alt Hacker NewsNo I think the argument is more like… on average the code AI produces is better than what the majority of developers were producing before AI. Don’t forget HN crowd is the exception. The people that post here are like 1% of total programmers that like this as more than just a job. The industry at large, 99%, is just people doing their job writing average to poor code and going home. AI does that better now.
I doubt we're really the exception, and I think a good developer from the before times can still guide AI to produce a reasonably maintainable codebase over time. Most likely, a bad developer from the before times will still be able to guide AI to produce a mess. But yeah. It seems to me that the latest models produce above average code, based on the messes I've seen (and helped produce) over the last 25 years or so. It's not as good as what I'd build by hand these days, but it's good enough, when in the right hands.