alt Hacker NewsWith the recent wave of posts about Claude rewriting entire codebases from Zig/Electron to Rust/Swift, I can't help but question the prompter's actual confidence in the final result. Gaining a thorough understanding of the generated output still demands an enormous amount of effort. I suspect the reality is that most people just chain a few review agents together, and if they output "LGTM", the code gets committed and pushed.
I have been doing daily agentic coding myself since last November, but lately Im having concerns. We are on the verge of becoming Warhammer 40k Tech-Priests: chanting sacred prompts to appease the machine spirit, praying for a good result. The foundational knowledge is lost, meaning that even if we do look at the code, we won't understand it anyway.
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Most developers by any metric haven't hopped onto the full agentic AI bandwagon. People who want to stop understanding code will indeed largely lose their technical skills, but they're a minority of developers. Its one of the reasons why I think its a terrible idea to invest in personally, being skilled at something has never once been a negative for me in my entire life even if it requires work
> The foundational knowledge is lost ...
Not yet. The world still pretty much runs on systems not written by LLMs. And humans wrote all of that. LLMs runs on OSes and hardware created by "not LLMS".
And seen the "quality" of the output of LLMs (and I pay three AI subscriptions), I don't think we're getting rid of human-produced code, OSes, hardware, anytime soon.
> The foundational knowledge is lost, meaning that even if we do look at the code, we won't understand it anyway.
but this is similar to a lot of other technical fields that have width and depth. People would not understand assembly any more and blindly trust the output of the compiler. People now can only design a part of a CPU, and not the entirety. Chip manufacturing is so complicated that there's probably no single person who could understand the entire process, from end to end.
Yet, we all trust these things.