AI-written code is still your code • Hacker News Board

Re: AI-written code is still your code

#11

Post by Hugsbox » Mon, Aug 31, 2026, 12:45 PM UTC

tyleo wrote: post #2

I keep getting downvoted for saying this but I still review all of my AI generated code. I feel like I’m sufficiently sped up. Of course you can go faster if you don’t read the code at all, that’s always been true. But it seems like the ability to emit large quantities of text is already a huge leap in productivity. I don’t think these tools are good enough yet to offload all or our thinking into them.

IMO human-verifying will always be a must, no matter how good the LLMs get. If I'm shipping code that I don't understand and it ends up having major problems, I'm still the one who's responsible for it, not the LLM.

Re: AI-written code is still your code

#12

Post by josefritzishere » Mon, Aug 31, 2026, 12:45 PM UTC

That's not OK. It's so convoluted I don't want my name on it.

Re: AI-written code is still your code

#13

Post by croes » Mon, Aug 31, 2026, 12:45 PM UTC

My code if you mean responsibility, not my code if you mean authorship.

Re: AI-written code is still your code

#14

Post by Retr0id » Mon, Aug 31, 2026, 12:45 PM UTC

> It’s crystal clear that AI can be a complexity factory.

> I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what software would look like if we made keeping software understandable to humans a first-class design goal in the age of AI.

I agree, and I've been thinking similarly. But I don't think there's anything "new" about what understandable and well-factored code should look like. It's the same principles as ever.

A lot of agent-written code looks like what you'd get if you gave an enthusiastic human slightly too many stimulants and asked them to take the shortest path to reach the goal. Plausibly this is just a result of the LLMs not being "smart enough" to do any better, but I think there's also an incentives problem. How do you reward human-understandability in benchmarks and unsupervised training?

Re: AI-written code is still your code

#15

Post by prometheus1992 » Mon, Aug 31, 2026, 12:46 PM UTC

I find it incredibly difficult to contribute to code files that were initiated by LLMs. Need to dig deeper to understand why but I just don't like it. I end up prompting my way out of any issues I see, sometimes it works out sometimes it doesn't.

Re: AI-written code is still your code

#16

Post by delijati » Mon, Aug 31, 2026, 12:46 PM UTC

we will go full circle "what software would look like if we made keeping software understandable to humans" maybe we invent a pseudo programming language so we get deterministic results ;)

Re: AI-written code is still your code

#17

Post by phoghed » Mon, Aug 31, 2026, 12:47 PM UTC

> when you build software, you own it

No, I specifically don’t. My company owns it, and that bastard will lay me off without a second thought.

Re: AI-written code is still your code

#18

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Aug 31, 2026, 12:47 PM UTC

[deleted]

Re: AI-written code is still your code

#19

Post by _kjq3 » Mon, Aug 31, 2026, 12:47 PM UTC

[flagged]

Re: AI-written code is still your code

#20

Post by mortalapeman » Mon, Aug 31, 2026, 12:48 PM UTC

tyleo wrote: post #2

I keep getting downvoted for saying this but I still review all of my AI generated code. I feel like I’m sufficiently sped up. Of course you can go faster if you don’t read the code at all, that’s always been true. But it seems like the ability to emit large quantities of text is already a huge leap in productivity. I don’t think these tools are good enough yet to offload all or our thinking into them.

Where it really shines for me is when the best solution is explicit and obvious code, but really tedious to write. Now I'll choose to have AI write it instead of me, where before I might have tried to write a bad abstraction. Things like generating a TypedDict for a JSON A document I'm returning as a convenience from a postgres query.