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

> COO Kumar Galhotra said Ford had been over-relying on automated quality systems without getting results, per Bloomberg. The returning engineers rebuilt the data pipelines feeding Ford's AI training, mentored junior staff, and reprogrammed the automated systems they had originally been brought in to replace.

Similarly with Commonwealth Bank and IBM, which are cited in your second link. None of these companies are saying they're not going to use AI and they're going to go back to manual labor. What they are saying is that they laid off workers prematurely.

The big lesson is highlighted well by IBM's head of HR, which is you can use AI, but you have to continue to invest in humans:

> “If we don’t continue to invest in entry-level hires, what happens in three-five years?,” IBM’s chief human resources officer, Nickle LaMoreaux, said at a Charter AI Summit in New York. “There’s no pipeline; the well simply dries up,” LaMoreaux added.

LLMs can be very useful for all sorts of things, but large scale code generation is IMHO the least interesting use case. And even when LLMs are successfully used for code generation, I feel like progress has been reset to the early 60s and people are now rediscovering all the failed software development approaches (eg "spec-driven" is pretty much the equivalent of "waterfall", I'm now waiting for UML diagrams to make a comeback as the next big thing with an "agentic engineering" label slapped on ;)

Classic interactive "vibecoding" with quick turnaround times (but much quicker than now please, don't make me wait and let me slip out of the flow) might actually turn out to be the most useful way to build software with LLMs (or let's better say "prototypes"). Because everything else currently looks like we're building up too much bureaucracy around the software development process again, and just in time when we finally got rid of that shit (now we have that absurd amount of .md files in pseudo-human-language as "skills", "rules", "context", "memory", ...) like it was common in the 70s when the work was split between "software architects" who only do the high level design, and "implementers" who only bake that design into code. This was obviously a stupid idea and I don't know why the "AI bros" seem to be so keen on repeating that mistake.

Every approach that builds a "human language specification" that's separate from source code written in a much more precise programming language is doomed to fail (eg the code is the spec!), and that's nothing new, we've known this for decades, but that brain virus of "upfront software architecture" always keeps creeping back into the minds of people at the first opportunity.