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Why write code in 2026

softwaredoug.com

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Re: Why write code in 2026

#231

Post by jillesvangurp »

Pavilion2095 wrote: post #217
jillesvangurp wrote: post #200

The relevant question is who is going to pay you to write code manually. It's something that's increasingly hard to justify. The answer is of course that people are not paying for code to be written or generated but for some problem to be solved. Whoever does that with the least amount of drama and cost gets the business. And using AI tools just allows for compressing the timelines a bit in a way that is hard to igno…

> The relevant question is who is going to pay you to write code manually. Hopefully companies in the industries where software quality matters and is regulated, e.g.: medicine, aviation, nuclear, etc. Although this market is relatively small.

You seem to assume that people still have an inherent advantage here. Mostly those sectors compensate for well documented human failures with very rigid and expensive processes and testing. And of course despite that, stuff still goes wrong occasionally.

I actually think AI based automation is going to be a key enabler in those kinds of strict environments as well. Recent work on identifying e.g. security bugs seems to be resulting in a lot of improvement that has somehow escaped decades of human scrutiny. With good quality harnesses (manual or automated), I don't see any big objection against using generated code here.

Re: Why write code in 2026

#232

Post by zelphirkalt »

kzzzznot wrote: post #201
bananaboy wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100% agree. I don't understand why there is pushback against this.

Because professional development is not just for fun

One of the things businesses tend to not understand is, that if you take the fun out of the activity, you also lose the passion of the people performing the activity, no matter how many times actors at the job fake passion in front of higher ups. If you lose the passion, what you will be left with it mediocre development and shoddy software.

Maybe that's "enough" for the business to survive. But it surely won't be the reason it succeeds. It can still succeed for other factors though, but the business has given up on one path to success, which is making better software than the competition.

Re: Why write code in 2026

#233

Post by soco »

quantumHazer wrote: post #220
ekidd wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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;…

> Fable didn't even need to debug it; I believe essentially all the assembly worked correctly on the first try. so you don't know if it works properly or not

It's also conveniently forgetting that AI was trained on the whole internet, a corpus of code including every garbage solution in SO wrong answers or random junior blogs. I didn't see any claim AI could select "best practices" from their sources, so putting AI to correct another AI has high chances of statistically selecting the same wrong solution, because that was just a common thread in those old posts they used as reference.

Re: Why write code in 2026

#234

Post by mattmanser »

soco wrote: post #233
quantumHazer wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Fable didn't even need to debug it; I believe essentially all the assembly worked correctly on the first try. so you don't know if it works properly or not

It's also conveniently forgetting that AI was trained on the whole internet, a corpus of code including every garbage solution in SO wrong answers or random junior blogs. I didn't see any claim AI could select "best practices" from their sources, so putting AI to correct another AI has high chances of statistically selecting the same wrong solution, because that was just a common thread in those old posts they used a…

I think you're pretty wrong here, but I'm no expert so anyone who wants to correct me please do so.

As I understand it, there's post-training step that does exactly that, they get real developers to select good and bad code and help the AI figure that out. AFAIK it's the reason why Claude was able to leap-frog OpenAI in coding last year, they did this refinement step a lot better.

And now they've taught the older models this, they can use existing models to bootstrap the newer models without humans involved, and bring humans in to just assess the trickier stuff.

Re: Why write code in 2026

#235

Post by streetfighter64 »

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…

First of all, obviously there's more training data on high level languages than assembly / compiled binaries. Secondly, Python, Java or even C is portable to another device. You know, one of the main points of high level languages: that you don't have to rewrite your app from scratch each time you want to change the machine it runs on.

Thirdly, compilers also do type checking and other static analysis and dynamic checks (array length etc). So it's not only got more guardrails against "mistakes" by the LLM, but it's also most likely "easier" for the LLM to "reason" about (in the sense that LLMs can reason).

There's no intrinsic value to having humans read the code, so as soon as LLMs are good enough to work on their own, companies will no longer need to keep developers who can read code as a backup solution.

Re: Why write code in 2026

#236

Post by wseqyrku »

ares623 wrote: post #152
enraged_camel wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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?

You will get to a point that you have to write it down so you don't forget but more importantly check if it even compiles.

Re: Why write code in 2026

#237

Post by chromadon »

"Why write code in 2026"..

Because AI generated code is STILL complete ass. Even Fable, even whatever custom Pi/opencode leet code harness you have, the output is awful, and, if you cannot distinguish the quality of your code vs the AI's, I've got some bad news for you.

Re: Why write code in 2026

#239

Post by ioseph »

jacomoRodriguez wrote: post #227
lelanthran wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How can you know how poorly they did it? Their lack of progress. Humans existed in the same basic form for around 100k years before they finally invented agriculture, which led to some improvements, and then rapid progress once writing was invented.

Improvements or just new ways to be occupied and more work? It seems life without agriculture and the like was way simpler and chilled.

Until winter.

Re: Why write code in 2026

#240

Post by softwaredoug »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #200

The relevant question is who is going to pay you to write code manually. It's something that's increasingly hard to justify. The answer is of course that people are not paying for code to be written or generated but for some problem to be solved. Whoever does that with the least amount of drama and cost gets the business. And using AI tools just allows for compressing the timelines a bit in a way that is hard to igno…

I personally am advocating for writing small amounts of code because I think it makes you more productive

Spending a day manually reworking the architecture in my experience can save you $1000s in tokens and weeks of headaches.

We’re trying to build a software factory with hands tied behind our back

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