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Ask HN: Do you know of any company that went back to hand-written code?

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41–50 of 136 posts

Re: Ask HN: Do you know of any company that went back to hand-written code?

#41
post #21

I'm running a startup and we deliberately don't use AI for development. We only use it for review. We're working in a really deep area where having full understanding of our code is more important than speed. Besides, in this area, clients getting one whiff of AI code would be an immediate deal-killer

Out of curiosity - what space are are in?

Re: Ask HN: Do you know of any company that went back to hand-written code?

#43
post #36
post #13

Ford 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.

> circular economy I get what you mean, but in general circular economy means something different, positive in my opinion. Here is what wikipedia has to say: > a model of resource production and consumption that involves sharing, leasing, reusing, repairing, refurbishing, and recycling materials and products, to extend product life cycle for as long as possible In the EU it is a hot topic for a lot of non-profit and…

I think the term GP was looking for was "circular financing", which has far fewer positive connotations.

Re: Ask HN: Do you know of any company that went back to hand-written code?

#44

I don’t think that would ever happen. AI as a tool made the life so much easier removing initial inertia. I agree that we still haven’t figured out what’s the best way to use AI tools, but over the time it would mature and people would come up with patterns, conventions, and design principles so the quality of what is produced will be maintained or increased while keeping the productivity gains.

It will happen once everything breaks and we have an entire generation of drooling idiots spamming prompts. AI is 100% trash and it will only get better at deceiving you into thinking it isnt.

Every single person I talk too that is enthusiastic about AI is so because they can't code for shit. Sure, then the AI seems better. But it never really is. Learn to code, that inertia you are talking about is the technical debt. It will drag you down into the abyss eventually

Re: Ask HN: Do you know of any company that went back to hand-written code?

#45

In 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…

I think I definitely see the problem as a solo dev. I can just wing it with refactors and new tests, and all manners of sloshing about. But if I tried to do this with just one other person, they'd be pulling their hair out trying to understand why the last time they had to understand the code has completely shifted.

There definitely going to be a lot of fortune 500 companies absolutely wrecked by the amount of changes to their code base that no one will be "responsible" for because none of the workers will really know if it was their agent that changed something.

There could be some outliers who found the correct tools at the right time, but I don't think they'll suddenly be thrust into the money, because good code is definitely not the only thing that lets people succeed.

Re: Ask HN: Do you know of any company that went back to hand-written code?

#46
post #7

I think devs themselves won't want to work for a company that doesn't let you use Codex et al.

I disagree. Personally, I would work in company which respects more code/infra quality than coding speed. When you vibe-deliver a lot of features per sprint after some time codebase becomes an unpredictable AI Slop.

Re: Ask HN: Do you know of any company that went back to hand-written code?

#47
post #14

Do 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?

The best part of the downvoting of this is the answer to all of these is yes. Companies have banned all of these in the past when they were coming up. If you don’t learn from the past, …

Re: Ask HN: Do you know of any company that went back to hand-written code?

#48
post #23

In what context would generating code faster not be a desired outcome? Assuming of course everything else stays the same (quality, etc.)

I think most AI doomers will tell you that the quality of their code is better than LLM-generated code.

I did witness ai output advantage dwindle as codebase grew in a team of experienced devs who switched to 99% ai generated changes.

The last time I've checked ai still had an edge adding new features, but the team collectively lost the project knowledge and any problem discovered that llm could not fix took significantly longer to correct - they were effectively working on a new to them codebase.

Re: Ask HN: Do you know of any company that went back to hand-written code?

#49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I cant imagine my job without it anymore, in my hobby projects I dont really use it because its more about learning new stuff but for work I dont really care

That's so depressing, and a real loss for your employer. Even if they neither know nor care that you are now sandbagging them, you still are. You aren't making real gains because you're tossing out value of equivalent or greater worth (your learning and engagement)

But that's obviously exactly what the employer expects, I don't see the problem tbh ;)

Re: Ask HN: Do you know of any company that went back to hand-written code?

#50
Not for code, but my wife is a doctor and has gone from using AI scribes back to manually typing out notes and has multiple friends who've done the same. Turns out the gains were eroded by having to check the work and turn verbose prose into an actual note.
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