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singpolyma3today at 2:56 PM1 replyview on HN

For sure I not think you can compare agentic coding to automation in this context


Replies

cyanydeeztoday at 4:22 PM

Sure you can; right now, planes fly 90% on automation. They fall back to pilots to correct issues, engine outs or touchdowns. Right now, that fallback condition is mostly reasonable: pilots are trained extensively and have thousands of hours of flight experience to manage it. But as that automation approaches 100%, that fall back condition crosses a line where it's more likely the pilot is both not well trained because of it and their instinct in an emergency is entirely untrustable.

So too is what's happening with LLMs: they're writing code that the programmer is increasinging unaware of and the programmer is increasingly not capable of understanding because they dont have the experience of writing and navigating complex codes. So in the event of a permissions prompt, the fallback condition, you have the same race condition between increasing automation removing the knowledge generation of the operator.

So there's obviously a rubicon where automation _has_ to be 100% because no operator can be a fallback.