Meanwhile, I can't even get Astra to consistently re-use the same font-size across all of my HTML page headings+subheadings.
There's just no world where this actually results in a stable, respected business. It will be death by a thousand bad impressions, mistakes and oversights. Yeah, you can automate everything. That doesn't mean it's being done well.
That's not to say this might not be something feasible in 2-3 years from now, but we're still a long ways away.
I can certainly understand why YC would fund an idea like this, and it's interesting to read about, but yeah the horizon for it working is surely very long if ever.
A more appropriate scope would be "can any element of a business at all be handled autonomously by an agent in the long run?" because I would buy that product, but I can't think of one.
Andon's real world experiments are a lot more interesting than the simulations IMO. They ran a retail outlet which has burned through 97% of the money in its bank account. A cafe which is well into a downward slide. Some online radio stations which have listener numbers you can count on one hand.
Seems a little insane that they opened expensive physical businesses like retail and a cafe without doing anything digital successfully first. Surely a dropshipping business is easier and cheaper to test out than a brick and mortar clothing store!
So if nothing else, they have a looooong way to go on distribution. I would argue that distribution in particular might be unsolvable with an agent. If your agent can do it why can't a thousand others? At which point the cost of customer acquisition will be driven up by thousands of robo-competitors until it's no longer viable. The robots mutate the problem and the closest real analogy ends up being perfect competition where no one has any profits.
People are using AI to write code. But HN is the wrong place to try to figure out how much they are using it. This site is full of bots and shills and has become a wasteland since AI. You can tell by the way they make short super confident (even ridiculous) statements in order to try to bully the insecure into buying into the hype. It matches exactly the patterns you used to see with crypto. Even the more subtle comments are often lacking in any kind of specifics. Of course there are some genuine AI users also but the point is that the overall volume of comments is completely unrepresentative of reality.
The tradgedy is that HN used to be a great place to get honest and well argued opinion and anecdotes about new technologies and the different tradeoffs etc.
I think the combination of YC being “a place for founders” and the proliferation of useless AI startups, each with its own little weird AI-booster founder, probably has added to this phenomenon as well.
I recently saw a video where one of these founders showed their “programming” setup, and it was a cashier’s microphone wherein he whispers sweet nothings to the LLM, because of course he doesn’t write code anymore (who even reads code nowadays, am I right?!). I think this is the type of individual who’s lost in the bubble sauce that ends up writing the most absurd comments around here.
How do you know these are bots and not Redditors? There's an HN sub on Reddit, and one of the hallmarks of Reddit are the 'mic drop' big pivotal one liner comments that get upvoted or cause lots of replies or engagement.
But I do feel, to reply to you, that crypto was a lot more critically received on HN than AI is right now. We're too busy debating humanity's end rather than if this crap actually works.
For those of us who actually work with technology (not product managers, executives or salespeople, this stuff doesn't work well at scale. It might in a research department at Google or a hedge fund, less so in the messy corporate world.
I can't remember when I started reading HN. Possibly as late as around 2017/18. I lost one account I had when I changed company, and this is my latest account. Obviously you can't tell for sure, but I know that I am not a bot and I know that every single developer in my company (only a few hundred) have agents writing almost all of their code. I'm in the fintech industry (trading side). I have a lot of connections from my long career in the industry. Everyone else is using coding agents too.
I don't think I could find a job in my industry if I tried that didn't want me to write code using coding agents.
Obviously I can't prove any of this, so try emailing a recruiter and test it for yourself.
From what I can tell, a lot of newly registered users are equally as vehemently against AI as there are those that are pro. I guess we see things through our own personal filter.
Yes, it is a waste of time right now not to use AI to write code.
It's the same category of "artisan code" like "artisan cheese": you can do it if you have a ton of free time as a hobby but other than a hobby? Not worth it.
It is imperative that the feature be shipped, damned be the quality of that which underlies its existence. And once that feature has indeed been shipped, the machine shall toil, and from its work there shall be thousands of lines born, and for the next feature: thousands more!
I agree that it's a waste of time, but I started to realize that doing it
a) puts be ahead of those people who don't, yes
b) but also diminishes my technical skills if I don't actively try to engage about what I'm "vibecoding" and proactively trying to understand it.
for your point a: writing code by hand puts you ahead of the people who don't write code by hand, eg, the people using LLMs to generate code? that doesn't make much sense assuming both of those personas are senior SWEs.
I still have to remind Ai not to use the n+1 pattern in queries, and fight it to stop using inconsistent inline styles vs classes, even within a single page.
How are people getting this "waste of time not to use AI" and "generates 99% of my code" level of code quality?
I know people's response will likely be something, something, "add instructions to memory to not use n+1", etc. But if the Ai wants to generate code this bad, then it represents an overall quality risk that would require an infinite memory file.
I've been developing a suspicion that many people simply aren't looking at what their agents produce and can't speak to the quality of it in a fully informed way.
For context, I've set up harnesses with recursive automated review loops, spec driven development, explicit lists, better models, better harnesses, formal methods tooling, etc. All of it helps, but they don't eliminate output issues. Those become very apparent when I go through the slow, manual work of deeply comprehending / validating LLM code.
And that leads me to one of three conclusions. Either my standards are achievable only by hyperintelligent programming gods, I have a skill issue using LLMs, or others aren't applying the same level of attention.
The first is obviously untrue. I meet my own standards and I'm an idiot. The second seems unlikely because I can see my competent coworkers and well-regarded people in the community discussing the same issues. So that leaves the third.
If you assume that programmers’ skills follows a bell curve, the typical output will not be better than the average. And that leads directly into your third conclusion: average programmers just do not put in the effort. That’s literally part of what makes them average.
Unfortunately most people just treat it as a job. And indeed, it is a job for most people. Not all farmers love gardening and all in their free time. It's just a livelihood. For me I like programming but honestly for my job I can't be assed to do it by hand anymore. It looks good enough, screw it, it's not like they pay me extra to produce handwritten code. When the whole org is pushing down this one path you know it's time to dgaf
It works if you neglect code quality and understanding. I've done a few vibe coded projects on my free time but I would feel shame for submitting that kind of code at work where I use LLMs more responsibly.
The truth is people just don't seem care about code quality anymore (if they ever did?). I don't think it generates great code (yes even using the state of the art, frontier, super max pro 9000 turbo boost ++ models), but it usually generates code that works. Sadly, that's all that most of the people in charge care about. I mean shit, half the time it doesn't even have to work great, look at the state of a lot of modern software. People complain about it all the time. Quite sad, but that seems to just be the state of things these days.
I don't think corporate ever gave a shit about code quality. Honestly if there weren't building codes skyscrapers would be made with the cheapest shit that didn't collapse immediately and your house would be made of cardboard. Similarly if users were OK with buggy crap or if they had no choice (e.g. windows) then you can get away with lots of crap.
You could only argue about it when an engineer was in charge and even so when they're high up enough the pressures and incentives are to just ship fast and break stuff. Not every company can afford to be a NASA making uncrashable code that runs for 100 years and goes to pluto and all.
It’s quite an uncanny alignment with Nvidia and other semiconductor companies that benefit from their customers to bloating software and buying as many of their chips with no real thought given to efficiency of the runtime.
Probably the largest part is that this kind of code quality is not that important to a lot of devs and applications. Personally I would not describe the majority of code I work on as particularly hard, the challenge was always in getting what I needed done efficiently as opposed to getting it done at all, and LLMs are extremely helpful for that. Though I think I'm more at 90% LLM-generated code, I still do spend a fair bit of time tidying up layout (and any user-visible prose).
If you already had a hand crafted codebase, a ton of miles on it, no real issue for a long time and customers who value some metric of quality then it might be worth crafting things by hand — if only for the bragging.
What is you are writing, what is the problem domain? What does need tens of thousands of lines of code written each day?
Because 100 lines of (debugged, reviewed) code per day is a good speed for seasoned software engineer. I assume that you can produce more than 100 lines of something per day as a prompt.
So, what is the problem domain that requires one to write several thousands of lines of code per day?
Thats you, don't assume everybody in the IT world works in code sweatshops like that. Your above ultra confident statements are also not correct across much of industry.
I always write my assembly by hand because nobody appreciates the craft anymore. It’s all hidden by those pesky compilers which generate extremely inadequate code that could easily be improved by some thinking on the programmer side /s
I do think a better programmer will be a better prompter just like a better compiler engineer will be a better programmer (when performance matters at least).
The llm induced dunning krueger from you larper types is really funny. Software isnt all shitty webapps is you vibe coders create and declare software solved.
None of the code written for a pacemaker, medical imaging, weapons systems, and thousands of other perf critical domains are written by llms in any meaningful sense. Not everything runs in a browser.
Thing is, lines of code was never a good metric in software engineering (at least it shouldn’t have been). When people talk about “~% of code” I feel certain dissonance between what they’re measuring and what they’re actually doing. I mean, you certainly want to type less for working code, sure - that’s why programmers develop high level languages.
Maybe now we should consider how to code with AI and how well/terrible different approaches are doing. Just saying “99% by AI” doesn’t sound like a good way of saying things are replaced by AI. I mean a lot of things will be replaced by AI, but at least not because of/according to lines of code.
Everyone I have talked to who uses coding agents at all now uses them to write almost all their code.
The two people I know who don’t use coding agents work in government, and in a data science company working with government.
I’d say if you work at a tech company and agents aren’t writing the majority of your code, that is weird. But if you work at a traditional company that doesn’t have Claude or Codex subscriptions, there it might be pretty normal to still be writing code by hand.
Well in my personal projects I write all code by hand because people relying on agents will have forgotten how to do their fucking job in 3 years and then it will be appreciated to have people understanding what they're actually doing. That being said, in my job ai writes the code just because it's way faster.
Your "fucking job in 3 years" will be very different, and if you don't learn how to do it in time, you won't still have a job in the computer industry.
Pick an industry where you can stop learning new things once you're out of school, because the computer industry is not one of them and never has been.
My fucking job used to be writing 6502 assembly language on an Apple ][, and I loved it, but I hope I've forgotten enough of it to have room to learn new things. If only I could forget all those hex I/O and peripheral addresses from $C000-$CFFF and the Monitor ROM routines from $F800-$FFFF, without forgetting how brilliantly beautiful Woz and and Allen Baum's code is.
Forgetting old stuff to make room for new stuff is one of the most valuable skills you can have in this industry.
The next most important skill is persistence ;) -- writing stuff down before you forget it, in a way that won't make future-you hate present-you when you need to learn it again.
The thing is I think there will come a time when AI tools will not be as accessible as they are now. I just don't know if it is in 3 years or more, because the market can stay irrational longer than I can foresee.
I saw this idea from elsewhere that the things AI helps with was never the "profit bottleneck" of companies. 10x engineering productivity gain does not translate to 10x more revenue if your profit bottleneck is customer acquisition and retention. In other words, your profit is limited by how many people are willing to give you money for your services and AI can't really affect that.
And even the productivity gains per individual is a generous assumption. An individual can only prompt (and check! You guys check right?) so much. Sooner or later the pendulum is gonna swing in the other direction and it will be cheaper to build a team than equip individuals with AI _to deliver the same value_. I'm also assuming that AI is still in the VC-subsidized pricing stage.
Hence why I think the job in the future is gonna be pretty similar to the job four years ago.
> The next most important skill is persistence ;) -- writing stuff down before you forget it, in a way that won't make future-you hate present-you when you need to learn it again.
Huge amen. Another thing I've found Claude very useful for is writing documentation for legacy systems and cleaning up my own notes on it. I only need Claude to be 70-80% correct because from there I can take it. That error margin is no different from moderately-outdated-but-still-useful documentation.
When that pendulum swings, I will have a documentation binder that I will print money with.
> The thing is I think there will come a time when AI tools will not be as accessible as they are now
I am very convinced that today's SOTA level will be accessible 3 years from now, but you might be right about the SOTA accessibility at that point in time.
Still with today's SOTA you need to know much less details to be able to write code than without it.
My (arguably not very directly communicated, true) actual point is that "weird" is a term that is not really suited for tool choices like this.
"Weird" is a social concept. It's an artifact that has its roots in social cohesion and friction induced by individual nodes to glue the group together.
Software development otoh is an engineering discipline (or.. it should be).
And Engineering does not use the local social consensus algorithm for determining correctness. (or.. it should not)
I think they just meant its weird as in if you met a software dev at a dinner party who was still writing all their code by hand it would raise an eyebrow and you’d want to enquire further why that is.
I think understand the purpose of this comment. I think you're sensing friction and you'd like to reduce that by explaining for the other guy. Which is a common social script, but one that is being exploited here I'd say.
But, regardless, what is interesting I think is the scenario chosen there. Because a "dinner party" is not where engineering happens; and that's kinda the point I was getting at.
That's pulled from the pool of "social consensus" and not "math" or "physics" or whatever.
It's interesting, isn't it?
Just like how specific tokens in the context window of LLMs pull probabilities towards specific clusters of ideas (and tokens); with humans, you see similar things happen.
(This comment is more coherent than it might look at at first sight.)
___
Anyway, point (and to the point) is: Don't get hacked by the current thing fraudsters/grifters.
They don't respect you or me or really anyone the slightest. They're just in it to get rich quick (or simply just inflict psychological damage for sadistic reasons), and they will use any means necessary to do so.
This comment chain only exists because some hype guy is trying to induce FOMO into people for not doing more AI.
Why is unclear, but it's clearly malicious. Whether they consciously know that they are doing that doesn't matter for that assessment.
I think LLMs just allow you to get to where you want to get to quicker. So in a productivity oriented world it seems weird to not be making use of them where those gains can be had.
Let me try another analogy:
AI-related comment sections are like a watering hole for both get-rich-quick grifters, but also bad people wanting to hurt others.
The technology is so disruptive that there are all sorts of opportunities while stuff is still developing, things aren't regulated, and people themselves have not yet learned how to self-regulate.
So if you're looking to make money or to just inflict pain onto others, you're pulled towards this stuff.
This is what I am seeing in this specific comment sub-tree. A troll.
But in current year, you cannot just call people trolls, so instead you get these elaborate meta comments that bypass the anti-anti-troll defenses, but get so abstract, people just go "what".
My advice would be to view any of these comment sections through a zero-trust lens.
Godspeed. We will all eventually get through this.
Software can be an engineering discipline doesn't change whether it's a human doing it or AI doing it.
Arguably engineering is something AI should be really good at since you're just trying to compute a working product given constraints, formulas, resources.
Maybe "unusual" or "uncommon" would be better terms here.
I definitely wouldn't put it at 99% of developers, but I'd say it is the norm among developers I know that agents are their primary mode of writing code now (still using IDEs and GitHub to review changes).
I'm seeing another team doing this, with 99% agents, and quality, predictability of delivery and raw performance have taken a massive nosedive.
But even not caring about quality: Speed of development is abysmal. It was never something this team had anyway, they were always slow. So they don't care that they take a year and 20 people to do what another startup in the same space was able to deliver in a few months with a skeleton crew (and perhaps more quality).
To me the experiment has shown the results it should. It's self-serving to developers, and amplifies the good and the bad in them. It's not particularly good to users and not to companies if the developers aren't good themselves.
It's writing nearly all of the code where I work. It also reviews all of the code (I review it as well). You still have to guide it and hold its hand though. I dont write code by hand anymore (and haven't in almost a year). The job is now about managing the bots, understanding the architecture and keep everything aligned.
That’s a norm at my place as well. But it’s not free. We have definitely given up on quality (both code and general stability) and fully understanding what’s going on. People are generally working more as well, because of all the layoffs pressure.
Industry is betting that we don’t need to. I still consider it a bet because Claude Code this scale has become norm just for a year.
An agent writes 99% of the code. Then I fix some parts, re-arrange things, usually takes a few prompts. Then, there's code review, more changes, etc. But I hardly write code nowadays compared to a few years ago.
The vast majority of work people do is basically supporting simple CRUD type apps.
CRUD apps have long been a solved problem long before AI, no one should be spending a lot of time dedicating their life to figuring out how to write a better CRUD app.
If your bubble consists of writing critical high performance applications or bleeding edge research, maybe you have a use case for not using AI, but that is not the norm.
I don’t think this is true at all. Maybe if you have an agent writing some of your code it will be 99% because its so verbose but I don’t think the modal software engineer is a vibecoder.
The certitude with which you condemn your peer without the slightest consideration for subtlety or alternate explanations for what you've understood to be true -- this comment is such a beautiful encapsulation of the state of discourse today. In some ways it is the modal comment of the moment. Tastelessness and mediocrity and inability to grasp nuance or feign at humility are on full display, not to mention a fantasy for violence
How is that the same thing at all? You didn't understand the comment you replied to and were confidently wrong. The person replying to you understood what you were saying very clearly and didn't make any ridiculous "you may not last long" comments like you did...
I think this is an uncharitable misinterpretation of the parent comment. I took “modal engineer” to mean “the statistical mode of engineers”, not a misspelling of “model engineer”. Which means I think you’re in agreement that using AI to write code is not necessarily vibe coding and that vibe coding is not what the majority (mode) are doing.
AI is just another way to not use your brain, I think there’s plenty of consensus around the fact that not using your brain makes you dumber.
So actually, yes you can say that definitely.
Unfortunately I was like this long before LLMs, trust me ;)
And yes I know it's a word, I know at least two meanings it has but in this particular usage I was not familiar with it. Anyways, I was wrong and I will take the L
That will probably change sooner than you think. Now that it's commonly accepted* that AI has reached AGI status there are already movements to grant legal personhood and rights to it, which would mean legal liability for its actions. Eventually we get to the cyberpunk trope of entirely autonomous corporations that only ever hire humans for gig work and pay them in femtobitcoins or something.
* I'm not arguing what that actually means, much less, whether or not that has actually happened, just that it's what people believe, and as we are a belief-driven culture rather than a data or fact driven culture, that belief is what will drive policy.
That sounds like a horrific dream than anything. How will you even punish an AI model? I think the cyberpunk trope is a bit out of touch from reality, but a lighter version of it can definitely happen where we do get AI companies and entire board coups replacing CEOs with AI for short amounts of time, but in the end people (both consumers and investors) will want something to blame and punish properly, and they will also want control (realistically if you told any of the big people in the AI scene you're replacing them with a model they will definitely reject and claim they are needed for the company to prosper)
In addition this will probably only happen on America as most movies take place lol
You’re mixing things up. Coding is work while managing is status. Management will force the peasants to use any pitchfork management wants. But giving status and power away will never happen. It’s obvious that there enough managers to replace with AI for positive outcome. Bet it will never happen.
we aren't anywhere near lights off software factories, and writing software is easiest domain for modern llms, you can verify results rather easily, plenty of training data etc.
> People said Devin, the AI coding agent, was garbage in 2024. Now it's weird if an agent isn't writing 99% of your code.
I have two comments to this statement. First, using "the" suggests being unique, where in fact there were several similar attempts of similarly low quality, including open-source autogpt even before that.
Second, Devin is still bad, in spite of VC money spent on its development and costly billboards in SF.
I think it's possible to get an LLM to run your business but I think it's still prohibitively expensive to spend the time and money getting guardrails, skills, knowledge, context setup.
Getting it to work reliably is quite the feat. AI coding is a much lower bar when there's (ideally) still a human expert that can set it straight when it goes awry.
I also think some of these debates get hung up on what's possible and ignore what's feasible and practical.
That’s a user error. Tell it to utilize a UI component library to separate styling from feature implementation and add tests which fail any feature level component outside of the UI component library which directly specify style.
As a bonus, you can now easily reskin and maintain dark and light modes.
I agree with your main point though. AI isn’t trained to run a company, it’s trained to solve complex puzzles. We’ll need better models with substantially diversified training to run a company.
I’ve gotten down votes on this comment, but this is the kind of work we have PMs doing now. We don’t even have dedicated frontend developers anymore. Continuing down this path is how you lose your job when someone who understands how to use the new tool comes along.
You can either keep filling up your context window with thousands of instructions and hoping the AI will listen, or you can use AI to fix the problem permanently with automation that runs in CI and allows you to correct everything before a PR gets merged.
Unless we’re training these systems on “solve this problem while following hundreds of arbitrary rules”, loading all your wants and needs into the context window is bound to fail. It’s not what the AI was built to do.
Building tests to catch specific issues and transforming code to better architecture are tasks that AI is good at. You can mistakenly expect the tool to operate like a human, or you can understand what the technology was trained to do and build around that instead.
I am doubling down here. This isn’t a real issue if you’re treating AI like any other tool and understanding how and where to apply it.
Or you have no autonomy to mold the code base to AI. If so, that’s unfortunate.
I agree and I think that this will bring such abundance of information/slop to deal with / to injest. A lot of security concerns too.
It's like the classic hot topic of having personal AI agents booking and ordering pizzas for you that are now all over social media. So pain to deal with when you're a human being on the other end receiving calls from an LLM.
Given the fact that LLMs are very unstable and don't follow the rules and often diverge from the initial instruction list[1], I can't even imagine the responsibility of running such system interacting with humans / other systems online.
> can't even get Astra to consistently re-use the same font-size across all of my HTML page headings+subheadings.
This is just basic software engineering. DRY. Define the style in one place and reuse it.
This is also why you need a human in the loop, you need to make these kinds of design decisions and tell it to do stuff like this. Otherwise you're just building a pile of trash and you'll keep having these dumb easily avoidable issues.
Humans have the exact same problem. If you want a consistent solution to a problem, solve it once and reuse it. Otherwise it won't be consistent.
Tailwind's philosophy is that you must not use CSS facilities at all and instead all their utility classes should be inlined into the HTML soup.
This leaves framework components as the only abstraction boundary, but that means if you're writing plain HTML without a framework there's literally no way to standardize your design system.
That and the huge soup of classes in DOM is (part of why) I don't like Tailwind... but that ship sailed a long time ago.
You can, but it goes against Tailwind's philosophy. It used to be explicitly discouraged here[0] (see this 2022 GH comment[1]), but now they just don't mention it.
I fully agree with the respected part. People hate when they need to contact customer support and are greeted with an AI chatbot. Now imagine if a customer needs to contact the CEO or sales department and is met with an AI chatbot.
There's just no world where this actually results in a stable, respected business. It will be death by a thousand bad impressions, mistakes and oversights. Yeah, you can automate everything. That doesn't mean it's being done well.
That's not to say this might not be something feasible in 2-3 years from now, but we're still a long ways away.