Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated • Hacker News Board

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#361

Post by GavinAnderegg » Mon, Mar 23, 2026, 1:05 PM UTC

> AI is getting better/faster/cheaper at incredible rates, but regardless of when, unless you believe in magic, it's only a matter of time until we reach the point at which machine intelligence is indistinguishable from human intelligence. We call that point AGI.

I still don’t think this is certain. It’s telling that code generation is one of the few things these systems do extremely well. Translating between English and French isn’t that much different than translating between English and Python. These are both tasks where the most likely next token has a good shot of being correct. I’m still not sold that we should assume that LLM-based tech will be well-generalized beyond that. Maybe some new tech will come along to augment or replace LLMs and that will get us there, who knows. Just because the line is going up quickly at the moment doesn’t mean it always will.

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#362

Post by gignico » Mon, Mar 23, 2026, 1:52 PM UTC

I don’t know if someone said it already, but when Steve Jobs said this famous quote (“reports of my death are greatly exaggerated”) he then died maybe just a couple of years later.

Hope this does not happen to code :)

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#363

Post by Tade0 » Mon, Mar 23, 2026, 1:56 PM UTC

edgyquant wrote: post #337

ehsanu1 wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Business problems are essentially neverending. And humans have a broader type of intelligence that LLMs lack but are needed to solve many novel problems. I wouldn't worry.

I know multiple engineers who have spent months or even years trying to find a job. How can you say not to worry when the industry has already gotten this bad?

It's no consolation, but this situation is temporary. Everyone is just distracted with AI.

"Temporary" might mean "the next three years", but at the same time some acted as if the Zero Interest Rate Policy would continue indefinitely, so this situation might end suddenly and unexpectedly.

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#364

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Mar 23, 2026, 2:12 PM UTC

ben_w wrote: post #347

Verdex wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Church turing is about computable functions. Uncomputable functions exist. For example how much rain is going to be in the rain gauge after a storm is uncomputable. You can hook up a sensor to perform some action when the rain gets so high. This rain algorithm is outside of anything church turing has to say. There are many other natural processes that are outside the realm of was is computable. People are bathed in t…

That example is completely false: how much rain will fall is absolutely a computable function, just a very difficult and expensive function to evaluate with absurdly large boundary conditions. This is in the same sense that while it is technically correct to describe all physically instantiated computer programs, and by extension all AI, as being in the set of "things which are just Markov chains", it comes with a ma…

[deleted]

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#365

Post by sharemywin » Mon, Mar 23, 2026, 2:14 PM UTC

edgyquant wrote: post #337

ehsanu1 wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Business problems are essentially neverending. And humans have a broader type of intelligence that LLMs lack but are needed to solve many novel problems. I wouldn't worry.

I know multiple engineers who have spent months or even years trying to find a job. How can you say not to worry when the industry has already gotten this bad?

if you want a job then here's my 2 cents:

To me the opportunity is with agents. Specially copilot and what ever amazon's agent it. figure out how to code using them. build something cool in the space your interested in finding a job for. that's the skill enterprise companies are fighting for. nobody knows how to do it.

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#366

Post by storus » Mon, Mar 23, 2026, 2:29 PM UTC

thinkindie wrote: post #326

storus wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is even a bigger problem; if AI didn't see your framework, you don't exist. Soon AI companies will be asking for money from devs to include their frameworks in the training dataset. Worse than Google's SEO that could at least be gamed somewhat.

I don't think people discovered frameworks with Google, nor they are going to do so with LLMs. It might be a different topic for libraries.

If no coding agent offers your framework as a choice for code generation, your framework might not even exist, you'd get the same outcome.

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#367

Post by smokedetector1 » Mon, Mar 23, 2026, 2:32 PM UTC

> unless you believe in magic, it's only a matter of time until we reach the point at which machine intelligence is indistinguishable from human intelligence

I find this flippancy about the greatest mystery in the universe extremely arrogant and incurious and wish it wouldn't be so prevalent.

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#368

Post by neversupervised » Mon, Mar 23, 2026, 2:34 PM UTC

lionkor wrote: post #133

neversupervised wrote: post #130

The author’s intuition is still backward calibrated, even though he talks about the future. He doesn’t have an intuition for the future. All code will be AI generated. There’s no way to compete with the AI. And whatever new downsides this brings will be solved in ways we aren’t fully anticipating. But the solution is not to walk back vibecoding. You have to be blind to believe not most code will be vibecoded very soo…

You have to be incredibly incompetent and naiive to look at the absolute garbage theatre that AI outputs today to go "yeah this will write all future code". Usually the response, for the last years, has been "no no you don't get it, it'll get so much better" and then they make the context window slightly larger and make it run python code to do math. What will really happen is that you and people like you will let Cl…

Can you explain what you think will happen, actually? People at OpenAi and Anthropic aren’t longer coding by hand. Are you saying everyone changes their mind and goes back? Not gonna happen. You have to work around this new constrain.

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#369

Post by trinsic2 » Mon, Mar 23, 2026, 2:40 PM UTC

smokedetector1 wrote: post #367

> unless you believe in magic, it's only a matter of time until we reach the point at which machine intelligence is indistinguishable from human intelligence I find this flippancy about the greatest mystery in the universe extremely arrogant and incurious and wish it wouldn't be so prevalent.

Yeah I was thinking this to, but he did say "Indistinguishable". I guess if you are a intellectual you can buy into that. Fortunately, consciousness and intelligence is much bigger than we can comprehend as human beings. We want to break everything down into understandable bites, but the truth is we are barley scratching the surface of what the brain does and what constitutes as intelligence.

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#370

Post by nstart » Mon, Mar 23, 2026, 2:41 PM UTC

g9yuayon wrote: post #157

lateforwork wrote: post #71

Chris Lattner, inventor of the Swift programming language recently took a look at a compiler entirely written by Claude AI. Lattner found nothing innovative in the code generated by AI [1]. And this is why humans will be needed to advance the state of the art. AI tends to accept conventional wisdom. Because of this, it struggles with genuine critical thinking and cannot independently advance the state of the art. AI…

> Lattner found nothing innovative in the code generated by AI I don't think the replacement is binary. Instead, it’s a spectrum. The real concern for many software engineers is whether AI reduces demand enough to leave the field oversupplied. And that should be a question of economy: are we going to have enough new business problems to solve? If we do, AI will help us but will not replace us. If not, well, we are go…

Before software, there were accountants. It was The qualification to have.

Today accountants are still needed. But it's a commodified job. And you start at the absolute bottom of the bottom rungs and slave it out till you can separate yourself and take on a role on a path to CFO or some respectable level of seniority.

I'm oversimplifying here but that is sufficient to show A path forward for software engineers imo. In this parallel, most of us will become AI drivers. We'll go work in large companies but we'll also go work in a back room department of small to medium businesses, piloting AI on a bottom of the rung salary. Some folks will take on specialisms and gain certifications in difficult areas (similar to ACCA). Or maybe ultra competitive areas like how it is in actuarial science. Those few will eventually separate themselves and lead departments of software engineers (soon to be known as AI pilots). Others will embed in research and advance state of art that eventually is commoditized by AI. Those people will either be paid mega bucks or will be some poor academia based researcher.

The vast majority? Overworked drones having to be ready to stumble to their AI agent's interface when their boss calls them at 10 PM saying the directors want to see a feature setup for the meeting tomorrow.