AI doesn't generate working products, that's still your job • Hacker News Board

Re: AI doesn't generate working products, that's still your job

#231

Post by doginasuit » Sat, Aug 01, 2026, 2:25 PM UTC

brabel wrote: post #222

doginasuit wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anything built this way will have a hard limit on the ability to scale in terms of functionality and load. Eventually it will get to a point where not even AI can work with it. It is hard to me to fathom why anyone would find those limits acceptable, especially with years of experience writing code. It seems something like an experienced painter giving up on their art to doodle with crayons, and maybe that could be c…

The ai does what you ask it to do. One thing you can ask is for it to refactor the code base to achieve some goal, for example to make new features easier to add , or to just make it more readable (though that’s a bad goal, no one agrees what is readable, and what AI finds readable may be different from what you think). I am saying this because I haven’t seen latest gen AI unable to implement something no matter how…

In order for you to properly guide it through a refactor, you have to understand the code, which becomes less possible as it grows into a mess of spaghetti. I think that's just setting yourself up for a massive amount of frustration. When there are multiple systems that need a refactor, each individual refactor becomes that much more complicated. And trusting the tool that created the mess to sort it out seems a tad delusional.

It's true that AI has an incredible ability to take in a massive amount of information and do useful work with it. But it has no direct ability to exercise judgment, and with each iteration of reasoning and applied changes, its ability to hold the original intent degrades very differently from a human intelligence.

Re: AI doesn't generate working products, that's still your job

#232

Post by lelele » Sat, Aug 01, 2026, 2:27 PM UTC

throwaway314155 wrote: post #125

gregoryl wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its a bit unkind to talk like this - the obvious and equally unproductive response is to question if you are really as good as you think you are. Are those junior developers not making a mess, or do you lack the insight to see it?

Or perhaps the ones complaining aren’t as good as they think they are at coding, prompting, etc.

But if so, then where is the secret prompt sauce for getting those results, please? It's not like we complainers don't read and put in practice all we can about how to refine a spec prompt after prompt, yet our results are still disappointing. To me, that's no wonder at all, as we haven't reached AGI yet; hence, no matter how impressive and productive these tools are, I totally don't expect them to actually know what they are doing.

To be clear: LLMs write about 99% of my code, but with constant steering.

Re: AI doesn't generate working products, that's still your job

#233

Post by bakugo » Sat, Aug 01, 2026, 2:49 PM UTC

ModernMech wrote: post #224

bakugo wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The whole thing will come crumbling down any minute It is crumbling down as we speak. There's more software being pumped out than ever, but it's also buggier, more bloated, and just generally worse than ever. A few days ago I had to revert to an older version of an open source project I use regularly, because the author turned full vibe coder and has pushed hundreds of AI generated commits in just a few weeks, at l…

What was the project? I'd like to examine the before and after.

Adminer. The code was never great, but it worked, and I have not been able to find a suitable replacement that isn't slow and bloated.

The specific functionality that was broken was the plugin that allows picking from a fixed list of servers instead of entering the address every time.

Re: AI doesn't generate working products, that's still your job

#234

Post by indigodaddy » Sat, Aug 01, 2026, 3:01 PM UTC

mmcnl wrote: post #89

prymitive wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s been infinitely times where I was stuck at some problem and every single solution was complex, messy, over-engineered and somehow wrong, until I went on a walk or moved to a different issue and suddenly it would hit me that I was looking at it all wrong, and there’s a simple solution there but my tunnel vision didn’t let me see it. LLM rob you of that, everything is instant, there’s no time to reflect, there’…

I recognize this, LLMs never stop, they pursue the dead end at all costs.

Never stop never stopping

Re: AI doesn't generate working products, that's still your job

#235

Post by discreteevent » Sat, Aug 01, 2026, 3:06 PM UTC

baq wrote: post #160

adamddev1 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In the same way high-level languages are a layer on top of writing machine code manually. Another layer, yes, but NOT "in the same way." It is a new, different kind of layer. The other layers were deterministic, not probabilistic.

Probabilistic algorithms are not new. If the distribution is known you can bend surprisingly many things to your will in the long run - and the most interesting part is the long run can be unexpectedly short. LLMs are quite interesting in that regard because you have a lot of levers to influence the shape of the distribution; the ways are different for each model, so it’s a very experimental science, but applying the…

The scientific method is not about running experiments and then trying to work out the gist of something. It's about understanding and theory building and then doing experiments to verify your model. The end result is not an experimental result but a model that you understand and can use to build solutions etc. LLMs are bringing us back to pre- science correlations and superstitions. That's why all the conversations on these threads about AI are so boring. It's all anecdotes and tips and no understanding.

Re: AI doesn't generate working products, that's still your job

#236

Post by gitaarik » Sat, Aug 01, 2026, 3:10 PM UTC

doginasuit wrote: post #207

schnebbau wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has happened to my side project too. There's so much going on in the code now that I can't possibly grok it to make changes safely by myself any more. But I think that's OK. Because I don't have to grok it anymore. I've been crafting beautiful code for almost 20 years - that itch is scratched. Now I just want to be productive and build cool stuff. AI is helping me make a better end-product in a fraction of the t…

Anything built this way will have a hard limit on the ability to scale in terms of functionality and load. Eventually it will get to a point where not even AI can work with it. It is hard to me to fathom why anyone would find those limits acceptable, especially with years of experience writing code. It seems something like an experienced painter giving up on their art to doodle with crayons, and maybe that could be c…

Have you heard about the concept of refactoring? AI is also good at that! ;)

Re: AI doesn't generate working products, that's still your job

#237

Post by cvwright » Sat, Aug 01, 2026, 3:10 PM UTC

doginasuit wrote: post #207

schnebbau wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has happened to my side project too. There's so much going on in the code now that I can't possibly grok it to make changes safely by myself any more. But I think that's OK. Because I don't have to grok it anymore. I've been crafting beautiful code for almost 20 years - that itch is scratched. Now I just want to be productive and build cool stuff. AI is helping me make a better end-product in a fraction of the t…

Anything built this way will have a hard limit on the ability to scale in terms of functionality and load. Eventually it will get to a point where not even AI can work with it. It is hard to me to fathom why anyone would find those limits acceptable, especially with years of experience writing code. It seems something like an experienced painter giving up on their art to doodle with crayons, and maybe that could be c…

We’ve already had those limits for years on any corporate project with average (or below) developers.

I work with a lot of AI code, and it’s not any worse than what big teams were already producing.

A small team of 2-3 really good humans is in a whole different league, but that has always been a very rare case.

Re: AI doesn't generate working products, that's still your job

#238

Post by ACS_Solver » Sat, Aug 01, 2026, 3:33 PM UTC

ThePhysicist wrote: post #174

schnebbau wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has happened to my side project too. There's so much going on in the code now that I can't possibly grok it to make changes safely by myself any more. But I think that's OK. Because I don't have to grok it anymore. I've been crafting beautiful code for almost 20 years - that itch is scratched. Now I just want to be productive and build cool stuff. AI is helping me make a better end-product in a fraction of the t…

Interesting point about "letting go". I hear that quite a lot, which I find surprising. In IT, when new technologies like cloud computing emerge people always need to adapt their workflows, and for some that is challenging e.g. going from manually maintained servers to virtual machines or containers that are just spun up and down on demand. Maybe it is similar with AI, we gain new capabilities along one dimension lik…

There's practical considerations with AI like it being a probabilistic layer and not deterministic in the way that compilers and deterministic, yes.

But the "letting go" point is I think about what people enjoy. Personally, I enjoy code. I've had jobs where I really enjoyed what I was doing because they gave me the opportunity to write interesting code. The end product wasn't interesting to me. I had a great job building tools for companies that build a very popular consumer product that I've never owned or been interested in. So the software we were building to assist in creating those products wasn't interesting to me in terms of what it is, but the job was motivating and interesting because of the technical problems I got to solve.

I think that's one of the big divides we're seeing in comments now. There are people who want to build things for the sake of the final product. They're happy because LLMs speed that up by a lot, at least initially. Then there are people who enjoy the process and craft of writing code. For them it's hard to let go of manual coding because that's the enjoyable part of the work.

Re: AI doesn't generate working products, that's still your job

#239

Post by bakugo » Sat, Aug 01, 2026, 3:35 PM UTC

brabel wrote: post #230

bakugo wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The whole thing will come crumbling down any minute It is crumbling down as we speak. There's more software being pumped out than ever, but it's also buggier, more bloated, and just generally worse than ever. A few days ago I had to revert to an older version of an open source project I use regularly, because the author turned full vibe coder and has pushed hundreds of AI generated commits in just a few weeks, at l…

> also buggier, more bloated, and just generally worse than ever. Citation needed. I have seen enormous improvements in bug fixes across our projects and many other companies (one HN headline says Google fixed more bugs in July than in previous 2 years). I would’ve expected even more given how easy it is to fix things now. LLMs can understand code better than anyone I’ve met, judging by their power to explain somethi…

> Citation needed.

Citation is me and my own personal experiences with vibe coded software. If you have examples of stable, efficient, polished software created by AI, I'll gladly try them out.

Regardless, your comment is a perfect exhibit of the problem. You are seeing 100 AI generated PRs merged in a day and interpreting that as 100 improvements to the user experience, which probably sounds great when you tell it to your manager before asking for a promotion, but doesn't actually translate to reality and never has. Before AI, it was generally agreed upon that measuring quality of work by lines of code written, PRs merged, etc. made no sense, yet that wisdom seems to have been completely forgotten in favor of just watching the line go up.

How do you even know the improvements are "enormous" if you don't understand the code? Do you just occasionally glance at your terminal to see Claude going on about how it just found the smoking gun and made a critical fix to a load-bearing seam and go "whoa, that sounds important"? If those improvements and bug fixes really were so important, why were they not considered worth the effort to make before AI came along, or was your team simply incapable of making them before?

If you're the most senior developer working on the same codebase for 12 years, yet proudly state that an LLM understands it better than you do, I can't help but interpret that as an admission of incompetence, so letting AI do your work for you may really be an improvement, but it shouldn't be.

Re: AI doesn't generate working products, that's still your job

#240

Post by HarHarVeryFunny » Sat, Aug 01, 2026, 4:00 PM UTC

I prefer the article's own "The Prototype Isn't the Product" title, since that seems to better capture what's being discussed.

With AI, it can be ridiculously quick to vibe code throwaway prototypes and personal use apps where "seems to mostly work" is the quality criteria, but what remains harder and slower is software engineering - building things where quality and maintainability are critical.

There is much less discussion of this - we mostly see people wanting to show off some flashy demo they just vibe coded, not discussion of how useful AI was, or wasn't, in working on some large legacy codebase or whatever non-sexy non-trivial task their day-to-day professional work consists of.

You are not going to get a 6am sunday call at home because your vibe-coded 3-D game prototype stopped working, but you surely will if there's a bug in the 24x7 production system that was just updated.