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Why write code in 2026

softwaredoug.com

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Re: Why write code in 2026

#151

Post by dgroshev »

softwaredoug wrote: post #100
mrweasel wrote: post #73

Apparently it's not obvious to everyone, but if you can't write code, you can't review it. I do know people, and companies, that says: "So what, we ask Claude to write the code, Codex will then do the review". The thing that then strikes me as odd is that they still ask for the code in Python, Java, or some other high level language.... Why? Just ask Claude to dump out assembly, or a compiled binary, but no, they don…

I’m finding it all boils down to cognitive differences. Some people find code easier to read than the English description. It’s more precise and many experienced devs can scan it and know what’s happening Many other people can’t read code. Or they find English easier to read than code. Thats not a knock on anyone. Maybe the latter will rule the world because the former focuses too much on irrelevant details. Or maybe…

Some heart surgeons might only be able to explain to the nurses their ideas on how to carry out the surgery, but are they still heart surgeons?

Re: Why write code in 2026

#152

Post by ares623 »

enraged_camel wrote: post #138
lelanthran wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Apparently it's not obvious to everyone, but if you can't write code, you can't review it. There's more to it than that: writing is thinking. If you stop writing code, you aren't thinking anymore. Many argue that they're now thinking at a higher level (maybe they weren't before?), but, guess what, that high-level design can be done better by the LLM than by you anyway. It's only temporary.

>> There's more to it than that: writing is thinking. If you stop writing code, you aren't thinking anymore. Humans have been thinking long before writing was invented . Why is code special?

have you tried thinking for a long time without writing anything down?

Re: Why write code in 2026

#153

Post by okanat »

> Not because agents are worse at coding that[sic] humans.

And then the whole article shows tangible reasons where the agents are truly worse at code than humans. Code never is just the text. If intelligence you have is not truly general, you cannot expect things like clarifying wider context, hierarchically ordering knowledge based on criteria and producing consistent results despite transfer learning and retraining.

And no, we are not even close to the multimodal capabilities of human brain to hierarchy encode and reproduce knowledge. Otherwise the correct "reasonable" economic action would be genociding all humans, and I'm pretty sure that this is what billionaires effectively want out of AI.

Re: Why write code in 2026

#154

Post by hresvelgr »

LtWorf wrote: post #144
dehrmann wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They don't have Claude write assembly because there is no training corpus on people making CRUD apps in assembly. I suspect that despite its translation abilities, this is true, but I'd like to see it do things in languages that are more or less appropriate for tasks to see how much the training corpus matters vs. its ability to translate. Assembly is a bit of an extreme example because you're either writing it as…

> C is essentially portable assembly Not really, assembly shows you what the machine instructions actually are. In C you have loops, functions structs. All things that make no sense in assembly.

Both points are specious. C disassembly is usually not an orthogonal translation of the structures in the code, usually due to optimisation.

> In C you have loops, functions structs. All things that make no sense in assembly.

One can reasonably infer that a loop will roughly translate to some type of conditional jump instruction. Function structs are just pointers and call instructions. The former point was that there is little runtime getting in the way of how the constructs could be expressed, and a long time ago it may have been the truth, but not for modern compilers.

Re: Why write code in 2026

#155

Post by softwaredoug »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #143
softwaredoug wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My other article on this topic advocates for using code over specs :) It’s ok to talk to the agent in code. Or create examples for it to follow. https://softwaredoug.com/blog/2026/07/04/write-code-not-spec...

> It’s ok to talk to the agent in code. Or create examples for it to follow If you're doing this, then why not just write the effing code?

What I mean by "talk to the agent in code" really is to code. Establish patterns. Then have the agent use those patterns as reference for other areas of the project.

Re: Why write code in 2026

#156

Post by nojito »

mrweasel wrote: post #73

Apparently it's not obvious to everyone, but if you can't write code, you can't review it. I do know people, and companies, that says: "So what, we ask Claude to write the code, Codex will then do the review". The thing that then strikes me as odd is that they still ask for the code in Python, Java, or some other high level language.... Why? Just ask Claude to dump out assembly, or a compiled binary, but no, they don…

>if you can't write code, you can't review it.

I don't write code anymore and I doubt I ever will ever again.

On the flipside I review exponentially more code than ever before.

>Just ask Claude to dump out assembly, or a compiled binary, but no, they don't trust the LLM that much

It's not "not trusting" the llm its that the llm has been undergoing reinforcement learning is on coding. Plus generating assembly is extremely token inefficient.

Re: Why write code in 2026

#157

Post by [deleted] »

lelanthran wrote: post #137
mrweasel wrote: post #73

Apparently it's not obvious to everyone, but if you can't write code, you can't review it. I do know people, and companies, that says: "So what, we ask Claude to write the code, Codex will then do the review". The thing that then strikes me as odd is that they still ask for the code in Python, Java, or some other high level language.... Why? Just ask Claude to dump out assembly, or a compiled binary, but no, they don…

> Apparently it's not obvious to everyone, but if you can't write code, you can't review it. There's more to it than that: writing is thinking. If you stop writing code, you aren't thinking anymore. Many argue that they're now thinking at a higher level (maybe they weren't before?), but, guess what, that high-level design can be done better by the LLM than by you anyway. It's only temporary.

[deleted]

Re: Why write code in 2026

#159

Post by avador »

ekidd wrote: post #117
ryandvm wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They don't have Claude write assembly because there is no training corpus on people making CRUD apps in assembly. I'm as hateful of LLMs hollowing out the job market as the next guy, but the reality is the frontier LLMs are really good at writing anything that's been done and documented on the Internet a million times and unfortunately most of what software devs have been doing the last couple decades is shitting out…

Claude is perfectly capable of writing assembly. Here's a working (basic) Prolog interpreter that Claude Fable 5 wrote in WebAssembly in 61 minutes for $16.75 in token costs: https://github.com/emk/fable-wasm-prolog/blob/main/prolog.wa... WebAssembly is slightly easier than real assembly, but here Fable used WASM GC extensions, which are poorly documented and not yet super common. Fable didn't even need to debug it;…

There’s a very real dichotomy at play here. Position 0: humans depend upon AI. Position 1: AIs depend upon humans.

At first blush, it seems achingly obvious that position 1 is true, whilst position 0 is a false play by con artists.

Well, at first blush I agree! But first blushes are notorious for being famous last words (blushes).

You see, we always knew that the tool shapes the hand. That is, as we use computational (discrete) devices, we ourselves become more computational, discrete.

But what we did not anticipate is that the tool would fool others as the ACTUAL HAND. I am so fooled. Daily.

My friends. Does technique encompass being? Answer me this!

Re: Why write code in 2026

#160

Post by noosphr »

supermdguy wrote: post #102

“Do you know what the industry term for a project specification that is comprehensive and precise enough to generate a program? Code. It’s called code.” - CommitStrip ( https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/1p70bk8/sp... ) I think if you’re doing it right, the core of your code should be the simplest expression of the underlying business logic. Of course there’s always going to be supporting layers, and m…

This is why you need lisp.

First you write a programming language in which the language primatives are the business logic primatives, then you write a trivial program that describes what the business does in the new language.

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