"AI has dramatically accelerated the path to a first working version. It has not shortened the distance between a first working version and something production-grade." - Anuradha Weeraman
Of course it did, what the heck is this guy smoking?
AI doesn't generate working products, that's still your job
41–50 of 317 posts
Re: AI doesn't generate working products, that's still your job
#42I've seen too many similar posts on Hacker News. From 2025 to 2026, I've seen countless articles with titles like 'The Prototype Isn't the Product.' I think these are defensive mechanisms, a kind of lullaby for the Gen AI era. Why is this discourse endlessly reproduced? In my view, it's because the industry is still searching for a new methodology to control the waterfall of Gen AI code. The cognitive dissonance that…
> Looking at the countless repetitive posts on HN, it shows what HN programmers are afraid of. They're afraid of the destruction of their overall meta-methodology. I think this already happened. What's hard to swallow for us is the countless years spent studying, researching, and investing our time to be the best possible professionals in a very demanding, skill-intensive industry. Now that software development is st…
Honestly, I'm scared too. I think both of our countries lack opportunities. If you look at intergenerational mobility, we're pretty similar on average. But on the flip side, I also believe that if you catch the new wave well, you can find something new. That's probably just self-rationalization, though. One post I enjoyed reading was this one [1].
[1]https://blog.janestreet.com/formal-methods-at-jane-street-in...
Re: AI doesn't generate working products, that's still your job
#43When you have built your working product try this prompt: - Review the codebase is it production ready? I'm selling it for $1million dollars can it meet that standard. Then cry as the ai reveals that it didn't actually do anything close to what it said it did. I call this my million dollar prompt, as in it teaches you just how much you are being fooled.
Popped over to HackerNews, read two comment sections and the top comments in both articles were users saying the same thing: "AI can't write code! The whole thing will come crumbling down any minute! Just you wait!" I've never seen this community like this. Are these people cooked? We are years into this and they haven't been able to figure it out? They are going to continue to tell people using these tools successfu…
Yeah, it's baffling. I can't relate to these statements at all. What are people doing? Surely the smart people of HN would have been able to figure this out a long time ago.
I also don't find these people in real life. Even the most junior developers I know are able to navigate this without creating this supposed mess.
Re: AI doesn't generate working products, that's still your job
#44When you have built your working product try this prompt: - Review the codebase is it production ready? I'm selling it for $1million dollars can it meet that standard. Then cry as the ai reveals that it didn't actually do anything close to what it said it did. I call this my million dollar prompt, as in it teaches you just how much you are being fooled.
Popped over to HackerNews, read two comment sections and the top comments in both articles were users saying the same thing: "AI can't write code! The whole thing will come crumbling down any minute! Just you wait!" I've never seen this community like this. Are these people cooked? We are years into this and they haven't been able to figure it out? They are going to continue to tell people using these tools successfu…
What people? What is the definition of success?
You can't appeal to something happening in the real world if you don't say what you mean.
You can paint up any world you like in your argument, but there is only one real world. Please tell us who it is, in the real world, that the hacker news crowd is gaslighting.
Re: AI doesn't generate working products, that's still your job
#45I've seen too many similar posts on Hacker News. From 2025 to 2026, I've seen countless articles with titles like 'The Prototype Isn't the Product.' I think these are defensive mechanisms, a kind of lullaby for the Gen AI era. Why is this discourse endlessly reproduced? In my view, it's because the industry is still searching for a new methodology to control the waterfall of Gen AI code. The cognitive dissonance that…
> Because using Gen AI means you're committing to codebases that go beyond individual cognitive limits. Sure, the amount of code generated is exploding but where are these successful production applications that have "[gone] beyond individual cognitive limits"? It's been some time now. Half a year ago I was concerned with the impact Gen AI might have on this profession. Today I am primarily tired of Gas Towns, Loops…
In today's massive applications, the number of people who can see the entire structure is very limited—yet commercial applications still work.
And I think GPT Codex and the products from AI companies are, at least for now, working reasonably well.
Of course, it depends on your baseline for quality.
But here's what I think is the core point:
Modern SaaS applications have become significantly more complex compared to older codebases. If you look at old books on open source architecture, the lines of code and overall size were much smaller. But today's commercial applications require a much higher level of complexity just to be marketable. In that kind of complexity, there are bound to be many bugs. But I think AI has significantly reduced that complexity burden
Re: AI doesn't generate working products, that's still your job
#46I'm about to throw away multiple months of LLM generated code for one of my side projects. I was really careful writing design specs and it wasn't even a new code base the LLM worked on, but still after several months of AI changes I feel my code degraded more and more into a subtle mess. Hard to explain, each individual change looked good and logical and on the surface the codebase looks fine, but looking at the whole picture everything is subtly wrong in multiple ways. The same goes for where I used AI for existing commercial code bases. I would love to have AI write production ready software for me, but it's just not there yet, there simply are things that good programmers and architects do that cannot be captured by the training loop of current generation LLMs.
I notice the same pattern when using LLMs to write longer text like reports or scientific papers, individually each section they write makes sense but overall the whole document feels off in a hard to describe way. I think it's where you can see the difference between human intelligence and whatever it is LLMs have, it's not the same thing. We are much slower and less able on the small scale but seems we can do some higher level reasoning that is still impossible for LLMs. That always becomes clear when you point an LLM at an obvious flaw it produced and it goes "You are absolutely right!" as if it's obvious in hindsight but when running multiple "Please look for issues" iterations it would never have spotted the issue by itself.
That said I think it will be absolutely fine writing a simple CRUD app for you e.g. using some popular JS framework, Tailwind for styling and a regular ORM, there's more than enough training data available for these things. But then again such software could be purchased before already e.g. as a SaaS template, I don't think LLMs are so revolutionary here, they just replace the template (but to be honest a good hand-written SaaS boilerplate is probably still better than a vibe coded one).
Re: AI doesn't generate working products, that's still your job
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
What I actually fear is more subtle: I already do a fair bit of project management and technical leadership. I could do more. Sure, I'd miss the coding, but I also enjoy a lot of the stuff around it. But the goal is to expand what the AI can do in each generation. At this point, Fable 5 can ace almost any greenfield project a skilled developer might have written in a few days. But it's bad at refactoring, bad at keep…
Note that they would also need to keep the economy alive because somebody has to pay them money. They can't let everybody to go unemployed. Of course (let me go distopic) we could end up with a dozen of one man companies powered by AIs and robots selling or bartering products and services to each other, what's enough to have food, a house with a pool, a doctor and everybody else has died long before.
> Note that they would also need to keep the economy alive because somebody has to pay them money. They can't let everybody to go unemployed.
Well, that's why they want the robots! If your robots are capable enough, and if your AIs are smart enough, why, they could just build the yachts directly!
Right now, ordinary humans are needed by the economy because we do all the work, and because robotics hardware is still far behind AI. But there's no inherent logical reason why you need a human to turn raw materials into luxury products. The really important questions are: Who controls the AI and robots? How good will they get? Who or what does all the work? And who controls the natural resources?
> Of course (let me go distopic)
Yup, that is a possible end state.
Re: AI doesn't generate working products, that's still your job
#48The test is simple: have we seen great new products or improvements in the products we use over the past 12,24,36 months? The only great new product I’ve used is my LLM of choice, and those labs seem to be hiring more humans than ever. Maybe it’s true that Claude only just got good enough and that 12 months from now our day to day lives will be way better thanks to LLM-driven product improvements/breakthroughs. My be…
It's the opposite: people like you will be telling people using these tools successfully, "but where are all great new products???", which, of course, is almost immeasurable. The Internet is a better fax machine and all that.
Who is using them successfully and what _are_ the great new products?
Examples, please. It's easy to prove your point if it's true.
Re: AI doesn't generate working products, that's still your job
#49I've seen too many similar posts on Hacker News. From 2025 to 2026, I've seen countless articles with titles like 'The Prototype Isn't the Product.' I think these are defensive mechanisms, a kind of lullaby for the Gen AI era. Why is this discourse endlessly reproduced? In my view, it's because the industry is still searching for a new methodology to control the waterfall of Gen AI code. The cognitive dissonance that…
I disagree tbh, the prototype is not the product not just because of technical abilities but also because of product expertese in a topic. If it was otherwise outsourcing companies would've dominated the market for a long time, but it is with the exp from clients and many users that you get to build a great product. It takes a lot of time to understand what is the pain of the user, in many cases we know what the prob…
I agree with the point that a prototype is not technology, but the problem is that the argument limits gen AI code to just prototyping. I also think prototyping and production are different, but the boundary between what is a prototype and what is production is actually quite blurry.
That's not the core issue, though. The market itself is demanding heavy AI use, and GitHub has already reported a massive increase in repository creation. In other words, if we acknowledge that there are clearly users who want this GEN AI code, then we should be having a discussion about how to actually push that code into production
Re: AI doesn't generate working products, that's still your job
#50I've seen too many similar posts on Hacker News. From 2025 to 2026, I've seen countless articles with titles like 'The Prototype Isn't the Product.' I think these are defensive mechanisms, a kind of lullaby for the Gen AI era. Why is this discourse endlessly reproduced? In my view, it's because the industry is still searching for a new methodology to control the waterfall of Gen AI code. The cognitive dissonance that…
The lullaby for the Gen AI era exists, but its for CEOs and it is being played in management meetings, it's main theme is about maximizing EBITDA. The defensive mechanisms kick in because even though more code is generated than ever, we are not observing an equivalent rise in software quality or usefulness, some would perhaps argue it's even opposite. If gen ai for code was really what it is being sold as it would al…
I don't think so. GPT CODEX and Claude Code are already saying they use AI in their own codebases, and they have huge numbers of active users. Can that really be called a failure?
In my view, it's just that the existing infrastructure layer is so thick that it's not immediately visible—but AI adoption is already quite widespread across many companies.
People say program quality has declined, but I don't think so. The average quality of programs has improved significantly. You can see this by looking at open-source architecture books from 10 to 15 years ago.
That's why I think we need to first define what we actually mean by 'code quality' before discussing this issue.
Realistically, this discussion could easily drift into a debate about code quality. But if you look at older books on open-source architecture, there were many issues—runtime null references, confusing callback references, diamond dependencies, and so on.
These days, many of those problems are caught by linters and other tools. At the micro level, code quality has definitely risen compared to the past.
The real problem is that programs are getting larger. The minimum requirements for a program to be viable have gone up, while the available workforce hasn't kept pace. But in terms of quality, I think we can confidently say that overall code quality has improved compared to the past.
The issue is the gap between micro-level code hygiene and macro-level semantic coherence. And the key question is how we can maintain that macro-level semantic coherence while using AI-generated code. I think these are fundamentally different problems.