11 ms·

Why write code in 2026

220 points by softwaredoug 3mo ago

guyzana 3mo ago
I found myself working mostly at the requirements and architecture level, but do not give up proper code-review, creating skills along the way that maintain conventions.
fuckaiwriter 3mo ago
[flagged]
olsondv 3mo ago
TL;DR: Write it so you’re actively involved and not a passive reviewer. Then a sign up link for his course.
vips7L 3mo ago
I still exclusively write my code. The quality is higher. I know exactly how it works. It’s more extensible. You don’t have to generate it.
- bigstrat2003 3mo ago
  In fact, it's better not to generate it imo. Like you said the quality is higher, and by the time I get done reviewing the LLM's output I haven't really saved time over just doing it myself. LLMs are only useful for things you can verify extremely quickly (like a short script), or for things where you don't care about the quality.
  - glouwbug 3mo ago
    Turns out you internalize it when you write it and refactor it with iteration
- sph 3mo ago
  In fact, not many people know that these days, but a human doing a thing by bashing their head against it, often tends to improve. My hand-written code is my best yet. My breadth of knowledge, wider than ever.
- lordnacho 3mo ago
  But the attraction of LLM code is not that you get quality. The selling point is that you know have a quality Vs time tradeoff that is a lot better than you used to have. I can spend 10 seconds typing out a prompt that will generate ok code. Before a couple of years ago, it might have taken me an hour to type out and debug that code.
  - vips7L 3mo ago
    Sure, if you prefer low quality go ahead. Many people have always preferred low quality. Many people prefer to eat junk. I also genuinely believe that time tradeoff doesn’t matter. > Before a couple of years ago, it might have taken me an hour to type out and debug that code. Are you not running and testing your code?
    - lordnacho 3mo ago
      It's just naive to say you are always going for quality. Everyone has constraints in money and time that they need to think about. > Are you not running and testing your code? Why would you think that?
      - vips7L 3mo ago
        > Why would you think that? Because you’re claiming to not debug, and that you’ve gone from 1 hour to 10 seconds. I can only go off of what you tell me here.
marsven_422 3mo ago
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FounderGod 3mo ago
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light_hue_1 3mo ago
This is too generic. There's some code I need to write like core abstractions that are going to set the pace for everything. Or tricky steps that can look good without actually working well. Then there's the mass. I don't need that anymore. The mountains of boilerplate, etc. I write little islands which need high judgement that are then connected by the obvious goo.
- jdthedisciple 3mo ago
  this is the way
- sublinear 3mo ago
  The boilerplate was always boilerplate though. You never needed to write it to already have that code in your project, so I'm confused by what you mean. Generating boilerplate is strictly inferior than something already written and tested by the authors of the tools. You will eventually have to make slight adjustments to it, and those decisions can be just as impactful as your "high judgment" code. Those decisions are what actually enable your high judgment code to stay clean and straightforward. Poor decisions in code architecture are some of the biggest blunders of all. Once you have begun to fill in the blanks on some boilerplate code, it ceases to remain boilerplate code. If you let AI make those adjustments, you will eventually blunder the codebase in precisely this way. You'll first recognize it when your high judgment code seems too verbose. You'll then soon realize some things are impossible without adjusting the boilerplate you started off with. Then the AI will fail to grasp what you want and you'll have to manually untangle a lot of the slop that you let grow out of control. Good luck with that.
simonask 3mo ago
"Why cook food in 2026 [while McDonald's exists]?"
gb2d_hn 3mo ago
I think fragility is the key reason i intervene in llm code too. Good article.
jdw64 3mo ago
Recently, even a tourist lost to OAI's model in competitive coding. To be honest, I haven't been able to beat AI at coding since around 5.2. People often say 'AI can't write good code,' but in reality, the quality of AI's output is layered depending on the level of the prompt input. The deeper the prompt, the better the code actually gets. Usually, when people say AI code is terrible, it's because they either don't understand the theory well but have grown through hands-on experience and can't explain things properly to the AI, or they don't know what they don't know. Or there are the very few who are just far better coders than AI. Some people will say they're among the rare few who can write better code than AI, and for some that may be true. But in my experience, the vast majority are not. Even from my perspective as a beginner, I could see flaws when I looked at their git code. It's a metacognition problem. Realistically speaking, at the script level, it's quite common to see AI surpass human programmers as you increase the input level. You might disagree, but that's probably because you're a specialist in that field, deeply immersed in a very narrow area—it only holds true in that limited scope. In the general domain, most people would agree that AI writes code well. Human programmers don't know much outside their own domain. But AI, while it loses in very narrow specialist areas, writes better code than humans across the broader range. It loses in the 1% zone (the expert's domain), but wins in the other 99%. Usually, when that's the case, you have two choices: become the 1%, or learn how to use AI. Since I'm a non-native English speaker, I'm already at a disadvantage compared to native speakers in programming skills, so I chose the latter. But I still code. Not for any other reason—if I don't maintain at least some typing muscle, I won't be able to review AI code properly. That's why I think coding is essential. Even if I can't understand the entirety of AI's output, I still need to understand the core business logic. At the very least, the core logic requires human understanding, so coding is necessary.
- nmehner 3mo ago
  "The deeper the prompt, the better the code actually gets." .... and in the and you end up with a very deep prompt that exactly specifies the behavior. This is what a programming language is. I'd rather describe a data structure in a language designed for this task, than a prompt the might be interpreted in many different ways.
mcrk 3mo ago
Do ppl think that programmers just write code from sratch each time..?! Even without AI I barely write code. 95% of time are spend setting up integrations, configs, copying & adjusting code from previous projects.
- estetlinus 3mo ago
  +1, I don’t understand who these greenfielders are. Either I wait on the CI to finish, or I’m in a meeting.
- danielbln 3mo ago
  And that sort of yak shaving is something LLMs are great at.
- softwaredoug 3mo ago
  I’m old enough to remember coders being made fun of for doing copy-pasting from stackoverflow all day.
jonplackett 3mo ago
Prediction: in 2027 a coding agent will read this as inspiration for why it should code.
nmehner 3mo ago
"It’s about attention and understanding. To keep my attention, I must go beyond ‘read code’ like a passive observer of agents from afar. To really connect with the architecture of the system, it helps to truly experience the code" I guess the funny answer that is behind this sentence is: You have to train your own mental model. We always argue about code in a very abstract and logical manner. But when coding the subconsciousness makes most of the decision ("this just feels right"). But for this to work you have to train it. And this does only work in a very limited way with code reviews or reading documentation. It requires repetition and deep focus. When there is an issue in production with this mental model you will be able to point to the cause of an error message instantly. With generated code you'll search for a long time with your slow, conscious part of the brain. For LLMs to be really helpful, they have to take over complete maintenance of the code. So you can treat them like an external library: Just assume it works. Otherwise this will always be problematic.
- kqr 3mo ago
  > With generated code you'll search for a long time The observability people will claim that if the dynamic runtime behaviour of your system makes it hard to find the source of a behaviour, your system must be made more transparent and observable. They would also claim this was always the case -- we should never have relied on people's mental models being amazing because people move around. (I don't know yet where I stand on this but I'm trying to learn more.)
  - hack1312 3mo ago
    The observability people are correct. It’s not either-or though.
  - nmehner 3mo ago
    If it was only "my" system without any integrations, I might agree. But currently e.g. I am working on an MES/Scada layer that integrates data from a load of different machines in a factory. These machines are from China, Korea, Germany, Sweden ... Upwards there is an ERP integration (and some other systems). Sometimes machines are updated and suddenly behave differently. Giving error messages in Chinese. The ERP has the nasty behavior of returning error messages where it is not clear whether the actual processing actually happened or not. There are some heuristics on parsing the error messages, but these also change with new versions. Sometimes one machine overloads cloud infrastructure and completely unrelated functionality fails. Sometimes the on-premise network stops working for whatever reason and data is lost. Sometimes operators do not understand a perfectly valid error message like: "The batch you loaded into input position XY has expired on XZ and cannot be used for production": "But we have been told to use it..." So when you get called out at night, because the production line stopped and "MES is displaying an error message", it is mostly about finding out what integration failed and who else to wake up. Getting this right is very much appreciated by your colleagues. And this is where you need a mental model of how things are connected, what error message happens because of what external causes etc. Observability can only work perfectly for known problems. In a complex system for unexpected problem you can either provide too much data, so analyzing it and finding the relevant part becomes really hard, or too little data which makes finding the issue impossible. There are so many companies claiming to provide the perfect observability solution and there are certainly solutions that help. But it is all very far from perfect. Not relying on people is managers wet dream. And for a lot of people it might be true that they can be easily replaced. But for complex systems there are always some key people that you cannot replace without causing issues.
feverzsj 3mo ago
Unless you want some unmaintainable shitty sloppy app.
dlvhdr 3mo ago
lol what a slopper
prymitive 3mo ago
I need to write code because otherwise LLMs will write too much code, it’s only when you fully understand the problem you can generalise it enough to not end up with 10k lines and 5 abstraction layers for “hello world”. LLMs are token predictors, so all solutions are you tokens, the more problems to solve == the more tokens (code) to output.
- h2aichat 3mo ago
  If tokens are the problem, SDD is the solution
- TacticalCoder 3mo ago
  > I need to write code because otherwise LLMs will write too much code, ... I second that and I can give an example that happened to me yesterday with a totally SOTA model (a US, not Chinese model). I needed to display an information on the client-side. Something trivial. I ask the LLM to do it. The thing went onto a rampage: it somehow found a way to pass the information from the server to the client during the initial handshake (already: why, just why?). Modifying both server-side code and client-side code. And it worked. To an unsuspecting programmer/tester (or automated test)/user: the info is there, what was asked has been done. So it's perfect, flawless LLM victory right? Except none of that sloppy-pasta was necessary: the info was already available on the client-side and was a one-line change, purely client-side. These thing shall definitely, as of 2026, write way too much code. And btw the companies selling metered tokens have a very serious incentive to produce the most complicated, rube-goldberg, solutions that use as many tokens as possible, while still kinda solving the problem. That way not only you consume tokens to produce the code, but later on you consume tokens when working on that code (which btw is a guaranteed thing: for the LLM just introduced new bugs in that gargantic amount of crap it output). Funnily enough the very same people who made fun of copy-pasta happen to be in love with sloppy-pasta. Go figure.
- softwaredoug 3mo ago
  LLMs love to defensively wrap code instead of thinking holistically about the big picture. That creates a lot of bloat. A human coder might OTOH follow the Boy Scout rule and clean up as they go.
goodness4all 3mo ago
I always hated writing code but loved debugging. LLM super charges systems thinkers & auditors, it’s just a different process and no different than copy and paste from stack overflow. It all comes down to the architecture design and LLM just exposes how bad people are at designing dynamic architectures.
- girvo 3mo ago
  > and no different than copy and paste from stack overflow This isn't really the point of your comment, and for that I apologise, but: not all of us did that. For many good reasons, too.
  - pydry 3mo ago
    Yeah, the more I hear about people writing "boilerplate" or "copy pasting" code faster using LLMs the more I think it's mainly a tool for letting you write brittle, buggy code, faster.
  - monk_grilla 3mo ago
    > not all of us did that. For many good reasons, too. This isn't really the point of your comment, and for that I apologise, but I still haven't gotten used to speaking about what we "used to do" in the past tense, as if we are in a post-programming world... We are already starting to speak of the habits we used to have (or not have), how things used to be done back in the day (1-2 years ago). I don't think you're wrong to do so. I find myself saying it sometimes too. Just an observation about the weird world we find ourselves in.
    - girvo 3mo ago
      For what it’s worth, I was talking in response to the original commenter who was talking in past tense, I was merely responding in kind :) I would argue that SO is basically “done”, though. For better or worse. I still write code by hand. I use LLMs too. Weird world for sure.
    - inigyou 3mo ago
sublinear 3mo ago
> If we’re building a software factory, details matter. The details that establish architectural patterns. Down to algorithms and performance. Agents push us to evaluate, measure, and guard. They’ve made it cool to add CI into side projects early, not as an afterthought. That’s massive improvement to the state of software. Why are you building a software factory though, and why weren't you immediately adding CI to every project? > It’s our job to build the software factory - not just the software. Software engineers maintain the assembly line allowing anyone to prompt for a change and ship immediately. Again, why? Where are you working where this is considered a good idea? This would mean that the software engineers are not just being completely kicked out of all business decisions, but asked to build a moat that ensures they stay on the other side of it. Any business that intentionally devalues the insights gained through implementation will eventually starve itself to death by making too many passive thoughtless moves. No insight will ever be gained just spot checking AI. Is their intention really just to make tiny amounts of profit while riding the thing into the ground? Crabs in a bucket, man.
deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]
cresting 3mo ago
AI is a tool. Learn how to use it! Interesting article btw
- saghm 3mo ago
  > AI is a tool. Learn how to use it! If you think that everyone agrees on the "correct" way to use it, you're mistaken. If you think that your way is the best possible way to use it, you're arrogant. And if you think that the way you think is correct is obvious and that everyone should already know that's the right way, you're delusional.
h2aichat 3mo ago
It seems to me that AI won the code Battle and that humans are just trying to justify the defeat. I will relax and wait for the Next AI generation to see how it fixed its problems. May be, everything will be ok.
- ataru 3mo ago
  I've got a coin that answers questions. You have to give it a heads or tails query, then flip the coin, and it returns an answer. It's incredible. Now, it doesn't get the right answer every single time, but we're all learning how to use the new coin technology, and this is only the first generation of coin. The next model of coin is going to be even better. Soon we're not going to need humans any more, for any question we have, we'll be able to use the coin.
  - yard2010 3mo ago
    I have a coin that can tell you whether a program would halt or not. But it's not always right. I think it's a coin like you have? Still trying to figure out how to use it to prove that p=np.
  - JackSlateur 3mo ago
    Even a broken clock is right twice a day :)
- invader 3mo ago
  So, the developers have finally found their Silver Bullet? I've seen so many of these already. It would be hilarious to see Brooks proving right once again.
- h2aichat 3mo ago
  [flagged]
mikkolaakkonen 3mo ago
[dead]
mikkolaakkonen 3mo ago
The software factory is exactly what I'm building. The world is changing, we can either be the ones changing it or be forced to change afterwards.
fernandotakai 3mo ago
i write code because i love it. it's something that makes me genuinely happy, so why would i give that up?
- jayknight 3mo ago
  Exactly this. I got into this field because designing programs and writing code is enjoyable. I'm probably behind on using AI and need to get more up to speed, but I never want to stop coding by hand.
  - DaiPlusPlus 3mo ago
    > I'm probably behind on using AI and need to get more up to speed Same. My difficulty is that for the past 8 years I've been working for (tiiiiny) SaaS business where I don't have anyone I can simply ask in-person "hey, can you show me how to 'do' all this newfangled AI agentic team coding?"; so my only direct-exposure is with the painful Copilot sidebar chat, which I now find myself allergic to. So let's see elsewhere: while searching online for some (reputable) "agentic coding courses" my results are for the same kind of people who used to run those dodgy coding-camps from 10 years ago. I'm having difficulty finding resources for practicing SWEs like myself wanting a continuing-professional-development course experience, not a get-rich-by-buying-my-course video library from a contemptable AI booster Even more surprisingly, my local major university (UW.edu) doesn't seem to offer any certificate courses for getting into agentic development either[1] despite offering courses on C++, Six Sigma, and actual ML/AI courses. It's maddening. I can't be the only one with this problem... [1] https://www.pce.uw.edu/search?type=certificate&programType=certificate https://www.pce.uw.edu/search?type=certificate&programType=c...
    - XenophileJKO 3mo ago
      I don't understand this. A skill critical to software engineering is learning how to learn. Just download Claude Code (or open alternative) and try to make things. See how it fails or succeeds. Look at the supported features, try them out, think about how you might use them in your workflow. Before you know it, you'll be proficient. You have to learn how to self-teach.
slopinthebag 3mo ago
Seems like there’s broadly two ways to use LLMs for coding - either as a way to generate the same code you would have written but faster, or as an opaque program-generator where you have no idea what the code is doing. One of these methods results in roughly the same amount of understanding and the other one radically less.
avaer 3mo ago
> For example, have you ever seen an agent follow the boy scout rule? Where they leave code better than they found it? And would you WANT them to try to do this? Yes, it's in the rules; run profiles, check code coverage, do a critical review, post the report and follow up tasks. 90% of people I've worked with did not follow these boy scout rules nearly as well as today's frontier LLMs. Is the author implying this is bad?
- softwaredoug 3mo ago
  That quote is the lead in to an example I talk about after this quote illustrates what I often see. > Agents bias to making the current change as safely as possible. I had a situation in a previous codebase where one morning, pre-caffeinated, my meat brain mentioned using browser local storage. So some random state was managed in local storage. Everything else through a backend database. When I looked at the code, the amount of wrapping and indirection to preserve this idiotic human mistake probably tripled the LoC. Agents can amplify our one-off bad decisions by being so conservative. You can of course solve this many ways. And many of boils down to just how a particular humans brain works. Some will solve this by not reading code. Some will read / write code. Whatever works for you is great. But many there is upside to the precision of not having code intermediated through the LLM for many.
  - avaer 3mo ago
    Right, but this just seems like underspecification. In my experience as both a team leader and an "agentic engineer" (ugh), I try to blame myself for the lack of clarity of my asks, rather than the person/agent for making the "wrong" choice. I'm sure plenty of meat humans out there would make the same mistake (sorry, you said to use local storage boss!). You might give them a scolding. And maybe document that policy. Maybe in a markdown file for the next person. IME the latest models are significantly better than the median engineer at following this feedback. I don't think it's fruitful to blame the LLM any more than it is to blame someone working under you. In fact I would say this is an excellent example of how engineering does NOT fundamentally change in the era of AI.
    - 3mo ago
conqrr 3mo ago
All this debate around use LLM or not is tiring and just black and white thinking. Can I use agents to code a SWE project? yes, with nuances. Can I write code for a SWE project? yes, with nuances. Its more options now, I'll write code about projects I deeply care and will use llm at work where its shared slop and forced usage.
majorbugger 3mo ago
Why is this even a legit question? I need to keep writing code to stay relevant, not to forget my craft, be able to review code... So many reasons. AI doesn't change a thing.
- avaer 3mo ago
  Before my time ppl mostly did things in asm, I bet the vast majority of people reading this have never touched assembly and will never have any reason to. This is quickly becoming true of most "code". AI has changed that. One way to "stay relevant" would be to admit that.
  - softwaredoug 3mo ago
    Yet as a C developer for 15 years I frequently looked at asm and on occasion even wrote a little. And that is a far stronger abstraction than LLMs :)
  - majorbugger 3mo ago
    I have also never used punch cards, what does it prove?
  - deadbabe 3mo ago
    assembly is compiled deterministically so you don't really need to look at it, LLMs though can write a variety of things at random based on the prompt. It is not the same.
  - cozzyd 3mo ago
    How can you evaluate what your compiler is doing without looking at the assembly? The many users of godbolt suggest it's pretty common.
pjmlp 3mo ago
I write code all the time I can, outside the KPI metrics that everyone is being pushed to, I only care about AI for smarter code completion.
minimaxir 3mo ago
Note as some may be confused by the "1 hour ago" with comments older than that: this submission was rescued by dang when a previous discussion existed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48883341 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48883341 fwiw I think the rationale behind it is counterproductive because the only difference between a OP submitting their article link and someone else submitting their article link is internet points.
- softwaredoug 3mo ago
  I was fairly confused myself as the author :) This was actually my original submission last week. There was a front page submission last night from someone else (hence the comments). Then my old post got re-upped just now (1 hr ago)
mrweasel 3mo ago
Apparently it's not obvious to everyone, but if you can't write code, you can't review it. I do know people, and companies, that says: "So what, we ask Claude to write the code, Codex will then do the review". The thing that then strikes me as odd is that they still ask for the code in Python, Java, or some other high level language.... Why? Just ask Claude to dump out assembly, or a compiled binary, but no, they don't trust the LLM that much. They still want to be able to read the code. So they need developers that can read, debug and reason about the code, yet they don't want to give them the training that's required to do this?
- ryandvm 3mo ago
  They don't have Claude write assembly because there is no training corpus on people making CRUD apps in assembly. I'm as hateful of LLMs hollowing out the job market as the next guy, but the reality is the frontier LLMs are really good at writing anything that's been done and documented on the Internet a million times and unfortunately most of what software devs have been doing the last couple decades is shitting out cookie cutter CRUD apps. I have my doubts about whether the state of the industry is going to advance as long as we're having LLMs do all the creation, but that's another diatribe.
  - deadbabe 3mo ago
    What's there to advance to? Without a revolutionary new platform to build apps on that no one has ever developed for before, there is basically no reason to believe there is any software left that has some business or economic value that hasn't already been written.
    - devin 3mo ago
      If you think we're "done", you have no imagination.
      - deadbabe 3mo ago
        What are you gonna make? Yet another CRUD app? An API subscription? A game? A mobile app? We’ve created software for virtually every place we can put software. There’s nothing new. It’s like bridges. We’ve seen all the ways bridges can be built by now. There’s nothing new left to discover.
rdksu 3mo ago
exactly how many times do you plan on posting this here
- minimaxir 3mo ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48883660 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48883660
- deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
TrackerFF 3mo ago
If we look at the progress made from ChatGPT 3.5 (Nov 2022) and up to today...shoot, I'm really starting to wonder if we'll even be reviewing code in 4 years. And I'm not saying this as some sort of AI maximalist. If progress keeps up, I seriously doubt software engineering and development will, as we know it today, will be a thing in the next 5-10 years. Maybe humans will be left with designing the UI, but everything else will be abstracted away and AI will be doing all the actual work behind the scenes.
- softwaredoug 3mo ago
  The thing is with a wish machine, you can one shot something very easily. But then you realize software is the accumulation of 1000s of wishes. And you want this but not that. Many little micro decisions of exactly what you want in every nook and cranny. In the current paradigm (LLMs) we still have to manage all this. But maybe in the future we have something impossible to imagine.
- weakfish 3mo ago
  You’re assuming that progress will continue at the same rate (it’s plateaud a bit as far as I can tell, I can look for sources tomorrow but am on phone now :)) & I think it’s fairly demonstrated that the industry isn’t profitable for training ever increasingly huge models, which get exponentially more expensive each iteration
  - galaxyLogic 3mo ago
    I wonder, LLMs have progressed at great speed, because they have learned to duplicate what humans did and recorded in the documents and source-code that became the training materials for the LLMs. But now that humans don't write any more code, there is no new learning materials for the LLMs. There are no new things for them to learn. Therefore I expect they will plateau, the progress is no longer so fast. And maybe we'll get something like a Mad Cow Disease, when AI "eats its own brains". To avoid that from happening we will need continued human inputs, and review.
    - 3mo ago
andai 3mo ago
>It’s our job to build the software factory - not just the software. Software engineers maintain the assembly line allowing anyone to prompt for a change and ship immediately. The job of the software engineer increasingly becomes to make himself unnecessary: to empower the nontechnical business users to do as much as reasonably possible, without his/her intervention. This has, of course, been the dream of computing, since its inception! And the true aim of every "high level" or "beginner friendly" (looking at you javascript!) language. But finally, now that the computer actually speaks English (and is beginning to stop making completely insane errors), it gradually becomes feasible. Freeing the masses from the tyranny of the nerds!
- inigyou 3mo ago
  This isn't the first or even the tenth attempt at making computer programming accessible to everyone. Remember COBOL? COBOL made the computer speak English. It didn't help. A specification detailed enough to control every aspect of the resulting product is called a program. Compilers are AI. The prevalence of compilers hasn't harmed the programming industry at all, quite the opposite.
  - andai 3mo ago
    Well, it's harmed the assembly programming industry.
- andai 3mo ago
  Update: since I have posted this my computer has made several completely insane errors. I guess we're not quite there yet haha.
supermdguy 3mo ago
“Do you know what the industry term for a project specification that is comprehensive and precise enough to generate a program? Code. It’s called code.” - CommitStrip (https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/1p70bk8/specisjustcode/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/1p70bk8/sp...) I think if you’re doing it right, the core of your code should be the simplest expression of the underlying business logic. Of course there’s always going to be supporting layers, and maybe those don’t need to be reviewed. But if you haven’t read the code, there’s an extent to which you don’t know the business logic.
- teddyh 3mo ago
  Original link: <https://web.archive.org/web/20260521130338/https://www.commitstrip.com/en/2016/08/25/a-very-comprehensive-and-precise-spec/ https://web.archive.org/web/20260521130338/https://www.commi...>
- softwaredoug 3mo ago
  My other article on this topic advocates for using code over specs :) It’s ok to talk to the agent in code. Or create examples for it to follow. https://softwaredoug.com/blog/2026/07/04/write-code-not-specs https://softwaredoug.com/blog/2026/07/04/write-code-not-spec...
  - imhoguy 3mo ago
    What I miss in Claude Code is code completion at prompt line.. ah wait it gets back to IDE and Copilot.
  - bluefirebrand 3mo ago
    > It’s ok to talk to the agent in code. Or create examples for it to follow If you're doing this, then why not just write the effing code?
    - softwaredoug 3mo ago
      What I mean by "talk to the agent in code" really is to code. Establish patterns. Then have the agent use those patterns as reference for other areas of the project.
podgietaru 3mo ago
I was thinking about an experience I had recently, and how it relates to my feelings about AI... And it bummed me out a lot. So I took over an open source project called Omnivore. It's a reading app in the vein of Pocket. The hosted version used pdf-lib to inject some functionality into the pdf viewer. Namely, highlighting, note taking, and storing location. pdf-lib is a licensed application, so when taking it to fully self-hosted this needed to change. I migrated it over to pdf.js. And I went through the entire process. I added all the functionality bit by bit. It didn't take exceptionally long, maybe 1-3 days. But that process was really satisfying. I found a bug, fixed it, and then found a stackoverflow issue where someone was also experiencing the same issue and suggested the fix. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/59151218/pdfjs-error-on-text-rendering-for-the-pdf/79277856#79277856 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/59151218/pdfjs-error-on-... I'm pretty sure an ai could have done all of this. And therein lies my fear and my upset with AI. Not only would it have robbed me of that experience, but it shows that I have in a way been devalued. Because I do think that took a level of skill. And now that's gone...
- softwaredoug 3mo ago
  I think what we’re learning is that up front slower experience can be valuable for maintaining the maintainers own understanding of the project I’ll be very curious how / if the Bun port to Rust works out.
throwatdem12311 3mo ago
If you’re not writing code it won’t be long until you get to a point where your agent won’t be able to dig you out of whatever hole you’ve dug for yourself and then you are fubar because you’ve just completely forgotten how.
jv22222 3mo ago
At this point I haven't looked at code for many months. Before that, I spent 4 years hand coding a Google Docs competitor in JS without any libraries. My brain feels equally as exercised (in fact more so as I am not as good at agentic coding as I was at real coding) But now I'm making highly polished Mac OS apps and I really like that move from JS. I feel... conflicted.
- softwaredoug 3mo ago
  Do you like to look at code? I’m finding it’s really just a personal preference. And honestly not worth getting worked up about either way.
  - jv22222 3mo ago
    This is weird but I think I like to focus wherever I feel needs polish. So, making a real time collaborative tool from scratch there was a lot of deep work in things like sockets, queues, memory structures, etc. That's just what needed attention. Right now I'm building a memory app for AI. So far I haven't spent much time looking at code on the swift side of things. But I have spent a lot of time up front working on domain driven design, screaming architecture, and module based design. I think with AI the polish is in deep QA, design taste, running trace logs and constantly asking it to do html diagrams of the architecture and such. ngl I miss "knowing what's going on" at the code level, but it feels like not a good use of my time to go into those weeds. When I look at the code it seems well structured due to screaming architecture, and module based design.
- deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
hirvi74 3mo ago
I write organic code in 2026 because I do not have a choice. Which, honestly, I am thankful for most of the time. My employer has no LLM mandates nor do they supply us an LLMs to use. In my personal life, I cannot justify more than a $20 sub per month. I only use the Web Chat anyway. Shelling out $100-$200 a month for a sub in which I would get little to no ROI is a poor choice. Besides, I've never hit the limit on my $20 a month plan either. The day I am forced to prompt LLMs all day, every day is the day I am cashing out of programming as a career. Though to be clear, I have no opposition towards anyone that uses LLMs, and think they are fantastic tools when used appropriately. (I love them as a StackOverflow replacement, and have learned a lot from going back and forth with LLMs).
okanat 3mo ago
> Not because agents are worse at coding that[sic] humans. And then the whole article shows tangible reasons where the agents are truly worse at code than humans. Code never is just the text. If intelligence you have is not truly general, you cannot expect things like clarifying wider context, hierarchically ordering knowledge based on criteria and producing consistent results despite transfer learning and retraining. And no, we are not even close to the multimodal capabilities of human brain to hierarchy encode and reproduce knowledge. Otherwise the correct "reasonable" economic action would be genociding all humans, and I'm pretty sure that this is what billionaires effectively want out of AI.
lowsong 3mo ago
Writing code helps me think. Every time I read some take about keeping up one's skills when using agents people get so tantalisingly close to the obvious answer, and then fall short. If the tools are making you worse, don't use the tools.
h4kunamata 3mo ago
This does not seem obvious to AI-developers, you cannot fix what you do not understand. Also, if you use AI to write your code, you are not a developer either. Let's say AI completely disappears right now, many of the so called "developers" are unable to write code, are unable to fix code, they cannot code. There are two kind of developers: 1. Non-developers: Use AI for everything, to write code, to test the code, you name it. 2. Real developers: Search engines are broken right now, they use AI as a tool, as replacement for Google to ASSIST you, not to do the task for you. As AI is falling apart and companies are hiring people back, these non-developers will find themselves out of work.
- squibonpig 3mo ago
  Ai will fall apart as an industry but it's likely that models on par with e.g. opus 4.8 will be runnable on a home server within the next year and a half and that model hosts will still exist. I figure these tools aren't likely to go away.
  - h4kunamata 3mo ago
    AI is here to stay, full stop. The problem is IT professionals who depend on AI for everything. That is crashing down and won't be pretty.
Arubis 3mo ago
To build software that you understand yourself. Next question.
ccoffey1 3mo ago
"Instead, we’re switching to this wrong-headed mindset that coding agents are like compilers. That mindset gives us permission to ship terribly written code. Agents aren’t compilers - they’re more like freshly onboarded interns." I feel this statement these days during code reviews. I know some amazing engineers whose output lately just isn't the same.
dented42 3mo ago
I feel like this question doesn’t need a blog post to answer. Why write code in 2026? Because it’s fun.
j16sdiz 3mo ago
I discovered Doctorow's "Reverse centaurs are the answer to the AI paradox" via a link in this article. It was a great read. Recent HN Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48873855 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48873855
jillesvangurp 3mo ago
The relevant question is who is going to pay you to write code manually. It's something that's increasingly hard to justify. The answer is of course that people are not paying for code to be written or generated but for some problem to be solved. Whoever does that with the least amount of drama and cost gets the business. And using AI tools just allows for compressing the timelines a bit in a way that is hard to ignore. Most code out there isn't all that great. I've been in this industry since the nineties. There are a lot of not so great software engineers doing mediocre work. People are romanticizing how great and magnificent their code is (or used to be). The reality of manually crafted code is of course a lot less flattering. Many code bases become hard to maintain over time and are riddled with bugs. And it's not like sloppy code is a new thing. Poorly executed software projects have been very common for a long time. That's not going to go away.
- tonyedgecombe 3mo ago
  >There are a lot of not so great software engineers doing mediocre work. Yeah, and they are all producing 10x as much mediocre work now.
- Pavilion2095 3mo ago
  > The relevant question is who is going to pay you to write code manually. Hopefully companies in the industries where software quality matters and is regulated, e.g.: medicine, aviation, nuclear, etc. Although this market is relatively small.
  - jillesvangurp 3mo ago
    You seem to assume that people still have an inherent advantage here. Mostly those sectors compensate for well documented human failures with very rigid and expensive processes and testing. And of course despite that, stuff still goes wrong occasionally. I actually think AI based automation is going to be a key enabler in those kinds of strict environments as well. Recent work on identifying e.g. security bugs seems to be resulting in a lot of improvement that has somehow escaped decades of human scrutiny. With good quality harnesses (manual or automated), I don't see any big objection against using generated code here.
mintflow 3mo ago
This resonate with me a lot Recently I am seriously thinking the time when agent do the work and I was waiting for it's output, I got a bit lost given it really can do a lot but it make me feel some crisis as a human, even it still can provide me a sort of Joy because some task I long want to do but no time to start can be finally take shape, but the Joy is actually not comparable with the Joy when I read the code and hack with it Concretely, I am letting agent to write some serious part of code to rust and I will consider only let Agent to handle the UI and integration stuffs, and I will take the rust part and rust is a language that I want to learn and be professional given I was do lots of C coding
gloosx 3mo ago
The OpenGraph preview image for this article is a total ragebait
mahmoudilyan 3mo ago
I enjoy writing and read code as well, but AI race force me to skip that part to be able to ship faster. I spend time building AI Agentic guides and skills, then review the code myself. I really miss the old days when you put your headphones on and focus for 3-4 hours
chromadon 3mo ago
"Why write code in 2026".. Because AI generated code is STILL complete ass. Even Fable, even whatever custom Pi/opencode leet code harness you have, the output is awful, and, if you cannot distinguish the quality of your code vs the AI's, I've got some bad news for you.
- mewpmewp2 3mo ago
  My code is/was worse than AI's, but at least I get paid, so what do I care about the bad news you have.
  - superze 3mo ago
    You are exactly the person who should be afraid then and you prove his point?!
    - mewpmewp2 3mo ago
      What should I be afraid about? The code I output with AI is now better than what I did previously so I have equalized with anyone who had better code pre-AI.
- anthonypasq 3mo ago
  99% of code ever written has always been shit. Most of it has been thrown out or not in use anymore, or EVER used. Most people arent going anything particularly unique or complicated or performance focused.
soundworlds 3mo ago
The most interesting and creative projects I have worked on required little code, but novel combinations of ideas.
balder1991 3mo ago
I’d like to recommend people to read the “Programming as a theory building” article and why the code itself isn’t enough to understand the whole context of a complex project. Every time you work in a complex software project, you have all the context in your head about what you must take into consideration. LLMs don’t, you have to explain every little detail to them, but there’s no telling where it stops: do you have to explain X to it or is it in the training already? When you try to shape how a LLM should behave and what it should know, you end up writing a Bible of relevant context that’s increasingly difficult to maintain as well, often with outdated or contradictory information, and it is still free to ignore things you have written and proceed however it wants. That’s why so many people only feel comfortable giving the LLM some limited task to do, because you can judge if that specific task needs just enough context that it can handle by itself.
vonneumannstan 3mo ago
Arrogance, vanity, ignorance... etc.

220 points by softwaredoug 3mo ago

I found myself working mostly at the requirements and architecture level, but do not give up proper code-review, creating skills along the way that maintain conventions.

fuckaiwriter 3mo ago

[flagged]

olsondv 3mo ago

TL;DR: Write it so you’re actively involved and not a passive reviewer. Then a sign up link for his course.

vips7L 3mo ago

I still exclusively write my code. The quality is higher. I know exactly how it works. It’s more extensible. You don’t have to generate it.

bigstrat2003 3mo ago
In fact, it's better not to generate it imo. Like you said the quality is higher, and by the time I get done reviewing the LLM's output I haven't really saved time over just doing it myself. LLMs are only useful for things you can verify extremely quickly (like a short script), or for things where you don't care about the quality.
- glouwbug 3mo ago
  Turns out you internalize it when you write it and refactor it with iteration
sph 3mo ago
In fact, not many people know that these days, but a human doing a thing by bashing their head against it, often tends to improve. My hand-written code is my best yet. My breadth of knowledge, wider than ever.
lordnacho 3mo ago
But the attraction of LLM code is not that you get quality. The selling point is that you know have a quality Vs time tradeoff that is a lot better than you used to have. I can spend 10 seconds typing out a prompt that will generate ok code. Before a couple of years ago, it might have taken me an hour to type out and debug that code.
- vips7L 3mo ago
  Sure, if you prefer low quality go ahead. Many people have always preferred low quality. Many people prefer to eat junk. I also genuinely believe that time tradeoff doesn’t matter. > Before a couple of years ago, it might have taken me an hour to type out and debug that code. Are you not running and testing your code?
  - lordnacho 3mo ago
    It's just naive to say you are always going for quality. Everyone has constraints in money and time that they need to think about. > Are you not running and testing your code? Why would you think that?
    - vips7L 3mo ago
      > Why would you think that? Because you’re claiming to not debug, and that you’ve gone from 1 hour to 10 seconds. I can only go off of what you tell me here.

marsven_422 3mo ago

[dead]

FounderGod 3mo ago

[dead]

light_hue_1 3mo ago

This is too generic. There's some code I need to write like core abstractions that are going to set the pace for everything. Or tricky steps that can look good without actually working well. Then there's the mass. I don't need that anymore. The mountains of boilerplate, etc. I write little islands which need high judgement that are then connected by the obvious goo.

jdthedisciple 3mo ago
this is the way
sublinear 3mo ago
The boilerplate was always boilerplate though. You never needed to write it to already have that code in your project, so I'm confused by what you mean. Generating boilerplate is strictly inferior than something already written and tested by the authors of the tools. You will eventually have to make slight adjustments to it, and those decisions can be just as impactful as your "high judgment" code. Those decisions are what actually enable your high judgment code to stay clean and straightforward. Poor decisions in code architecture are some of the biggest blunders of all. Once you have begun to fill in the blanks on some boilerplate code, it ceases to remain boilerplate code. If you let AI make those adjustments, you will eventually blunder the codebase in precisely this way. You'll first recognize it when your high judgment code seems too verbose. You'll then soon realize some things are impossible without adjusting the boilerplate you started off with. Then the AI will fail to grasp what you want and you'll have to manually untangle a lot of the slop that you let grow out of control. Good luck with that.

simonask 3mo ago

"Why cook food in 2026 [while McDonald's exists]?"

gb2d_hn 3mo ago

I think fragility is the key reason i intervene in llm code too. Good article.

jdw64 3mo ago

Recently, even a tourist lost to OAI's model in competitive coding. To be honest, I haven't been able to beat AI at coding since around 5.2. People often say 'AI can't write good code,' but in reality, the quality of AI's output is layered depending on the level of the prompt input. The deeper the prompt, the better the code actually gets. Usually, when people say AI code is terrible, it's because they either don't understand the theory well but have grown through hands-on experience and can't explain things properly to the AI, or they don't know what they don't know. Or there are the very few who are just far better coders than AI. Some people will say they're among the rare few who can write better code than AI, and for some that may be true. But in my experience, the vast majority are not. Even from my perspective as a beginner, I could see flaws when I looked at their git code. It's a metacognition problem. Realistically speaking, at the script level, it's quite common to see AI surpass human programmers as you increase the input level. You might disagree, but that's probably because you're a specialist in that field, deeply immersed in a very narrow area—it only holds true in that limited scope. In the general domain, most people would agree that AI writes code well. Human programmers don't know much outside their own domain. But AI, while it loses in very narrow specialist areas, writes better code than humans across the broader range. It loses in the 1% zone (the expert's domain), but wins in the other 99%. Usually, when that's the case, you have two choices: become the 1%, or learn how to use AI. Since I'm a non-native English speaker, I'm already at a disadvantage compared to native speakers in programming skills, so I chose the latter. But I still code. Not for any other reason—if I don't maintain at least some typing muscle, I won't be able to review AI code properly. That's why I think coding is essential. Even if I can't understand the entirety of AI's output, I still need to understand the core business logic. At the very least, the core logic requires human understanding, so coding is necessary.

nmehner 3mo ago
"The deeper the prompt, the better the code actually gets." .... and in the and you end up with a very deep prompt that exactly specifies the behavior. This is what a programming language is. I'd rather describe a data structure in a language designed for this task, than a prompt the might be interpreted in many different ways.

mcrk 3mo ago

Do ppl think that programmers just write code from sratch each time..?! Even without AI I barely write code. 95% of time are spend setting up integrations, configs, copying & adjusting code from previous projects.

estetlinus 3mo ago
+1, I don’t understand who these greenfielders are. Either I wait on the CI to finish, or I’m in a meeting.
danielbln 3mo ago
And that sort of yak shaving is something LLMs are great at.
softwaredoug 3mo ago
I’m old enough to remember coders being made fun of for doing copy-pasting from stackoverflow all day.

jonplackett 3mo ago

Prediction: in 2027 a coding agent will read this as inspiration for why it should code.

nmehner 3mo ago

"It’s about attention and understanding. To keep my attention, I must go beyond ‘read code’ like a passive observer of agents from afar. To really connect with the architecture of the system, it helps to truly experience the code" I guess the funny answer that is behind this sentence is: You have to train your own mental model. We always argue about code in a very abstract and logical manner. But when coding the subconsciousness makes most of the decision ("this just feels right"). But for this to work you have to train it. And this does only work in a very limited way with code reviews or reading documentation. It requires repetition and deep focus. When there is an issue in production with this mental model you will be able to point to the cause of an error message instantly. With generated code you'll search for a long time with your slow, conscious part of the brain. For LLMs to be really helpful, they have to take over complete maintenance of the code. So you can treat them like an external library: Just assume it works. Otherwise this will always be problematic.

kqr 3mo ago
> With generated code you'll search for a long time The observability people will claim that if the dynamic runtime behaviour of your system makes it hard to find the source of a behaviour, your system must be made more transparent and observable. They would also claim this was always the case -- we should never have relied on people's mental models being amazing because people move around. (I don't know yet where I stand on this but I'm trying to learn more.)
- hack1312 3mo ago
  The observability people are correct. It’s not either-or though.
- nmehner 3mo ago
  If it was only "my" system without any integrations, I might agree. But currently e.g. I am working on an MES/Scada layer that integrates data from a load of different machines in a factory. These machines are from China, Korea, Germany, Sweden ... Upwards there is an ERP integration (and some other systems). Sometimes machines are updated and suddenly behave differently. Giving error messages in Chinese. The ERP has the nasty behavior of returning error messages where it is not clear whether the actual processing actually happened or not. There are some heuristics on parsing the error messages, but these also change with new versions. Sometimes one machine overloads cloud infrastructure and completely unrelated functionality fails. Sometimes the on-premise network stops working for whatever reason and data is lost. Sometimes operators do not understand a perfectly valid error message like: "The batch you loaded into input position XY has expired on XZ and cannot be used for production": "But we have been told to use it..." So when you get called out at night, because the production line stopped and "MES is displaying an error message", it is mostly about finding out what integration failed and who else to wake up. Getting this right is very much appreciated by your colleagues. And this is where you need a mental model of how things are connected, what error message happens because of what external causes etc. Observability can only work perfectly for known problems. In a complex system for unexpected problem you can either provide too much data, so analyzing it and finding the relevant part becomes really hard, or too little data which makes finding the issue impossible. There are so many companies claiming to provide the perfect observability solution and there are certainly solutions that help. But it is all very far from perfect. Not relying on people is managers wet dream. And for a lot of people it might be true that they can be easily replaced. But for complex systems there are always some key people that you cannot replace without causing issues.

feverzsj 3mo ago

Unless you want some unmaintainable shitty sloppy app.

dlvhdr 3mo ago

lol what a slopper

prymitive 3mo ago

I need to write code because otherwise LLMs will write too much code, it’s only when you fully understand the problem you can generalise it enough to not end up with 10k lines and 5 abstraction layers for “hello world”. LLMs are token predictors, so all solutions are you tokens, the more problems to solve == the more tokens (code) to output.

h2aichat 3mo ago
If tokens are the problem, SDD is the solution
TacticalCoder 3mo ago
> I need to write code because otherwise LLMs will write too much code, ... I second that and I can give an example that happened to me yesterday with a totally SOTA model (a US, not Chinese model). I needed to display an information on the client-side. Something trivial. I ask the LLM to do it. The thing went onto a rampage: it somehow found a way to pass the information from the server to the client during the initial handshake (already: why, just why?). Modifying both server-side code and client-side code. And it worked. To an unsuspecting programmer/tester (or automated test)/user: the info is there, what was asked has been done. So it's perfect, flawless LLM victory right? Except none of that sloppy-pasta was necessary: the info was already available on the client-side and was a one-line change, purely client-side. These thing shall definitely, as of 2026, write way too much code. And btw the companies selling metered tokens have a very serious incentive to produce the most complicated, rube-goldberg, solutions that use as many tokens as possible, while still kinda solving the problem. That way not only you consume tokens to produce the code, but later on you consume tokens when working on that code (which btw is a guaranteed thing: for the LLM just introduced new bugs in that gargantic amount of crap it output). Funnily enough the very same people who made fun of copy-pasta happen to be in love with sloppy-pasta. Go figure.
softwaredoug 3mo ago
LLMs love to defensively wrap code instead of thinking holistically about the big picture. That creates a lot of bloat. A human coder might OTOH follow the Boy Scout rule and clean up as they go.

goodness4all 3mo ago

I always hated writing code but loved debugging. LLM super charges systems thinkers & auditors, it’s just a different process and no different than copy and paste from stack overflow. It all comes down to the architecture design and LLM just exposes how bad people are at designing dynamic architectures.

girvo 3mo ago
> and no different than copy and paste from stack overflow This isn't really the point of your comment, and for that I apologise, but: not all of us did that. For many good reasons, too.
- pydry 3mo ago
  Yeah, the more I hear about people writing "boilerplate" or "copy pasting" code faster using LLMs the more I think it's mainly a tool for letting you write brittle, buggy code, faster.
- monk_grilla 3mo ago
  > not all of us did that. For many good reasons, too. This isn't really the point of your comment, and for that I apologise, but I still haven't gotten used to speaking about what we "used to do" in the past tense, as if we are in a post-programming world... We are already starting to speak of the habits we used to have (or not have), how things used to be done back in the day (1-2 years ago). I don't think you're wrong to do so. I find myself saying it sometimes too. Just an observation about the weird world we find ourselves in.
  - girvo 3mo ago
    For what it’s worth, I was talking in response to the original commenter who was talking in past tense, I was merely responding in kind :) I would argue that SO is basically “done”, though. For better or worse. I still write code by hand. I use LLMs too. Weird world for sure.
  - inigyou 3mo ago

sublinear 3mo ago

> If we’re building a software factory, details matter. The details that establish architectural patterns. Down to algorithms and performance. Agents push us to evaluate, measure, and guard. They’ve made it cool to add CI into side projects early, not as an afterthought. That’s massive improvement to the state of software. Why are you building a software factory though, and why weren't you immediately adding CI to every project? > It’s our job to build the software factory - not just the software. Software engineers maintain the assembly line allowing anyone to prompt for a change and ship immediately. Again, why? Where are you working where this is considered a good idea? This would mean that the software engineers are not just being completely kicked out of all business decisions, but asked to build a moat that ensures they stay on the other side of it. Any business that intentionally devalues the insights gained through implementation will eventually starve itself to death by making too many passive thoughtless moves. No insight will ever be gained just spot checking AI. Is their intention really just to make tiny amounts of profit while riding the thing into the ground? Crabs in a bucket, man.

deleted 3mo ago

[deleted]

cresting 3mo ago

AI is a tool. Learn how to use it! Interesting article btw

saghm 3mo ago
> AI is a tool. Learn how to use it! If you think that everyone agrees on the "correct" way to use it, you're mistaken. If you think that your way is the best possible way to use it, you're arrogant. And if you think that the way you think is correct is obvious and that everyone should already know that's the right way, you're delusional.

h2aichat 3mo ago

It seems to me that AI won the code Battle and that humans are just trying to justify the defeat. I will relax and wait for the Next AI generation to see how it fixed its problems. May be, everything will be ok.

ataru 3mo ago
I've got a coin that answers questions. You have to give it a heads or tails query, then flip the coin, and it returns an answer. It's incredible. Now, it doesn't get the right answer every single time, but we're all learning how to use the new coin technology, and this is only the first generation of coin. The next model of coin is going to be even better. Soon we're not going to need humans any more, for any question we have, we'll be able to use the coin.
- yard2010 3mo ago
  I have a coin that can tell you whether a program would halt or not. But it's not always right. I think it's a coin like you have? Still trying to figure out how to use it to prove that p=np.
- JackSlateur 3mo ago
  Even a broken clock is right twice a day :)
invader 3mo ago
So, the developers have finally found their Silver Bullet? I've seen so many of these already. It would be hilarious to see Brooks proving right once again.
h2aichat 3mo ago
[flagged]

mikkolaakkonen 3mo ago

[dead]

mikkolaakkonen 3mo ago

The software factory is exactly what I'm building. The world is changing, we can either be the ones changing it or be forced to change afterwards.

fernandotakai 3mo ago

i write code because i love it. it's something that makes me genuinely happy, so why would i give that up?

jayknight 3mo ago
Exactly this. I got into this field because designing programs and writing code is enjoyable. I'm probably behind on using AI and need to get more up to speed, but I never want to stop coding by hand.
- DaiPlusPlus 3mo ago
  > I'm probably behind on using AI and need to get more up to speed Same. My difficulty is that for the past 8 years I've been working for (tiiiiny) SaaS business where I don't have anyone I can simply ask in-person "hey, can you show me how to 'do' all this newfangled AI agentic team coding?"; so my only direct-exposure is with the painful Copilot sidebar chat, which I now find myself allergic to. So let's see elsewhere: while searching online for some (reputable) "agentic coding courses" my results are for the same kind of people who used to run those dodgy coding-camps from 10 years ago. I'm having difficulty finding resources for practicing SWEs like myself wanting a continuing-professional-development course experience, not a get-rich-by-buying-my-course video library from a contemptable AI booster Even more surprisingly, my local major university (UW.edu) doesn't seem to offer any certificate courses for getting into agentic development either[1] despite offering courses on C++, Six Sigma, and actual ML/AI courses. It's maddening. I can't be the only one with this problem... [1] https://www.pce.uw.edu/search?type=certificate&programType=certificate https://www.pce.uw.edu/search?type=certificate&programType=c...
  - XenophileJKO 3mo ago
    I don't understand this. A skill critical to software engineering is learning how to learn. Just download Claude Code (or open alternative) and try to make things. See how it fails or succeeds. Look at the supported features, try them out, think about how you might use them in your workflow. Before you know it, you'll be proficient. You have to learn how to self-teach.

slopinthebag 3mo ago

Seems like there’s broadly two ways to use LLMs for coding - either as a way to generate the same code you would have written but faster, or as an opaque program-generator where you have no idea what the code is doing. One of these methods results in roughly the same amount of understanding and the other one radically less.

avaer 3mo ago

> For example, have you ever seen an agent follow the boy scout rule? Where they leave code better than they found it? And would you WANT them to try to do this? Yes, it's in the rules; run profiles, check code coverage, do a critical review, post the report and follow up tasks. 90% of people I've worked with did not follow these boy scout rules nearly as well as today's frontier LLMs. Is the author implying this is bad?

softwaredoug 3mo ago
That quote is the lead in to an example I talk about after this quote illustrates what I often see. > Agents bias to making the current change as safely as possible. I had a situation in a previous codebase where one morning, pre-caffeinated, my meat brain mentioned using browser local storage. So some random state was managed in local storage. Everything else through a backend database. When I looked at the code, the amount of wrapping and indirection to preserve this idiotic human mistake probably tripled the LoC. Agents can amplify our one-off bad decisions by being so conservative. You can of course solve this many ways. And many of boils down to just how a particular humans brain works. Some will solve this by not reading code. Some will read / write code. Whatever works for you is great. But many there is upside to the precision of not having code intermediated through the LLM for many.
- avaer 3mo ago
  Right, but this just seems like underspecification. In my experience as both a team leader and an "agentic engineer" (ugh), I try to blame myself for the lack of clarity of my asks, rather than the person/agent for making the "wrong" choice. I'm sure plenty of meat humans out there would make the same mistake (sorry, you said to use local storage boss!). You might give them a scolding. And maybe document that policy. Maybe in a markdown file for the next person. IME the latest models are significantly better than the median engineer at following this feedback. I don't think it's fruitful to blame the LLM any more than it is to blame someone working under you. In fact I would say this is an excellent example of how engineering does NOT fundamentally change in the era of AI.
  - 3mo ago

conqrr 3mo ago

All this debate around use LLM or not is tiring and just black and white thinking. Can I use agents to code a SWE project? yes, with nuances. Can I write code for a SWE project? yes, with nuances. Its more options now, I'll write code about projects I deeply care and will use llm at work where its shared slop and forced usage.

majorbugger 3mo ago

Why is this even a legit question? I need to keep writing code to stay relevant, not to forget my craft, be able to review code... So many reasons. AI doesn't change a thing.

avaer 3mo ago
Before my time ppl mostly did things in asm, I bet the vast majority of people reading this have never touched assembly and will never have any reason to. This is quickly becoming true of most "code". AI has changed that. One way to "stay relevant" would be to admit that.
- softwaredoug 3mo ago
  Yet as a C developer for 15 years I frequently looked at asm and on occasion even wrote a little. And that is a far stronger abstraction than LLMs :)
- majorbugger 3mo ago
  I have also never used punch cards, what does it prove?
- deadbabe 3mo ago
  assembly is compiled deterministically so you don't really need to look at it, LLMs though can write a variety of things at random based on the prompt. It is not the same.
- cozzyd 3mo ago
  How can you evaluate what your compiler is doing without looking at the assembly? The many users of godbolt suggest it's pretty common.

pjmlp 3mo ago

I write code all the time I can, outside the KPI metrics that everyone is being pushed to, I only care about AI for smarter code completion.

minimaxir 3mo ago

Note as some may be confused by the "1 hour ago" with comments older than that: this submission was rescued by dang when a previous discussion existed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48883341 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48883341 fwiw I think the rationale behind it is counterproductive because the only difference between a OP submitting their article link and someone else submitting their article link is internet points.

softwaredoug 3mo ago
I was fairly confused myself as the author :) This was actually my original submission last week. There was a front page submission last night from someone else (hence the comments). Then my old post got re-upped just now (1 hr ago)

mrweasel 3mo ago

Apparently it's not obvious to everyone, but if you can't write code, you can't review it. I do know people, and companies, that says: "So what, we ask Claude to write the code, Codex will then do the review". The thing that then strikes me as odd is that they still ask for the code in Python, Java, or some other high level language.... Why? Just ask Claude to dump out assembly, or a compiled binary, but no, they don't trust the LLM that much. They still want to be able to read the code. So they need developers that can read, debug and reason about the code, yet they don't want to give them the training that's required to do this?

ryandvm 3mo ago
They don't have Claude write assembly because there is no training corpus on people making CRUD apps in assembly. I'm as hateful of LLMs hollowing out the job market as the next guy, but the reality is the frontier LLMs are really good at writing anything that's been done and documented on the Internet a million times and unfortunately most of what software devs have been doing the last couple decades is shitting out cookie cutter CRUD apps. I have my doubts about whether the state of the industry is going to advance as long as we're having LLMs do all the creation, but that's another diatribe.
- deadbabe 3mo ago
  What's there to advance to? Without a revolutionary new platform to build apps on that no one has ever developed for before, there is basically no reason to believe there is any software left that has some business or economic value that hasn't already been written.
  - devin 3mo ago
    If you think we're "done", you have no imagination.
    - deadbabe 3mo ago
      What are you gonna make? Yet another CRUD app? An API subscription? A game? A mobile app? We’ve created software for virtually every place we can put software. There’s nothing new. It’s like bridges. We’ve seen all the ways bridges can be built by now. There’s nothing new left to discover.

rdksu 3mo ago

exactly how many times do you plan on posting this here

minimaxir 3mo ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48883660 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48883660
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TrackerFF 3mo ago

If we look at the progress made from ChatGPT 3.5 (Nov 2022) and up to today...shoot, I'm really starting to wonder if we'll even be reviewing code in 4 years. And I'm not saying this as some sort of AI maximalist. If progress keeps up, I seriously doubt software engineering and development will, as we know it today, will be a thing in the next 5-10 years. Maybe humans will be left with designing the UI, but everything else will be abstracted away and AI will be doing all the actual work behind the scenes.

softwaredoug 3mo ago
The thing is with a wish machine, you can one shot something very easily. But then you realize software is the accumulation of 1000s of wishes. And you want this but not that. Many little micro decisions of exactly what you want in every nook and cranny. In the current paradigm (LLMs) we still have to manage all this. But maybe in the future we have something impossible to imagine.
weakfish 3mo ago
You’re assuming that progress will continue at the same rate (it’s plateaud a bit as far as I can tell, I can look for sources tomorrow but am on phone now :)) & I think it’s fairly demonstrated that the industry isn’t profitable for training ever increasingly huge models, which get exponentially more expensive each iteration
- galaxyLogic 3mo ago
  I wonder, LLMs have progressed at great speed, because they have learned to duplicate what humans did and recorded in the documents and source-code that became the training materials for the LLMs. But now that humans don't write any more code, there is no new learning materials for the LLMs. There are no new things for them to learn. Therefore I expect they will plateau, the progress is no longer so fast. And maybe we'll get something like a Mad Cow Disease, when AI "eats its own brains". To avoid that from happening we will need continued human inputs, and review.
  - 3mo ago

andai 3mo ago

>It’s our job to build the software factory - not just the software. Software engineers maintain the assembly line allowing anyone to prompt for a change and ship immediately. The job of the software engineer increasingly becomes to make himself unnecessary: to empower the nontechnical business users to do as much as reasonably possible, without his/her intervention. This has, of course, been the dream of computing, since its inception! And the true aim of every "high level" or "beginner friendly" (looking at you javascript!) language. But finally, now that the computer actually speaks English (and is beginning to stop making completely insane errors), it gradually becomes feasible. Freeing the masses from the tyranny of the nerds!

inigyou 3mo ago
This isn't the first or even the tenth attempt at making computer programming accessible to everyone. Remember COBOL? COBOL made the computer speak English. It didn't help. A specification detailed enough to control every aspect of the resulting product is called a program. Compilers are AI. The prevalence of compilers hasn't harmed the programming industry at all, quite the opposite.
- andai 3mo ago
  Well, it's harmed the assembly programming industry.
andai 3mo ago
Update: since I have posted this my computer has made several completely insane errors. I guess we're not quite there yet haha.

supermdguy 3mo ago

“Do you know what the industry term for a project specification that is comprehensive and precise enough to generate a program? Code. It’s called code.” - CommitStrip (https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/1p70bk8/specisjustcode/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/1p70bk8/sp...) I think if you’re doing it right, the core of your code should be the simplest expression of the underlying business logic. Of course there’s always going to be supporting layers, and maybe those don’t need to be reviewed. But if you haven’t read the code, there’s an extent to which you don’t know the business logic.

teddyh 3mo ago
Original link: <https://web.archive.org/web/20260521130338/https://www.commitstrip.com/en/2016/08/25/a-very-comprehensive-and-precise-spec/ https://web.archive.org/web/20260521130338/https://www.commi...>
softwaredoug 3mo ago
My other article on this topic advocates for using code over specs :) It’s ok to talk to the agent in code. Or create examples for it to follow. https://softwaredoug.com/blog/2026/07/04/write-code-not-specs https://softwaredoug.com/blog/2026/07/04/write-code-not-spec...
- imhoguy 3mo ago
  What I miss in Claude Code is code completion at prompt line.. ah wait it gets back to IDE and Copilot.
- bluefirebrand 3mo ago
  > It’s ok to talk to the agent in code. Or create examples for it to follow If you're doing this, then why not just write the effing code?
  - softwaredoug 3mo ago
    What I mean by "talk to the agent in code" really is to code. Establish patterns. Then have the agent use those patterns as reference for other areas of the project.

podgietaru 3mo ago

I was thinking about an experience I had recently, and how it relates to my feelings about AI... And it bummed me out a lot. So I took over an open source project called Omnivore. It's a reading app in the vein of Pocket. The hosted version used pdf-lib to inject some functionality into the pdf viewer. Namely, highlighting, note taking, and storing location. pdf-lib is a licensed application, so when taking it to fully self-hosted this needed to change. I migrated it over to pdf.js. And I went through the entire process. I added all the functionality bit by bit. It didn't take exceptionally long, maybe 1-3 days. But that process was really satisfying. I found a bug, fixed it, and then found a stackoverflow issue where someone was also experiencing the same issue and suggested the fix. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/59151218/pdfjs-error-on-text-rendering-for-the-pdf/79277856#79277856 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/59151218/pdfjs-error-on-... I'm pretty sure an ai could have done all of this. And therein lies my fear and my upset with AI. Not only would it have robbed me of that experience, but it shows that I have in a way been devalued. Because I do think that took a level of skill. And now that's gone...

softwaredoug 3mo ago
I think what we’re learning is that up front slower experience can be valuable for maintaining the maintainers own understanding of the project I’ll be very curious how / if the Bun port to Rust works out.

throwatdem12311 3mo ago

If you’re not writing code it won’t be long until you get to a point where your agent won’t be able to dig you out of whatever hole you’ve dug for yourself and then you are fubar because you’ve just completely forgotten how.

jv22222 3mo ago

At this point I haven't looked at code for many months. Before that, I spent 4 years hand coding a Google Docs competitor in JS without any libraries. My brain feels equally as exercised (in fact more so as I am not as good at agentic coding as I was at real coding) But now I'm making highly polished Mac OS apps and I really like that move from JS. I feel... conflicted.

softwaredoug 3mo ago
Do you like to look at code? I’m finding it’s really just a personal preference. And honestly not worth getting worked up about either way.
- jv22222 3mo ago
  This is weird but I think I like to focus wherever I feel needs polish. So, making a real time collaborative tool from scratch there was a lot of deep work in things like sockets, queues, memory structures, etc. That's just what needed attention. Right now I'm building a memory app for AI. So far I haven't spent much time looking at code on the swift side of things. But I have spent a lot of time up front working on domain driven design, screaming architecture, and module based design. I think with AI the polish is in deep QA, design taste, running trace logs and constantly asking it to do html diagrams of the architecture and such. ngl I miss "knowing what's going on" at the code level, but it feels like not a good use of my time to go into those weeds. When I look at the code it seems well structured due to screaming architecture, and module based design.
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hirvi74 3mo ago

I write organic code in 2026 because I do not have a choice. Which, honestly, I am thankful for most of the time. My employer has no LLM mandates nor do they supply us an LLMs to use. In my personal life, I cannot justify more than a $20 sub per month. I only use the Web Chat anyway. Shelling out $100-$200 a month for a sub in which I would get little to no ROI is a poor choice. Besides, I've never hit the limit on my $20 a month plan either. The day I am forced to prompt LLMs all day, every day is the day I am cashing out of programming as a career. Though to be clear, I have no opposition towards anyone that uses LLMs, and think they are fantastic tools when used appropriately. (I love them as a StackOverflow replacement, and have learned a lot from going back and forth with LLMs).

okanat 3mo ago

> Not because agents are worse at coding that[sic] humans. And then the whole article shows tangible reasons where the agents are truly worse at code than humans. Code never is just the text. If intelligence you have is not truly general, you cannot expect things like clarifying wider context, hierarchically ordering knowledge based on criteria and producing consistent results despite transfer learning and retraining. And no, we are not even close to the multimodal capabilities of human brain to hierarchy encode and reproduce knowledge. Otherwise the correct "reasonable" economic action would be genociding all humans, and I'm pretty sure that this is what billionaires effectively want out of AI.

lowsong 3mo ago

Writing code helps me think. Every time I read some take about keeping up one's skills when using agents people get so tantalisingly close to the obvious answer, and then fall short. If the tools are making you worse, don't use the tools.

h4kunamata 3mo ago

This does not seem obvious to AI-developers, you cannot fix what you do not understand. Also, if you use AI to write your code, you are not a developer either. Let's say AI completely disappears right now, many of the so called "developers" are unable to write code, are unable to fix code, they cannot code. There are two kind of developers: 1. Non-developers: Use AI for everything, to write code, to test the code, you name it. 2. Real developers: Search engines are broken right now, they use AI as a tool, as replacement for Google to ASSIST you, not to do the task for you. As AI is falling apart and companies are hiring people back, these non-developers will find themselves out of work.

squibonpig 3mo ago
Ai will fall apart as an industry but it's likely that models on par with e.g. opus 4.8 will be runnable on a home server within the next year and a half and that model hosts will still exist. I figure these tools aren't likely to go away.
- h4kunamata 3mo ago
  AI is here to stay, full stop. The problem is IT professionals who depend on AI for everything. That is crashing down and won't be pretty.

Arubis 3mo ago

To build software that you understand yourself. Next question.

ccoffey1 3mo ago

"Instead, we’re switching to this wrong-headed mindset that coding agents are like compilers. That mindset gives us permission to ship terribly written code. Agents aren’t compilers - they’re more like freshly onboarded interns." I feel this statement these days during code reviews. I know some amazing engineers whose output lately just isn't the same.

dented42 3mo ago

I feel like this question doesn’t need a blog post to answer. Why write code in 2026? Because it’s fun.

j16sdiz 3mo ago

I discovered Doctorow's "Reverse centaurs are the answer to the AI paradox" via a link in this article. It was a great read. Recent HN Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48873855 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48873855

jillesvangurp 3mo ago

The relevant question is who is going to pay you to write code manually. It's something that's increasingly hard to justify. The answer is of course that people are not paying for code to be written or generated but for some problem to be solved. Whoever does that with the least amount of drama and cost gets the business. And using AI tools just allows for compressing the timelines a bit in a way that is hard to ignore. Most code out there isn't all that great. I've been in this industry since the nineties. There are a lot of not so great software engineers doing mediocre work. People are romanticizing how great and magnificent their code is (or used to be). The reality of manually crafted code is of course a lot less flattering. Many code bases become hard to maintain over time and are riddled with bugs. And it's not like sloppy code is a new thing. Poorly executed software projects have been very common for a long time. That's not going to go away.

tonyedgecombe 3mo ago
>There are a lot of not so great software engineers doing mediocre work. Yeah, and they are all producing 10x as much mediocre work now.
Pavilion2095 3mo ago
> The relevant question is who is going to pay you to write code manually. Hopefully companies in the industries where software quality matters and is regulated, e.g.: medicine, aviation, nuclear, etc. Although this market is relatively small.
- jillesvangurp 3mo ago
  You seem to assume that people still have an inherent advantage here. Mostly those sectors compensate for well documented human failures with very rigid and expensive processes and testing. And of course despite that, stuff still goes wrong occasionally. I actually think AI based automation is going to be a key enabler in those kinds of strict environments as well. Recent work on identifying e.g. security bugs seems to be resulting in a lot of improvement that has somehow escaped decades of human scrutiny. With good quality harnesses (manual or automated), I don't see any big objection against using generated code here.

mintflow 3mo ago

This resonate with me a lot Recently I am seriously thinking the time when agent do the work and I was waiting for it's output, I got a bit lost given it really can do a lot but it make me feel some crisis as a human, even it still can provide me a sort of Joy because some task I long want to do but no time to start can be finally take shape, but the Joy is actually not comparable with the Joy when I read the code and hack with it Concretely, I am letting agent to write some serious part of code to rust and I will consider only let Agent to handle the UI and integration stuffs, and I will take the rust part and rust is a language that I want to learn and be professional given I was do lots of C coding

gloosx 3mo ago

The OpenGraph preview image for this article is a total ragebait

mahmoudilyan 3mo ago

I enjoy writing and read code as well, but AI race force me to skip that part to be able to ship faster. I spend time building AI Agentic guides and skills, then review the code myself. I really miss the old days when you put your headphones on and focus for 3-4 hours

chromadon 3mo ago

"Why write code in 2026".. Because AI generated code is STILL complete ass. Even Fable, even whatever custom Pi/opencode leet code harness you have, the output is awful, and, if you cannot distinguish the quality of your code vs the AI's, I've got some bad news for you.

mewpmewp2 3mo ago
My code is/was worse than AI's, but at least I get paid, so what do I care about the bad news you have.
- superze 3mo ago
  You are exactly the person who should be afraid then and you prove his point?!
  - mewpmewp2 3mo ago
    What should I be afraid about? The code I output with AI is now better than what I did previously so I have equalized with anyone who had better code pre-AI.
anthonypasq 3mo ago
99% of code ever written has always been shit. Most of it has been thrown out or not in use anymore, or EVER used. Most people arent going anything particularly unique or complicated or performance focused.

soundworlds 3mo ago

The most interesting and creative projects I have worked on required little code, but novel combinations of ideas.

balder1991 3mo ago

I’d like to recommend people to read the “Programming as a theory building” article and why the code itself isn’t enough to understand the whole context of a complex project. Every time you work in a complex software project, you have all the context in your head about what you must take into consideration. LLMs don’t, you have to explain every little detail to them, but there’s no telling where it stops: do you have to explain X to it or is it in the training already? When you try to shape how a LLM should behave and what it should know, you end up writing a Bible of relevant context that’s increasingly difficult to maintain as well, often with outdated or contradictory information, and it is still free to ignore things you have written and proceed however it wants. That’s why so many people only feel comfortable giving the LLM some limited task to do, because you can judge if that specific task needs just enough context that it can handle by itself.

vonneumannstan 3mo ago

Arrogance, vanity, ignorance... etc.