alt Hacker News> 2. AI is a terrible replacement for me - my skills are at such a high level that it’s almost theoretical that it’ll ever be good enough to replace me for 90% of what I get paid to do. It’s a tool at best.
Most? Perhaps it's depression, but I look back at my career and wonder if any code I've ever been paid to write is beyond what current AI can do.
Sure, this leaves me with the non-coding tasks of UX taste, and code review + a few other forms of QA (and, when self-employed, project management, game design, etc.), but man, I'm someone who actually learned to read in part on the Commodore 64 user manual (as in, trying to understand what PEAK and POKE meant concurrent with having "Jack and Jill go up the hill" picture books).
(And no, I'm not claiming LLMs make bug-free code, I see the bugs LLMs make during my code review of their output and some of them are awful, hence "this leaves me with …").
And? How valuable are individual lines of code? To the author's point, I'm sure AI can translate individual sentences perfectly, but miss the nuance of communication in a bigger project or body of text. In the same vein, when was the last time someone put an AI on a ralph loop, posted the result on r/vibecoding and ended up with actual users.