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

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

#81

Post by flohofwoe »

adamtaylor_13 wrote: post #72
flohofwoe wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shitting out lots of code faster was already possible before (just hire more interns who do it for free heh) the question is at what quality and is more code in less time really the biggest problem in professional software development that had to be solved? 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…

It's fascinating how people jump straight into their biases, making all sorts of inferences that were never mentioned. Where did anyone advocate for "large scale code generation"? LLMs are a fantastic way to go from, "We thought this this feature" to "It's shipped and in people's hands". That could've been 100 lines or 1,000 lines but that's not the point.

You're thinking too small! It's all about building entire apps autonomously from 10 lines of a blurry "do what I mean" spec /s

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

#82

Post by pluc »

sajithdilshan wrote: post #30
pluc wrote: 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.

The original question was about developers going back to manually coding without using AI. The link you posted is not about it. IBM replaced its Human Resources team with AI and hired them back. They didn’t remove AI usage in development and went back to manual coding. Please read your sources completely before posting them only reading the title

The question was whether some companies forego LLMs in favour of human authoring

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

#83

Post by glimshe »

Stepping back from AI completely (vs changing how AI is used in the company) is like stopping using IDEs, compilers etc. It's a tool.

I don't understand why people would even entertain that. They are completely fine using random libraries written by random people but not having AI helping with a small refactoring? Nobody is making you use AI to do the entire work.

I see developers using languages with garbage collectors and projects based on heavyweight frameworks while saying "we can't use AI because we still need to understand the code" or "I love coding and AI doesn't allow me to do what I love"

If you are one these people... Dude, you aren't doing the work yourself already. Back in the day memory management was one of the hardest pieces of the programming work. A lot of time went also to building stable and bug free string libraries, math libraries, UI toolkits etc. Without shifting complexity (and tedious work) elsewhere, we wouldn't have been able to build the software ecosystem we have today

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

#84

Post by testerius »

boesboes wrote: post #44
sajithdilshan wrote: post #5

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 deb…

Can you understand that there is a lot of DIFFERENT people than YOU who can use AI tools? My team leader (he is also director of department) can use Claude/Codex (or other LLM/AI tools) and create faster, better things than doing it manually. You would not say that he is going down - he is even better with it.

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

#85

Post by i2km »

thunky wrote: post #80
i2km wrote: 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

> Besides, in this area, clients getting one whiff of AI code would be an immediate deal-killer If you implement AI code review suggestions then you're using AI code, just the hard way. Also I don't see why your clients would be ok with having AI review and influence your code. Seems hypocritical, or like you're trying to cheat them.

That's a fair challenge. AI review can mean many different things though. We treat it like a slightly better CppCheck, for context. TBH the way we use it doesn't really add much beyond regular static analysis tools.

Re "the hard way", I disagree. While it may seem like the hard way, in the medium and long term this is turning out to be the easy way. We have basically no technical debt, we can fix issues rapidly and (intangible I know) we can stand behind our codebase with absolute confidence.

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

#86

Post by testerius »

flohofwoe wrote: post #59
adamtaylor_13 wrote: post #8

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

Shitting out lots of code faster was already possible before (just hire more interns who do it for free heh) the question is at what quality and is more code in less time really the biggest problem in professional software development that had to be solved? 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…

I think Spec-Driven Development is similar to waterfall but it is not like that. It is more agile oriented and for fast iterations. The idea is simple and can be vibecoded too - quick chatting, planning and so on.

The main things I don't like about LLM is that frontier models are paid (so no unlimited "tokens"), subscribtion based payments, local models are "not ready yet".

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

#87

Post by conartist6 »

flohofwoe wrote: post #79
conartist6 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm with you except that the economy will crash when it turns out everyone stopped creating real value. ...and in the mean time every real product I have to use is getting worse.

I think we're way past this point tbh, software development is just the latest area that's being "bullshittified" ;) (also let's be honest, building yet another CRUD app - eg what 99% of software devs actually do, is not "creating value" - with or without AI)

Where they created value wasn't just the CRUD app but developing their skills, supporting communities that asked and answered questions to build public knowledgebases. They adapted to painfully repetitive tasks by developing tools that made expressing common ideas simple. In losing the pain of repetition, we lost the incentive towards abstraction. The forces in opposite directions cancelled out, creating growth for AI companies but overall stagnation due to the immense amount of value lost because before AI there was never a dollar value put on it.

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

#88

Post by probably_wrong »

adamtaylor_13 wrote: post #70
probably_wrong wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lines-of-code has long been accepted as a terrible measure for code quality, and I believe it has been strongly correlated with poorer code quality.

No one is advocating for lines of code here.

It has a 1-to-1 correlation, though: the faster you can generate code (which is the one quality under discussion), the more lines of code you can generate in a given unit of time, and vice versa. So I would argue we are talking about lines-of-code, just indirectly.

I don't see how one can hold "speed of code generation" as a good metric while, simultaneously, holding "number of lines generated in a unit of time" as a bad metric. And more worrisome, I'm not sure how one would reward one without rewarding the other creating a perverse incentive. But I'm open to be proven wrong.

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

#89

Post by root-parent »

I guess also useful to answer your question, is look at the companies who had a successful track record, of delivering reliable, consistent software over 5 to 10 years, went full vibe coding and got into a massive end crash.

You have evidence video here, that the AWS AI Division (04:23) went literally full vibe coding:

"I was laid off from my AI software engineering job at Amazon" - https://youtu.be/ZAom6f4-vh0?t=263

The whole division has been dismantled...

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

#90

Post by jatins »

mrdw wrote: post #46
jatins wrote: 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.

> I would work in company which respects more code/infra quality than coding speed

Same. But that doesn’t have to be in contrast to using AI tools. There’s a lot of grunt in day to day coding as well.

The problem is not the tools

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