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Write less code, be more responsible
41–50 of 135 posts
Re: Write less code, be more responsible
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
>I don’t really understand the, “more, better, faster,” cachet to be honest. Writing the code hasn’t been the bottle neck to developing software for a long time. It’s usually the thinking that takes most of the time and if that goes away well… I dunno, that’s weird. I will understand it even less. This is what I've always found confusing as well about this push for AI. The act of typing isn't the hard part - its unde…
> The act of typing isn't the hard part - its understanding what's going on, and why you're doing it. Using AI to generate code is only faster if you try and skip that step - which leads to an inevitable disaster It’s more than just typing though. A simple example remembering the exact incantation of CSS classes to style something that you can easily describe in plain English. Yes, you could look them up or maybe eve…
> It’s more than just typing though. A simple example remembering the exact incantation of CSS classes to style something that you can easily describe in plain English.
Do that enough and you won't know enough about your codebase to recognise errors in the LLM output.
Re: Write less code, be more responsible
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Writing the code hasn’t been the bottle neck to developing software for a long time. I see this on HN just so much and I am not sure what this is, almost seems like a political slogan that followers keep repeating. I had to do some rough math in my head but in the last 5 years I have been involved with hiring roughly 40 SWEs. Every single one of them was hired because writing the code was THE bottleneck (the only o…
If you’ve never read Fred Brooks, I’d recommend it. The aphorism is a bit dated but rings true: you can’t add another developer and make the process go faster. It usually slows teams down. I’ve seen it time and again: startups move from their market-fit phase into an operational excellence phase on the backing of VC funding and they start hiring a ton of people. Most of those developers are highly educated, specializ…
> If you’ve never read Fred Brooks, I’d recommend it. The aphorism is a bit dated but rings true: you can’t add another developer and make the process go faster.
He didn’t say that. He said adding developers to a late project makes it slower, explained why, and even added some charts to illustrate it. The distinction matters.
By your interpretation, no company should have more than a few developers, which is obviously false. You can argue team organization, but that’s not what Brooks was saying, either.
On top of that, parent never said he hired 40 devs for one project at one time. He was talking in general terms, over the course of years, perhaps in multiple companies.
Finally, let me invoke another aphorism: hours of planning can save you weeks of development. Right here you have the bottleneck staring you into the face.
Of course it’s development. And unless you’re in a really dysfunctional environment, most of that development is coding, testing and debugging, where AI can help a lot.
Re: Write less code, be more responsible
#44I’m working as a single solo developer of a tiny video game. I’m writing it in C with raylib. No coding assistants, no agents, not even a language server. I only work on it for a few hours during the week. And it’s progressing at a reasonable pace that I’m happy with. I got cross-compilation from Linux to Windows going early on in a couple of hours. Wasn’t that hard. I’ve had to rework parts of the code as I’ve progr…
> Writing the code hasn’t been the bottle neck to developing software for a long time. It’s usually the thinking that takes most of the time Does your coding not involve thinking? And if not, why are you not delighted to have AI take that over? Writing unthinking boilerplate is tedious garbage work. Today I wanted to address a bug I found on a product I work on. At the intersection of platform migration and backwards…
>> Writing the code hasn’t been the bottle neck to developing software for a long time. It’s usually the thinking that takes most of the time
> I used an LLM to research the code paths and ensure that my understanding of the break was correct and what the potential side effects of my proposed fix would be.
Using the LLM for understanding is very different to using the LLM for codegen.
You are not really disagreeing with the author here; it's just that for the specific project he is talking about, he already understands it just fine so the advantages of LLM help in understanding is tiny.
Re: Write less code, be more responsible
#45> Nowadays many people are pushing AI-assisted code, some of them in a responsible way, some of them not. So... what do we do?
You hold them accountable.
Once upon a time we used to fire people from their jobs for doing things poorly. Perhaps we could return to something approximating this model.
Re: Write less code, be more responsible
#46I’m working as a single solo developer of a tiny video game. I’m writing it in C with raylib. No coding assistants, no agents, not even a language server. I only work on it for a few hours during the week. And it’s progressing at a reasonable pace that I’m happy with. I got cross-compilation from Linux to Windows going early on in a couple of hours. Wasn’t that hard. I’ve had to rework parts of the code as I’ve progr…
>I don’t really understand the, “more, better, faster,” cachet to be honest. Writing the code hasn’t been the bottle neck to developing software for a long time. It’s usually the thinking that takes most of the time and if that goes away well… I dunno, that’s weird. I will understand it even less. This is what I've always found confusing as well about this push for AI. The act of typing isn't the hard part - its unde…
AI not just types code for you. It can assist with almost every part of software development. Design, bug hunting, code review, prototyping, testing.
Re: Write less code, be more responsible
#47I'm not entirely sure I can trust the opinions of someone on LLMs when their blog is sponsored by an AI company. Am I not simply seeing the opinions that the AI company is paying for?
Re: Write less code, be more responsible
#48For various internal tools & other projects, I started using config only tools and avoid code as much as possible. https://avilpage.com/2026/03/config-first-tools.html
I like this. Thanks for sharing.
I think "config first" is an understatement. The more general term here is "data driven".
It's sort of obvious that agents are way better and faster when writing data that can be validated easily against a schema and understood and reviewed in far less time. Data driven also gives you leverage, because it is far easier to for a program to produce data than code.
The same applies to humans as well. Sort of ironic that we are now rediscovering and celebrating robust approaches like writing well designed CLIs, data driven programming, actionable error messages and good documentation.
Maybe AI agents are a sort of reality check or even evolutionary pressure that forces us to do the right things.
Re: Write less code, be more responsible
#49Good framing. I’d add that “be responsible” extends well beyond code quality - it’s about product responsibility.
AI making code cheaper to produce doesn’t make the decisions around it any cheaper. What to build, for whom, and why — that’s still fully on you. It should free up more time for strategy, user understanding, and saying “no” to things that shouldn’t exist regardless of how easy they are to ship.
The maintainability concern Orhun raises is real, but I think the root cause isn’t AI — it’s ownership. If you don’t understand what was built, you can’t evolve it. It’s the same failure mode as a PM who doesn’t grasp the technical implementation — they end up proposing expensive features that fight the architecture instead of working with it. Eventually, someone has to pay for that disconnect, and it’s usually the team
Re: Write less code, be more responsible
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The act of typing isn't the hard part - its understanding what's going on, and why you're doing it. Using AI to generate code is only faster if you try and skip that step - which leads to an inevitable disaster It’s more than just typing though. A simple example remembering the exact incantation of CSS classes to style something that you can easily describe in plain English. Yes, you could look them up or maybe eve…
> It’s more than just typing though. A simple example remembering the exact incantation of CSS classes to style something that you can easily describe in plain English. Do that enough and you won't know enough about your codebase to recognise errors in the LLM output.
imo a question is, do you still need to understand the codebase? What if that process changes and the language you’re reading is a natural one instead of code?