AI demands more engineering discipline. Not less • Hacker News Board

Re: AI demands more engineering discipline. Not less

#141

Post by youknownothing » Wed, Jun 17, 2026, 8:46 PM UTC

hintymad wrote: post #98

ryandvm wrote: post #24

It is now significantly harder to figure out who understands the systems and is using AI effectively and who doesn't know shit and is just slinging LLM copypasta around. Before 2025, the underperformers/coasters were at least relatively identifiable by the paucity of their contributions. Now all of the sudden every single engineer is filing PRs, code reviews, technical design documents, and every other artifact under…

Eh, are you using the loop engineering effectively? Remember, Boris can merge more than 200 PRs a week mostly with merely a phone and despite his busy schedule. Anthropic engineers do not write code manually any more, and they don't need to review most of the code either. In all seriousness, though, I'm indeed curious about Anthropic's engineering practice, particular how they can achieve such level of autonomy.

Remember Facebook's original motto: Go fast and break things. That's where the speed is coming from.

Anthropic's speed of development is about 20% AI and 80% technical debt. We all could be faster if we stopped trying to build things right.

Once Anthropic floats, I predict a screeching halt in feature development to fix all the technical debt that they're accumulating.

Re: AI demands more engineering discipline. Not less

#142

Post by pydry » Wed, Jun 17, 2026, 8:52 PM UTC

deaton wrote: post #129

trjordan wrote: post #27

> Those are not code problems. They are evaluation problems. > Code becomes precious when it is the only place knowledge lives. Reading AI code all day is _agonizing_. Just, a horrible way to live, and it melts people's brains at the moment you need them to be the most capable. Manual programming has this really productive and gratifying feedback loop, where you read the code, write the code, and fix it until it comp…

It almost seems like the juice might not be worth the squeeze. If you want verifiable code that conforms well to a well-designed plan, you have to basically write pseudocode and have the AI translate it for you. At that point why use the AI to write the code at all? And then, personally, I find that I just have more fun planning, writing, and debugging myself. I think its kinda the part of programming that I fell in…

This is the core of the insanity nobody who vibe codes seems to be able to grasp.

It's not even that its more fun, AI can spew endless slop boilerplate but it simply can't handle boiling an application down to its component essence in a way that makes it straightforward to maintain and bug free.

Re: AI demands more engineering discipline. Not less

#143

Post by eiwiwi » Wed, Jun 17, 2026, 9:01 PM UTC

simonw wrote: post #75

> What happened in 2025 was this: the economics of code production were turned upside down . Instead of being very hard, time-consuming, and expensive to generate code, it became effectively free and instant. Lines of code went from being treasured, reused, cared for and carefully curated, to being disposable and regenerable, practically overnight. I've been thinking about this a whole lot recently. So much of my int…

I’m gonna say this in the most polite way that I can but who cares?

Look around you - google is valuable because it hoovers up data to generate revenue from advertising and has minimal expenditures compared with the revenues. All those bets? Lol yeah what about them?

Engineering for the sake of engineering has no value to the economy - aka it’s irrelevant. It’s the hard truth nobody wants to hear. There’s a limited set of things that can existence in the economy at any given moment in time - only those that provide value and can be sustained w.r.t economics stay the course.

Re: AI demands more engineering discipline. Not less

#144

Post by vjvjvjvjghv » Wed, Jun 17, 2026, 9:06 PM UTC

trjordan wrote: post #27

> Those are not code problems. They are evaluation problems. > Code becomes precious when it is the only place knowledge lives. Reading AI code all day is _agonizing_. Just, a horrible way to live, and it melts people's brains at the moment you need them to be the most capable. Manual programming has this really productive and gratifying feedback loop, where you read the code, write the code, and fix it until it comp…

"Reading AI code all day is _agonizing_. Just, a horrible way to live, and it melts people's brains at the moment you need them to be the most capable."

I think it's very similar to dealing with large offshore teams. Every day you get a huge pile of code to review. It's really exhausting.

I prefer dealing with AI because at least it tends to follow rules once I write them down. Not so much with a lot of offshore guys. Same mistakes every day.

I guess my company needs to hire better offshore devs....

Re: AI demands more engineering discipline. Not less

#145

Post by consp » Wed, Jun 17, 2026, 9:09 PM UTC

fusslo wrote: post #68

trjordan wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's worse than that. At least if I dumped 5k LoC on somebody in 2021, you knew I spent the time to write it, so it's "fair" to ask you to read it. But I didn't write it in 2026, so you shouldn't read it. I think it's less about "break it down" and more about "let's communicate at the same altitude." I wrote a (bait-titled) post about it: https://tern.sh/blog/stop-reading-prs/

113 files +22913 −2423 305 files +15075 −13110 153 files +21934 −8698 125 files +28120 −2398 43 files +11188 −63 118 files +21564 −647 These are the largest (6 of 35) in the past 30 days. added: 190079 removed: 39696 in the last 6 months from one person.

[dead]

Re: AI demands more engineering discipline. Not less

#146

Post by jay_kyburz » Wed, Jun 17, 2026, 9:15 PM UTC

"...never fix a running thing. Replace it.

AI pushes this premise beyond infrastructure and into application code itself. When rewriting is cheap, editing in place becomes risky. Mutation accumulates entropy. Replacement resets it."

I've always found verifying some code works correctly much harder and time consuming than writing code. Replacing big chunks code means much _more_ verification and validation.

When you see a bug, and you "fix the running thing" you only need to verify what you changed.

Re: AI demands more engineering discipline. Not less

#147

Post by QuantumNoodle » Wed, Jun 17, 2026, 9:35 PM UTC

Given how many critical systems software touches these days, I am surprised that there they are not licensed. Imagine if civil engineers can just go building shit as minimum viable products? Sure prototype quickly but someone should be found liable for final product.

Re: AI demands more engineering discipline. Not less

#148

Post by gitremote » Wed, Jun 17, 2026, 9:38 PM UTC

4lx87 wrote: post #55

strix_varius wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure this is gated by where you work (especially by how technically savvy your manager is), but the most effective contributors at my job tend to be the ones with near-zero (or sub-zero!) net LoC. LLMs are prolific and they love to add shit. Truly capable engineers are able to achieve more business outcomes with less code / fewer moving parts.

The most effective contributors at your job remove more code than they add? That doesn't sound effective that sounds like digging ditches to fill them. Every line of code removed is a line that was previously added.

> The most effective contributors at your job remove more code than they add?

Yes.

> That doesn't sound effective that sounds like digging ditches to fill them.

It sounds effective to me, like removing garbage from sidewalks so people can walk straight instead of walking around the trash.

> Every line of code removed is a line that was previously added.

Correct. Today I cleaned up

  if (a || b)
    return true;
  if (c)
    return true;
  if (d)
    return true;
  return false;

to

  return a || b || c || d;

and contributed various other negative lines of code in multiple areas.

Every line of code removed is a line that was previously added.

Do you have any experience coding before LLMs?

Re: AI demands more engineering discipline. Not less

#149

Post by oompydoompy74 » Wed, Jun 17, 2026, 9:39 PM UTC

therealdrag0 wrote: post #130

dakiol wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"High performers". Can't believe we have normalized this vocabulary, among us, "hackers".

Most of us work for business and on teams where performance matters.

I’m not sure that there is a consistent definition for matters in this context. What matters is completely subjective to an individual. Furthermore, performance is rarely correlated with success and compensation in an enterprise. I could just as easily say that playing the game is what matters.

Re: AI demands more engineering discipline. Not less

#150

Post by goldenarm » Wed, Jun 17, 2026, 9:47 PM UTC

QuantumNoodle wrote: post #147

Given how many critical systems software touches these days, I am surprised that there they are not licensed. Imagine if civil engineers can just go building shit as minimum viable products? Sure prototype quickly but someone should be found liable for final product.

relevant xkcd : https://xkcd.com/2030/