alt Hacker NewsI don't write code anymore, because AI writes better code than me. I could write code, but the next AI would find 10 ways to make it better and more consistent with the rest of the AI-generated codebase. So I just let it write all of it. However, I inspect it all carefully and I constantly asks it to reflect on the code quality, to refactor, to reorganize, to make the code as good as possible. The end result is code that is much better than anything I could have written myself.
And I should mention that I have 30+ years of programming experience.
Replies
To be honest, as you know, background knowledge is extremely important in programming. As you move into complex domains, the specifications multiply. So as a domain gets more complex, there comes a point where it exceeds my cognitive capacity. And that's when AI surpasses me and writes code I can't keep up with.
Usually, it produces code that would take three or four humans days to figure out—in just 20 minutes.
Even the professors and PhDs who hire me all use AI. Honestly, they hold PhDs and professorships, which puts them in a league I can't even touch—and even they use it. AI just does it really well.
Honestly, I learned from your book, 'rossant'—I never expected a programmer like you to say something like that. I thought my perspective was because I'm only an intermediate-level programmer. But you're in the 1% expert category I mentioned
Can you explain what you are working on?
I’ve stopped using llms to generate architecture, which i design and write myself and let the machine pattern match the gaps. I also use it to review issues which I lot of the times push back against.
I’m working on a stateful application sitting on top of a data warehouse and have to implement a stream of messy half defined feature requests and navigate on top of an ever changing infrastructure layer. LLMs rarely get the infra layer even if it is written as code and have hard time grasping how to deal with tech debt, when and how to re-architecture parts of the stack or even implement stuff based on a detailed openspec design.