Nobody knows how the whole system works • Hacker News Board

Re: Nobody knows how the whole system works

#91

Post by raw_anon_1111 » Mon, Feb 09, 2026, 3:05 PM UTC

mamp wrote: post #3

Strange article. The problem isn’t that everyone doesn’t know how everything works, it’s that AI coding could mean there is no one who knows how a system works.

If the average tenure of a developer is 2.5 years, how likely is it in 5 years that any of the team that started the project is still working on it?

Re: Nobody knows how the whole system works

#92

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Feb 09, 2026, 3:06 PM UTC

rorylaitila wrote: post #71

There are many layers to this. But there is one style of programming that concerns me. Where you neither understand the layer above you (why the product exists and what the goal of the system is) nor the layer below (how to actually implement the behavior). In the past, many developers barely understood the business case, but at least they understood how to translate into code, and could put backpressure on the busin…

[deleted]

Re: Nobody knows how the whole system works

#93

Post by CrzyLngPwd » Mon, Feb 09, 2026, 3:06 PM UTC

Oh so many times over the decades, having to explain to a dev why iterating over many things and performing a heavy task like a DB query, will result in bad things happening...all because they don't really comprehend how things work.

Re: Nobody knows how the whole system works

#94

Post by ffsm8 » Mon, Feb 09, 2026, 3:10 PM UTC

rorylaitila wrote: post #71

There are many layers to this. But there is one style of programming that concerns me. Where you neither understand the layer above you (why the product exists and what the goal of the system is) nor the layer below (how to actually implement the behavior). In the past, many developers barely understood the business case, but at least they understood how to translate into code, and could put backpressure on the busin…

I am still missing something like Claude code that's less "hands-off" and optimizes for small edits instead of full feature development

Like you're sitting in your ide, select a few rows, press (for example) caps lock to activate speech and then just say a short line what it should adjust or similar - which is then staged for the next adjustments to be done with the same UX

Like saying "okay, I need a new usecase here, let's start by making a function to do y. [Function appears] great, we need to wire with object into it [point at class] [LLM backtracking code path via language server until it finds it and passes things through]

The main blocking issue to that UX would likely be the speed of the response, as the transcription would be pretty much instant, but the coding prompt after would still take a few moments to be good... And such an interactive approach would feel a lot better with speed.

Too bad nobody seems to target the combined mouse+voice control for LLMs yet. It would even double as a fantastic accessibility tool for people suffering from various typing related issues

Re: Nobody knows how the whole system works

#95

Post by snyp » Mon, Feb 09, 2026, 3:11 PM UTC

Script kiddies have always existed and always will.

Re: Nobody knows how the whole system works

#96

Post by anal_reactor » Mon, Feb 09, 2026, 3:12 PM UTC

rorylaitila wrote: post #71

There are many layers to this. But there is one style of programming that concerns me. Where you neither understand the layer above you (why the product exists and what the goal of the system is) nor the layer below (how to actually implement the behavior). In the past, many developers barely understood the business case, but at least they understood how to translate into code, and could put backpressure on the busin…

In an ideal scenario, you want your employees to be fungible. You don't want any irreplaceable individuals who hold the entire organization hostage. One way of defending yourself from such individuals is ensuring that all members have enough knowledge to take other people's roles, at least after some brief training. The problem is, maintaining high level of competency and transparency is very expensive. The other solution is when your organization is a complete mess and nobody knows what they're doing anyway. Yes, this results in your organization being inefficient, but this inefficiency might actually be cheap in the grand scheme of things.

Re: Nobody knows how the whole system works

#97

Post by Atlas667 » Mon, Feb 09, 2026, 3:15 PM UTC

This is a non-discussion.

You have to know enough about underlying and higher level systems to do YOUR job well. And AI cannot fully replace human review.

Re: Nobody knows how the whole system works

#98

Post by vineethy » Mon, Feb 09, 2026, 3:16 PM UTC

There’s plenty of people that know the fundamentals of the system. It’s a mistake to think that understanding specific technical details about an implementation is necessary to understand the system. It would make more sense to ask questions about whether someone could conceivably build the system from scratch if they have to. There’s plenty of people that have worked in academic fabs that have also written verilog and operating systems and messed with radios.

Re: Nobody knows how the whole system works

#99

Post by ForHackernews » Mon, Feb 09, 2026, 3:19 PM UTC

I think there's a difference between "No one understands all levels of the system all the way down, at some point we all draw a line and treat it as a black-box abstraction" vs. "At the level of abstraction I'm working with, I choose not to engage with this AI-generated complexity."

Consider the distinction between I don't know how the automatic transmission in my car works, vs. I never bothered to learn the meanings of the street signs in my jurisdiction.

Re: Nobody knows how the whole system works

#100

Post by scottLobster » Mon, Feb 09, 2026, 3:20 PM UTC

rorylaitila wrote: post #71

There are many layers to this. But there is one style of programming that concerns me. Where you neither understand the layer above you (why the product exists and what the goal of the system is) nor the layer below (how to actually implement the behavior). In the past, many developers barely understood the business case, but at least they understood how to translate into code, and could put backpressure on the busin…

The irony is "ownership" is a common management talking point, but when you actually try to take ownership you inevitably run into walls of access, a lack of information, and generally a "why are you here?" mentality.

Granted one person can't know/do everything, but large companies in particular seem allergic to granting you any visibility whatsoever. It's particularly annoying when you're given a deadline, bust your ass working overtime to make it, only to discover that said deadline got extended at a meeting you weren't invited to and nobody thought to tell you about it. Or worse, they were doing some dark management technique of "well he's really hauling ass right now, if he makes the original deadline we'll be ahead of schedule, and if he doesn't we have the spare capacity".

If the expectation is I'm a tool for management to use, then I'll perform my duties to the letter and no further. If the expectation is ownership, then I need to at least sit at the cool kids' table and maybe even occasionally speak when I have something relevant to contribute.