didnt really make sense (thousands of people often times re-implementing similar use cases). LLMs are like global open source repositories of everything known to mankind with search on steroids. we can never go back, if only for this one reason (imagine of how many hours of peoples lives were lost implementing the same function, or yet another CRUD app)...…

I think that we will be reviewers too, we have to know if the AI generated artifact does what we want.

ok, but this can be tested with black box tests, you can add performance tests on top to make sure there is no bloat over time

you might look at generated code as often as you look at generated assembly now

Re: Ask HN: Are developers sad about AI writing more of their code?

#25

Post by brokegrammer » Sat, Aug 02, 2025, 10:22 AM UTC

I never found coding to be fun. All I care about is shipping features. However, I do care about maintainability and user experience. That's why I use AI to write much of the "dumb" code, and then I'll spend time doing quality control.

I always hated writing HTML and CSS, so I have AI do that. I always found writing tests and type annotations to be tedious, and would usually avoid those at my own detriment. Now AI is able to do those.

AI in general has been a net positive for me. I hope that it keeps getting better and better so that I can stop coding for good and focus on the products I'm building themselves.

Re: Ask HN: Are developers sad about AI writing more of their code?

#26

Post by brokegrammer » Sat, Aug 02, 2025, 10:28 AM UTC

moomoo11 wrote: post #20

I mean if you’re building react buttons and using pydantic and think that makes you an engineer then yeah you’re getting replaced. I don’t think people who know how the computer and networking works are going anywhere any time soon. Or the people who actually made react or pydantic.

There's a certain elitism in programming where people will claim that library authors are superior to programmers who can only use those libraries, which is devoid of logic. Surprising, because programmers excel at logic.

Either way, I've been using AI to help me stop relying on external packages and frameworks lately. Turns out, AI can write libraries too because libraries and end products are simply code.

AI will replace all of us eventually, no matter how good you think you are. When guns got invented, Samurai went jobless but blacksmiths still had jobs. Fast forward to 2025, I don't think anyone is considering a career in blacksmithing.