Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why write code in 2026

softwaredoug.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

271–280 of 321 posts

Re: Why write code in 2026

#271

Post by palmotea »

satvikpendem wrote: post #170
lelanthran wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Humans have been thinking long before writing was invented. And look how poorly they did it until they invented writing. > Why is code special? You don't get better at thinking without doing. With code the "doing" part is writing. In your view, it is reasonable to expect HS students to thoroughly read a book on trigonometry and then ace the exam? We know, from experience , that only by doing problems does the stude…

> And look how poorly they did it until they invented writing. How can you know how poorly they did it?

>> And look how poorly they did it until they invented writing.

> How can you know how poorly they did it?

You could probably get some sense by comparing illiterate people to literate people.

Re: Why write code in 2026

#272

Post by balder1991 »

mewpmewp2 wrote: post #257
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.

I think writing is summarizing your thoughts outside of thinking. Thinking happens at least for me before I write. I know what I want to do before I write, and writing is just one medium to get it out there. If there was a faster way, to get my thoughts there I would use that.

You’re not wrong, but there’s a nuance here. More often than not our thoughts fool us into thinking we have something clear when we have only a vague idea of what you want to do.

I kinda [wrote about this before](https://dielsonsales.github.io/2023/05/11/starting-a-new-blo...) but the takeaway is that writing forces you to structure your thoughts, giving them a final shape and enables you to notice flaws or gaps in your own thinking process. It’s impossible to do this without writing.

Re: Why write code in 2026

#273

Post by cindyllm »

fuzztester wrote: post #167
lelanthran wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Humans have been thinking long before writing was invented. And look how poorly they did it until they invented writing. > Why is code special? You don't get better at thinking without doing. With code the "doing" part is writing. In your view, it is reasonable to expect HS students to thoroughly read a book on trigonometry and then ace the exam? We know, from experience , that only by doing problems does the stude…

>>Humans have been thinking long before writing was invented. >And look how poorly they did it until they invented writing. Yeah, look how poorly they did it until they invented writing. [peers into the dim ancient past] Sorry, my time-machine spectacles are on leave or on strike today. And congrats on being a multi-millen(ium)arian, and a mind reader, who could both 1) exist so far back in the past, and 2) be able t…

[dead]

Re: Why write code in 2026

#274

Post by balder1991 »

avaer wrote: post #75
softwaredoug wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That quote is the lead in to an example I talk about after this quote illustrates what I often see. > Agents bias to making the current change as safely as possible. I had a situation in a previous codebase where one morning, pre-caffeinated, my meat brain mentioned using browser local storage. So some random state was managed in local storage. Everything else through a backend database. When I looked at the code, th…

Right, but this just seems like underspecification. In my experience as both a team leader and an "agentic engineer" (ugh), I try to blame myself for the lack of clarity of my asks, rather than the person/agent for making the "wrong" choice. I'm sure plenty of meat humans out there would make the same mistake (sorry, you said to use local storage boss!). You might give them a scolding. And maybe document that policy.…

Often times to write a good enough specification in a way the LLM won’t misunderstand it, you need to really understand the code and the possible pitfalls in it though. A few times when I tried this route, even adding details just in case the LLM still went and assumed something wrong that I didn’t consider would be a problem until the agent had to make that choice. Then it becomes a game of doing it again and again with more and more detailed instructions until you could have yourself done it in less time and having a deeper understanding of the problem (or I could argue having any understanding of the problem at all, since having the LLM do it for you is like being a manager who has no clue about the lower level decisions made and only being communicated the final result).

Re: Why write code in 2026

#275

Post by balder1991 »

krackers wrote: post #190
prymitive wrote: post #24

I need to write code because otherwise LLMs will write too much code, it’s only when you fully understand the problem you can generalise it enough to not end up with 10k lines and 5 abstraction layers for “hello world”. LLMs are token predictors, so all solutions are you tokens, the more problems to solve == the more tokens (code) to output.

> it’s only when you fully understand the problem you can generalize Peter Naur explained this decades ago >Peter Naur argues that programming is fundamentally a human activity of building a mental "theory" - a deep conceptual insight into how a system's parts match the real-world problem it solves. He rejects the prevailing view that programming is merely the mechanical production of source code, specifications, and…

Basically, I’d say the LLM doesn’t have a “theory” of anything that wasn’t in its training. It’ll always treat your project as if it was reading a book for the first time.

As an example, if you chat with an LLM it can sort of explain concepts it learned in its training, because it created some internal representation of them. However it’ll never be able to explain things about your project unless you tell it (then it can simply repeat it, which is the same RAG does, the LLM is just spitting it out without any deep understanding of it).

You can try to cram as much context to it as possible and overload it with extra information, or you can understand this difference and separate a task that you know the LLM can handle because you’ll be able to leverage its knowledge and judge the final work yourself.

But this distinction needs to be more clear, I think. The LLM doesn’t have any deep understanding of anything you’re creaming into the context window the same way it does with concepts it learned during training from millions of examples and building some internal model of the concepts and their relationships.

Re: Why write code in 2026

#276

Post by ipsod »

DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #266
ipsod wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Make a copy of your codebase. Go to town on it. Have fun. Doesn't have to be stressful. Plan to throw away whatever happens. Do it in a VM if your nerves demand it. No reason it can't be fun.

I'm not anxious about my codebase; I'm anxious about all the fun parts being sucked out of my job as though I'm being promoted from IC to management - and given the inevitability of progress I can see how my new role as an agent shepherd, too, could be obsoleted in the near-future. ...so I've been avoidant of the whole thing ever since 2023, burying my head in the sand to avoid those feelings of anxiety and uncertain…

Ah, well... I can't say that there's any real hope.

I dove in in ~2023, and I'm about as deep in it as one can be. The better I get at it, and the better the agents get, the less time I spend even doing what I do - one prompt will often take 3+ hours. I often keep 8+ agents churning for the whole workday (and leave them running when I leave, too, and it's very often that they'll work from 4pm to midnight or later). I was responsible for 499 commits last week (very little new functionality, though), and I felt pretty useless at the end of it. I keep thinking I should code something, because coding feels productive in comparison, but going by results, it's pretty far from economical to write code by hand, and quickly approaching as bad as shipping goods by foot.

Re: Why write code in 2026

#277

Post by embedding-shape »

t43562 wrote: post #246
softwaredoug wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The code tells you HOW, the English should be telling you WHY. Both are usually needed IMO. Even a tiny bit of "why" can be extremely helpful to understanding in my experience. I don't want generated AI garbage that merely describes the code - I want the reason the whole thing exists and what was wanted by the person who wrote it.

AKA "Direction", which obviously the LLMs follows, and suck at coming up with by themselves. Humans though, when they have purposeful direction and manages to execute it, ends up creating a (small) beautiful life-changing revolution almost.

Re: Why write code in 2026

#279

Post by mewpmewp2 »

palmotea wrote: post #267
mewpmewp2 wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think writing is summarizing your thoughts outside of thinking. Thinking happens at least for me before I write. I know what I want to do before I write, and writing is just one medium to get it out there. If there was a faster way, to get my thoughts there I would use that.

> Thinking happens at least for me before I write. I know what I want to do before I write, and writing is just one medium to get it out there. If there was a faster way, to get my thoughts there I would use that. A lot of people observe that their thoughts get better when they do the work to write them out. It's not just a straightforward encoding process (as maybe a software engineer would conceive of it).

Yes, it gets better, but not because of writing, it gets better because of building, playing it out and observing the results. The trial and error. It wouldn't matter whether I built via voice to command AI or wrote the code myself.

E.g. I iterate and see the architecture or the system work out, or I get other ideas because of something I don't like, etc.

Re: Why write code in 2026

#280

Post by mewpmewp2 »

balder1991 wrote: post #272
mewpmewp2 wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think writing is summarizing your thoughts outside of thinking. Thinking happens at least for me before I write. I know what I want to do before I write, and writing is just one medium to get it out there. If there was a faster way, to get my thoughts there I would use that.

You’re not wrong, but there’s a nuance here. More often than not our thoughts fool us into thinking we have something clear when we have only a vague idea of what you want to do. I kinda [wrote about this before]( https://dielsonsales.github.io/2023/05/11/starting-a-new-blo... ) but the takeaway is that writing forces you to structure your thoughts, giving them a final shape and enables you to notice flaws or gaps in…

It would be good to have specific situations here I guess, otherwise it's quite abstract, and I'm not sure what to make of it.

As to your post, I think rather than writing it's the act of pressuring yourself to figure the thing out that is making you more knowledgeable about the thing.

You are putting it out publicly out there so you really want to be certain that you are correct, and therefore you do a lot of research.

If you wanted to be accurate and prove a point, the motivation mechanism could vary, but also the eventual communication mechanism could vary. It doesn't necessarily have to be in writing, it could be a live debate or simply something else you built. The writing or the product are end product, but the process of wanting to produce something is what made you research and to understand.

You could be writing to yourself into a Google Docs, and not care and you would not go deep to research since there's no incentive to be accurate.

E.g. I could be doing a home project whether hardware, software or DIY, that in order to produce this output I have to learn and think. Similar to as good set of words to communicate some idea. But also I could build some slop without thinking and I could produce slop writing without thinking, and about nothing special.

Post reply on HN