alt Hacker NewsThere's an interesting phenomenon I noticed with the "skeptics". They're constantly using what-ifs (aka goalpost moving), but the interesting thing is that those exact same what-ifs were "solved" earlier, but dismissed as "not good enough".
This exact thing about optimisation has been shown years ago. "Here's a function, make it faster". With "glue" to test the function, and it kinda worked even with GPT4 era models. Then came alphaevolve where google found improvements in real algorithms (both theoretical i.e. packing squares and practical i.e. ML kernels). And yet these were dismissed as "yeah, but that's just optimisation, that's easyyyy. Wake me up when they write software from 0 to 1 and it works".
Well, here we are. We now have a compiler that can compile and boot linux! And people are complaining that the code is unmaintainable and that it's slow / unoptimised. We've gone full circle, but forgot that optimisation was easyyyy. Now it's something to complain about. Oh well...
I use LLM’s daily and agents occasionally. They are useful, but there is no need to move any goal posts; they easily do shit work still in 2026.
All my coworkers use agents extensively in the backend and the amount of shit code, bad tests and bugs has skyrocketed.
Couple that with a domain (medicine) where our customer in some cases needs to validate the application’s behaviour extensively and it’s a fucking disaster —- very expensive iteration instead of doing it well upfront.