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Ask HN: Do you know of any company that went back to hand-written code?
11–20 of 136 posts
Re: Ask HN: Do you know of any company that went back to hand-written code?
#12Although code quality may sometimes suffer, no one can deny the productivity gains AI brings to software development.
Neither can anyone deny that 'productivity gains' are worthless if what's being produced is worthless.
Re: Ask HN: Do you know of any company that went back to hand-written code?
#13Ford did: https://www.forbes.com/sites/joetoscano1/2026/06/30/ford-hir...
So did Commonwealth Bank of Australia and IBM: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/01/employers-who-laid-off-worke...
And I'm sure many others who didn't publicize it because they have to keep this circular economy going.
Re: Ask HN: Do you know of any company that went back to hand-written code?
#14Do you know of any company that banned IDEs and went back to plain text only editing?
Do you know of any company that banned compilers and went back to hand written assembly?
Do you know of any company that banned stack overflow and went back to figuring everything out?
Re: Ask HN: Do you know of any company that went back to hand-written code?
#15In my startup, I am currently in consideration for doing this exact thing. The interesting part is it's not really the AI that's causing the issue. It's the ease of my developer to make a mess, either with messy code or feature bloat. After figuring out the exact product we need with some very quick development cycles with AI, we now have some problems that I can't keep under control because of AI. So, currently unde…
This is a leadership problem, not an AI problem. I have the opposite situation: I don't think about code "messiness" anymore. I trust my developers to ship the right thing because we communicate constantly about what our goal is and why we're doing it.
Solve the leadership problem and the AI thing becomes an advantage instead of a problem.
Re: Ask HN: Do you know of any company that went back to hand-written code?
#16Although code quality may sometimes suffer, no one can deny the productivity gains AI brings to software development.
> Although code quality may sometimes suffer
That doesn't sound like a good thing in the long term.
> no one can deny the productivity gains AI brings to software development.
What are those "productivity gains"? Rapidly building hundreds of the wrong things that people do not want?
It means you cannot stop and the competition only moves far more quicker and its a forever race to the bottom.
Re: Ask HN: Do you know of any company that went back to hand-written code?
#17[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: Do you know of any company that went back to hand-written code?
#18We don’t have a no-AI policy but I’m trying to hand roll some code, because it is useful for interviews. It is very difficult to memorize the exact syntax unless I hand write code everyday.
Re: Ask HN: Do you know of any company that went back to hand-written code?
#19Do you know of any company that banned IDEs and went back to plain text only editing? Do you know of any company that banned compilers and went back to hand written assembly? Do you know of any company that banned stack overflow and went back to figuring everything out?
Someone answered the question with some actual examples. Please refrain from the hyperbole
Re: Ask HN: Do you know of any company that went back to hand-written code?
#20Ford did: https://www.forbes.com/sites/joetoscano1/2026/06/30/ford-hir... So did Commonwealth Bank of Australia and IBM: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/01/employers-who-laid-off-worke... And I'm sure many others who didn't publicize it because they have to keep this circular economy going.
No they didn’t. Did you read either of the things you posted?