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

Re: AI-written code is still your code

#21

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

majorbugger wrote: post #7

eterm wrote: post #3

Yes I'm more than okay. AI has enabled a scale of personal ambition I could only previously have dreamed of. I've never been the kind of coder who could easily sit down and get their thoughts out from mind to written lines. I've seen that happen in a few gifted individuals, and AI might be frustrating them, because for them, coding was never the bottleneck, but for me, I would always get stuck in analysis paralysis,…

Way to completely miss the point of the article.

> point of the article

Nth iteration of pointless AI navel gazing?

Re: AI-written code is still your code

#22

Post by lirolero » Mon, Aug 31, 2026, 12:49 PM UTC

eterm wrote: post #3

Yes I'm more than okay. AI has enabled a scale of personal ambition I could only previously have dreamed of. I've never been the kind of coder who could easily sit down and get their thoughts out from mind to written lines. I've seen that happen in a few gifted individuals, and AI might be frustrating them, because for them, coding was never the bottleneck, but for me, I would always get stuck in analysis paralysis,…

> I've never been the kind of coder

Looks like you were never really a coder, to be honest.

Re: AI-written code is still your code

#23

Post by dan_gggggg » Mon, Aug 31, 2026, 12:52 PM UTC

Retr0id wrote: post #14

> 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 a…

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Re: AI-written code is still your code

#24

Post by lerp-io » Mon, Aug 31, 2026, 12:52 PM UTC

And since AI is trained on your code and my code. Your code is now my code and my code is now your code :)

Re: AI-written code is still your code

#25

Post by Verdex » Mon, Aug 31, 2026, 12:52 PM UTC

I don't believe that AI is the 'higher level of abstraction[1]' that it is often claimed to be. However I wonder if it's possible to work with a codebase when other developers are treating AI as a higher level of abstraction.

Analogously, people can write in assembly, but can you write in assembly when the codebase is frequently altered by someone with an optimizing compiler?

[1] - Do higher levels of abstractions even exist? By my way of thinking that's called not an abstraction. C isn't a higher level of abstraction; it's a different abstraction implemented by assembly. There are more powerful abstractions and more ergonomic abstractions, but that doesn't make them 'higher level'.

Re: AI-written code is still your code

#26

Post by daveguy » Mon, Aug 31, 2026, 12:53 PM UTC

trvz wrote: post #8

For most people employed as programmers, inheriting code from previous people has been a thing. Also relevant: including libraries written by others in your own software. As always it comes down to finding a healthy balance.

I've inherited plenty of code bases. AI generated code is a special kind of foobar. With a code base inherited from a human you can at least be assured at least one human has understood each portion for a brief period. With agentic slop all bets are off.

Re: AI-written code is still your code

#27

Post by dan_gggggg » Mon, Aug 31, 2026, 12:53 PM UTC

phoghed wrote: post #17

> 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.

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Re: AI-written code is still your code

#28

Post by alasano » Mon, Aug 31, 2026, 12:54 PM UTC

delijati wrote: post #16

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 ;)

Some guy posted that project like a week ago on HN, no joke. Circle has been circled.

Re: AI-written code is still your code

#29

Post by rob » Mon, Aug 31, 2026, 12:54 PM UTC

Absolutely! I haven't had this much fun since I was coding MySpace layout glitter graphic websites in 2006 with PHP, MySQL, and CodeIgniter.

I'm getting older, I have lots of ideas, and now I have tools that can help bring them together faster instead of spending two weeks obsessing about how I want to set up Ubuntu and have nothing to show for it. Helps replace the all-nighters that I used to be able to do.

I still think having decades of experience in everything from domains, DNS, FreeBSD/Linux servers, databases, all sorts of programming languages, and full stack dev helps get more out of these tools compared to somebody that has no idea what they're doing. Especially around the deployment side right now. People keep saying that's changing though.

Re: AI-written code is still your code

#30

Post by gwbas1c » Mon, Aug 31, 2026, 12:55 PM UTC

delijati wrote: post #16

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 ;)

I honestly have a vision of a database of .md files that fully describes an application in human-readable, (ok, engineer-readable), text. Making a change is committing a change to the human-readable text, and then AI comes and figures out the rest and/or suggests edits to the human-readable text. (Or asks questions.)