AI makes programming differently difficult • Hacker News Board

Re: AI makes programming differently difficult

#101

Post by typon » Tue, Jul 21, 2026, 8:56 PM UTC

techteach00 wrote: post #100

bnfcl wrote: post #7

Quote of the main point in the article: In other words, the hard part moves from recall (“How do I write this?”) to judgment (“Does this actually make sense?”) This is very true. But to evaluate if it makes sense, you first need experience writing the code. I am glad I learned software development over 15 years ago, and not today. AI is a super power, but without the experience to guide it, it can go horribly wrong r…

This is called the bargaining phase.

I am using a model that runs on a 100 GB300s, near AGI, all bets are off, $10B training run on a 1GW cluster, and it can't realize that when I told it to "please implement v2 of feature X" that I mean delete v1, not support v1 and v2 together, in a weird Frankenstein's monster of the two. Sorry, but I think my job is quite secure for the forseeable future.

Re: AI makes programming differently difficult

#102

Post by runarberg » Tue, Jul 21, 2026, 8:56 PM UTC

webdood90 wrote: post #88

runarberg wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People were saying the exact same thing exactly a year ago. “Last years models were no good, but this year we can do anything; so what about next years models?” the people said in July of 2025. Well... Now we have next years models, and people are still saying: “Last years models were no good, but this year we can do anything; so what about next years models?” And I am pretty sure in July 2027 (if this whole thing ha…

You must really have your head in the sand if you truly believe AI will not soon be very close to, if not better than, humans at writing code.

That is simply not technologically possible. You are speaking in science fiction here. You cannot train a neural network on existing things and then by some magic have the model be better then the training data. The laws of statistics prohibit it.

Re: AI makes programming differently difficult

#103

Post by reinitctxoffset » Tue, Jul 21, 2026, 8:59 PM UTC

jorgeleo wrote: post #20

bnfcl wrote: post #7

Quote of the main point in the article: In other words, the hard part moves from recall (“How do I write this?”) to judgment (“Does this actually make sense?”) This is very true. But to evaluate if it makes sense, you first need experience writing the code. I am glad I learned software development over 15 years ago, and not today. AI is a super power, but without the experience to guide it, it can go horribly wrong r…

Yup!. Over 30 years experience here. Landed on the same place with the added feeling of "We were always intended to develop the judgement of what makes sense and maintainable, where is the surprise here?" People want the "Fluent Text Generator" to think for them because its marketing calls it AI. At the end is just a tensor collection, probabilistically backtracked adjusted, text generator. It does produces fluency i…

I think it's easier to make your point without the baggage of the mechanism assertions.

The code is just wrong a lot. By denying the possibility of emergent phenomemona or model interiority you just hand the hypsters an easy point to score.

The code is just wrong, all the time. You're right about the part that matters and that we can measure.

Re: AI makes programming differently difficult

#104

Post by runarberg » Tue, Jul 21, 2026, 9:04 PM UTC

orangedog wrote: post #76

runarberg wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People were saying the exact same thing exactly a year ago. “Last years models were no good, but this year we can do anything; so what about next years models?” the people said in July of 2025. Well... Now we have next years models, and people are still saying: “Last years models were no good, but this year we can do anything; so what about next years models?” And I am pretty sure in July 2027 (if this whole thing ha…

Who is talking like this? Presumably the people looking forward to next year's models find some value out of this year's. You seem to want it to collapse, but that's not the argument you person you're responding to is making.

It is in fact very common:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1753056000&dateRange=custom&...

In particular those of us rooting for the collapse of AI were complaining about this speech a year ago as well:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44525074

Re: AI makes programming differently difficult

#105

Post by vorticalbox » Tue, Jul 21, 2026, 9:12 PM UTC

noodlescb wrote: post #82

nasretdinov wrote: post #74

Definitely not my experience. No matter the model, if I'm working on something important (and there is little reason on working on something not important) I do care about correctness and understandability. While LLMs are great for throwaway one-time code (although that's also debatable), they cannot compete with code written by a seasoned professional. No matter how many times I've tried delegating writing code to L…

After 18+ months of this, LLMs are incredible for getting rid of the work I hated most: Updating JIRA tickets, tedious little cleanup jobs, refactoring, etc. They are great at finding infosec issues. They are also GREAT at writing code based on standards and patterns established by an actual human engineers. They are STILL trash at anything meaningfully complex from the ground up. I will go through hours of planning…

> I have to kick the hell out of its plans in ways that I don't think someone without a ton of real world experience could do

I think that’s the real point the article’s making. Unless you already know the ropes, you can’t tell if a plan is actually any good. I use LLMs all the time for work, but only because I get the system well enough to spot the nonsense or catch when a plan duplicates something that already exists. They really do keep rewriting the same functions over and over in the code.

Re: AI makes programming differently difficult

#106

Post by cadamsdotcom » Tue, Jul 21, 2026, 9:18 PM UTC

tossandthrow wrote: post #36

dsmurrell wrote: post #6

It's somehow more tiring, reading complex plans in response to your guidance, and then making decision after decision. Reminds me of this Alan Watts bit... A farmer who ordered a farmhand quickly discovered he was an extraordinarily efficient worker. The first day, he put him on sawing logs, and the farmhand sawed more logs than anybody else, ever. It was fantastic — but the wood-cutting work was all done in one day.…

Historically, we make systems to make these decisions - build a method to sort potatoes. Or build a method that can build a method to sort potatoes. Ai, as a cognitive technology, has the potential to climb that hierarchy. Yes, current software developers need to make more decisions now. But that is just until the methodologies settle. Then it is over.

If you think the hierarchy has a highest level, or that abstraction can only go "this far and no further".. I don't know what to tell you.

Re: AI makes programming differently difficult

#107

Post by order-matters » Tue, Jul 21, 2026, 9:30 PM UTC

gofreddygo wrote: post #71

bnfcl wrote: post #7

Quote of the main point in the article: In other words, the hard part moves from recall (“How do I write this?”) to judgment (“Does this actually make sense?”) This is very true. But to evaluate if it makes sense, you first need experience writing the code. I am glad I learned software development over 15 years ago, and not today. AI is a super power, but without the experience to guide it, it can go horribly wrong r…

"How can we dig a well here" and "should we dig a well here" are neither mutually exclusive nor sufficient in their own regard. Cant answer should we without having done a lot of it before. Cant learn unless you actually do it and see the consequences through.

and yet it's also incredibly effective to be able to recognize "oh this plot is incredibly similar to these 100 other plots and there appears to be a pretty consistent pattern to what is driving where the well is built, and they are all constructed in a very similar fashion, i am just going to copy what they did"

AI is very useful when you dont need to invent anything new

Re: AI makes programming differently difficult

#108

Post by kerblang » Tue, Jul 21, 2026, 9:33 PM UTC

austin-cheney wrote: post #49

I am looking at the subtitle: The future of software development will belong to those who can think clearly at scale, maintain durable mental models amid rapid change, and integrate machine-generated output into human-directed intent. Wasn't this always the case? Maybe I just take this for granted because I am dumb Army guy and this is the only lens through which we dumb Army people see the world. Whenever the subjec…

Ever since the first programming language the goal was to make the work easier, although there are different kinds of "easy", and sometimes you end up worse off because tools don't live up to promises.

The human element is "What do I want?" You have ideas about how you need things to work. Some folks don't care much at all about how things work, just that they can shove a thing out the door and get paid with minimal effort. Sometimes their boss is completely in agreement. Sometimes things fall apart because nobody cared enough to bother, and sometimes even that doesn't matter, and everybody gets paid anyhow.

Sometimes you wish things mattered more, and sometimes they do.

Re: AI makes programming differently difficult

#109

Post by skydhash » Tue, Jul 21, 2026, 9:53 PM UTC

austin-cheney wrote: post #49

I am looking at the subtitle: The future of software development will belong to those who can think clearly at scale, maintain durable mental models amid rapid change, and integrate machine-generated output into human-directed intent. Wasn't this always the case? Maybe I just take this for granted because I am dumb Army guy and this is the only lens through which we dumb Army people see the world. Whenever the subjec…

> Whenever the subject of AI comes up in connection to programming it feels like the conversation always misses the human element. When you look at this only in terms of human behavior I am not seeing anything new with AI

You’re not wrong. I think that’s the confusion in LLM conversation. It seems that most people believe that programmers only think about code like it’s some kind of lego bricks we have to assemble. While the truth is that most projects is about building a sets of concepts that interacts in a specific way. The code is just the medium to do so, like letters helping to create words when writing.

I was reading the OpenBSD code (some investigation about a pen tablet) and the layers in abstraction was the following:

  xinput
  ws       (driverfor x11)
  --|ioctl syscall|---
  wsmouse  (wscons subsystem)
  hidms    (hid mouse) Some other things use the usb hid format
  ums      (usb mouse)
  uhidev   (usb hid device)
  usb      (root controller hub abstraction)
  xhci     (usb root controller under the hood, usb side
  pci_xhci (usb root controller, pci side)

You can stop at several point and not worry about what’s in the lower level of the abstraction tower, but those mechanism exists and have been built by someone. Imagine if that tower has been flattened out and all the code needed to coexist within the same module. It would be madness.

Programming was always about taking some lower order of things and rearranging it into meaningful concepts for some higher purposes. Whether it’s the DOM api, the jQuery suite of functions, the React model of components and reactive state, the goal is to create UI widgets for a page.

People (sometimes?) see the building blocks (dom api…) and the end result (figma sketch) but have no idea how the two connect.

Re: AI makes programming differently difficult

#110

Post by koakoala » Tue, Jul 21, 2026, 9:58 PM UTC

Havoc wrote: post #34

FinnLobsien wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the bigger issue in defining this is that “programming” is too big a task to say whether it got easier or harder. Some YAML formalities now take zero effort while architectural thinking became way more important and difficult.

>architectural thinking became way more important and difficult. Did it though? I think the architectural stuff was always there and was always hard. And still is. I don't buy that it got harder now that you've got a pretty smart AI you can bounce ideas off, ask to investigate stuff, maybe make a quick mockup trivial test of both options on an architectural choice you face, send off to do research etc. ...so in my mi…

I agree it hasn't become more difficult conceptually. However, I am finding that the way to get the most out of agents seems to be to bite off bigger chunks than I would've when coding by hand, and try to make up-front decisions to much greater levels of detail than I previously would have before editing code.

Previously, I would've only thought through the really important high level choices up front (e.g. things that would affect interfaces with other parts of the system, or 'do I need a queue here' etc). For the smaller minutiae of good code structure, appropriate abstractions etc. I would allow myself flexibility to address those while working through the problem.

I found it easier to work at those different levels of granularity in sequence, and the latter one I specifically found easier to see the problem clearly and make a good decision while hand-writing the diff. In that sense, I think good architecture has been made more difficult to practice. For me, at least.