alt Hacker News> a lot of code doesn't need to be understood
Really? I am having difficulty thinking of any examples of code that doesn't need to be understood. If it isn't understood by someone, then how is it even working?
If you mean like a library you are using, where you aren't even reading the internals or might not even have access to it, OK, but that code is stull understood by its authors, surely?
I have so many projects on my computer where it doesn't matter if I know how it works or not. Probably well over 100. I think closer to 200, depending on how you count.
They're relatively simple, they do the task they need to and then they wait until they're needed again (or not).
In the past I wrote them, then forgot how they worked, until I needed them again, relearned what I did and adapted it.
Now I just don't have to know how exactly they work, I just get an AI to read the documentation anytime I need to reuse the project and I'll query the AI to fill in the details and to make changes and I ask the AI to run the code and debug it.
Perfect use cases for today's AIs. Doesn't even require SOTA, I can run comfortably on a Sonnet 5 or a Qwen 3.8 and it'll do exactly what it needs to do without making too many mistakes.
Not all code is large corporate code bases.