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shevy-java • today at 11:32 AM • 1 reply • view on HN

The article is not good in some areas.

Yes, the initial claim that good software still has value, even if written by humans, is true - high quality is always nice to have.

But the author then states this:

"The fact that an LLM now writes the code does not mean any abstractions we made before are suddenly less important or less useful."

Now - here the author makes a mistake that assumingly LLMs would lend benefit to the important of HUMAN written high quality software. But this makes no sense. If AI is really viable and useful then it SHOULD NOT NEED humans anywhere. Nor SHOULD it matter how much OTHER software that is good, exists - if AI works well. Perhaps current AI depends on existing data but I would not be surprised if AI becomes good, eventually, that it really does not need humans in order to write high quality code. Perhaps AI is not there yet, perhaps it will take a while - but there is no practical reason as to why LLMs would need human-written code. That just does not compute here.

"When we build a product for people we should be focused on solving their actual problems rather than writing job queues and ORMs and I believe that still holds true for a situation where an LLM writes 100 percent of the code."

But ... why? If a LLM can write the software well, humans are not needed. LLMs write for the people already. AI skynet replaced the human.

"To get back to the decision of whether to let LLMs rewrite everything in Rust: in the end a person is responsible for the software and will have to explain the decisions being made."

DHH was exposed on twitter when he had AI write software and then he crisitized alternatives to what he autogenerated, e. g. "elixir sucks". Well, now everyone knows that DHH is not a good programmer; and even not a good businessman either. If you let AI write code you yourself can not write because of lack of skills, yet then use this to praise AI and critisize e. g. Elixir, without being able to refute the counter-arguments made by José and others then sorry - that's just a promo campaign DHH and the AI tech bros run here. Besides, it is also interesting how the author does not mention DHH at all - DHH literally announced the death of rails when he did his AI-Rust promo. That is a post-mortem on Rails - if I were to use rails, which thankfully I don't (yet ruby powers all my web-needs and has so for +21 years), I would be very worried, since rails is literally dead. People just don't want to admit to it. (Ruby also is sinking, which is unfortunate, but looking at the mistakes made by the ruby core team in the last +2 years, I am no longer surprised: see https://po-ru.com/2026/10/18/why-im-no-longer-updating-this-... and then look at the ruby core team, which is now officially called Mr. Claude)


Replies

status_quo69 • today at 11:59 AM

LLMs are computers pretending to be human, even when their intelligence surpasses their originating species, why shouldn't they benefit from the same kind of structure and flexibility that ruby and rails provide?

Rails isn't dead yet or else I'd be surprised considering I write rails enterprise every day with LLMs who seem to do a perfectly fine job at writing the framework code and libraries. They're absolutely atrocious at testing. I'm also not particularly worried yet because my money making machine has no bottlenecks that dropping to a lower language would solve, and the loss of productivity for humans or LLMs by dropping to a lower level language would be staggering. Turns out monkeypatching in ruby is actually a huge benefit in the age of LLMs vs having to rewrite or fork everything if there's a bug or bad behavior by a lib.