alt Hacker News> Yes, at work, where you are paid to produce value for a business, the economics of purely hand-written code have changed
I'd love to genuinely love these blog posts but they are all the same! They're all like "now that machine are better than us $xyzargument". I'm so pissed off when I read so blantant lies like AI "writing code better than me" maybe better than you! But in general it's just a big lie.
> the economics of purely hand-written code have changed
who are you to know? I still hand code and produce a lot of value because I do care and polish everything I do. There are some pieces of the software that I wrote that I never touched again, they work perfectly, no errors no customer complaints
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Although "lies" might be too strong a word, I agree with you that the the AI-is-the-future people haven't done nearly enough to prove their claims. But that's nothing new in our industry, really.
I would recommend "The Leprechauns of Software Engineering" by Laurent Bossavit for an insightful and entertaining overview of just how much of software "engineering" is based on "truths" that we don't question.
It depends on your definition of better. Some businesses value speed above almost all else. Especially early-stage businesses where time to market and test ideas is paramount. I think in those cases, LLMs are better than probably any human.
On the other hand, if you mean tight, performant, simple, well-factored code, then yeah. LLMs simply aren't there, and may never be. On the other hand, maybe that matters less than we thought it did. Time will tell.
The industry is in a desperate race to throw away what little quality it had (could you imagine if other fields of engineering had catastrophic failures at the rate software does?) in favour of "look at all the lines of code I generated today but don't actually read them please". It's always been a fad-heavy field, but this time it's really gone fully off the deep end. The whole "it's better than me" is just re-asserted endlessly. Nobody even pretends to care about evidence. I wish the boosters would go ahead and "leave me behind" already, I've been waiting years for it to happen now. The zone has never been more flooded, I think.
I read so blantant lies like AI "writing code better than me" maybe better than you! But in general it's just a big lie.
Those weren't lies. The AI does produce better code than those people. They simply weren't very good programmers to begin with.
Thank you! It's made me lose a lot of respect for my field how credulous everyone is to any argument that starts out with a fig leaf of pretending to be on your side.
"The AI labs are scared of their own models, surely they must be credible sources on how powerful those models are"
"They are asking the government for regulation, they must be even more responsible than the average company"
"They are claiming to be a software engineer who automated their job with AI, surely I have to buy their course"
There are many boilerplate pieces of software that an LLM can generate faster than a human, but nearly half a decade into the LLM era there is no evidence that it's leading to the apocalyptic end of software organizations. And that's all with the subsidy in place that is now disappearing. Everyone online is lying for money, and that money is coming out of the same investor-subsidized marketing budgets.
I don't know that it's a lie. The code that I can get Claude Sonnet to produce is pretty much what I would and that's two iterations behind. We've vibecoded scripts recently that genuinely are better than what I would have written and I don't think I'm terrible.
There are a lot of mediocre programmers aren't there, I wouldn't be surprised if on average Claude is doing better than what exists. It's not a "lie", anyways, just a point of view.