The End of Programming • Hacker News Board

Re: The End of Programming

#121

Post by znnajdla » Thu, Aug 27, 2026, 6:50 AM UTC

dogcomplex wrote: post #118

znnajdla wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Such an AI would be unusable in production because there is no bound on the work that can be created and external side effects that could happen. All projects have real world constraints and side effects, budget, customer requirements, etc. Imagine a non-technical person prompting the AI "make the app faster and fix all the bugs" and the AI autonomously decides to rewrite the whole production app and all its dependen…

You are essentially describing an over-eager developer having to run decisions up the chain of command to senior devs / product owners / company execs. I assure you, every one of those roles is being trained on to balance their own wide breadth of concerns, and is unlikely to advise something like a live rewrite of a production app or an entire product pivot - unless it actually made sense from an economics/managemen…

Yes, but the entire point is, you can't have a reasonable chain of command or any kind of sensible decision process without human judgement that has engineering expertise, so no, engineers are not going to be entirely replaced.

The reason human judgement is necessary is not because it's "better". It's because the entire reason the business exists is to execute the human's judgement. There is no "right or wrong" way to build a startup if different paths are all profitable, but the human decides what they want to do.

Could Bun have survived and done well even if they didn't rewrite the codebase in Rust? Yes, it would've been fine. But the human decided they wanted Rust, that's a different path they chose with different tradeoffs. The AI has no skin in the game , no ownership, it doesn't belong to the AI. The AI only exists to serve the human. And if the human wants to make good decisions, inevitably they need engineering expertise (or an engineer) to weigh the decision.

Re: The End of Programming

#122

Post by simianwords » Thu, Aug 27, 2026, 7:40 AM UTC

lunar_mycroft wrote: post #117

simonw wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> More generally, it's not clear to me that there was any technical benefit to the rewrite in the first place. The Bun 1.4 announcement claims: https://bun.com/blog/bun-v1.4 > It reduces idle CPU usage by 5x, reduces memory usage by up to 35%, and starts 50% faster on Linux.

The announcement also makes it very clear that 1.4 isn't just a rust port of 1.3. Rust is my favorite language and it can be a bit faster than other systems languages in the right circumstances (because the compiler can make optimizations based on assumptions that wouldn't hold without the borrow checker), but numbers like those seem far more likely to be the result of other changes than the language shift.

> More generally, it's not clear to me that there was any technical benefit to the rewrite in the first place

> but numbers like those seem far more likely to be the result of other changes than the language shift.

Which one is it?

Re: The End of Programming

#123

Post by devy » Sat, Aug 29, 2026, 4:57 PM UTC

znnajdla wrote: post #22

The article gives the example of Bun's successful Zig to Rust of why this is the end of programming. I think that rewrite is a perfect example of why it's NOT the end of software engineering. A non-programmer could not have prompted AI to do that rewrite, and in fact a non-programmer would not have even conceived of the idea of doing that rewrite in the first place. Somebody is still needed to 1. come up with the ide…

Don't conflate the existing SOTA and the future SOTA.

When OpenAI released ChatGPT 3.5 in late 2022 as free a research preview as the SOTA at the time, the model wasn't good and with a ton of hallucinations. There was no harness, context windows was small and token speed is slow. Plenty of folks said what a joke, no one can do serious work with it.

4 year later now looking back, can you imagine what AI capabilities are now? Can you imagine what AI would be capable another 4 years from today?

Keep in mind, AI improvement is not stagnant as everyone is working on Recursive Self-Improvement and trillions of dollars pouring into it. If you are betting the future on the current understanding the AI capability, I bet you will lose.

Re: The End of Programming

#124

Post by lunar_mycroft » Wed, Sep 02, 2026, 4:34 PM UTC

simianwords wrote: post #122

lunar_mycroft wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The announcement also makes it very clear that 1.4 isn't just a rust port of 1.3. Rust is my favorite language and it can be a bit faster than other systems languages in the right circumstances (because the compiler can make optimizations based on assumptions that wouldn't hold without the borrow checker), but numbers like those seem far more likely to be the result of other changes than the language shift.

> More generally, it's not clear to me that there was any technical benefit to the rewrite in the first place > but numbers like those seem far more likely to be the result of other changes than the language shift. Which one is it?

Just saw this now. The two aren't remotely in conflict. The _rewrite_ (from zig to rust) almost certainly didn't result in the performance improvements they're claiming, because rust and Zig are roughly equivalent in that regard. We know that they included other changes with the 1.4 release (in other words, 1.4 is not just 1.3, but in rust this time), so it's far more likely that those changes are responsible, not the rewrite.