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Ask HN: Do you know of any company that went back to hand-written code?
This is intended as a question about the current phase of the LLM hype cycle, and, at the same time, as a reality check about whether reluctance to rely on LLMs is economically viable for an average developer.
You've definitely seen that many companies progressed from "use LLMs for anything and everything" policies to limiting budgets and scopes of approved LLM usage. It wouldn't be unexpected to see that some companies might decide that generating more code faster doesn't meaningfully contribute to their bottom line, and forego LLMs in favour of human authoring, but does it ever happen?
I'm not trying to point out any (de)merits of the new way of software development, I simply want to know if there are many/any companies that went back to the old ways.
- tomwuu 2mo agoAlthough code quality may sometimes suffer, no one can deny the productivity gains AI brings to software development.
- urbnspacecowboy 2mo agoNeither can anyone deny that 'productivity gains' are worthless if what's being produced is worthless.
- K0balt 2mo agoIf you are producing worthless code, you are choosing that outcome either by choosing to work on worthless projects, or by failing to provide the direction and constraints that cause the model to create performant, maintainable code. You can’t just yolo everything, it’s still software development, but with LLMs it’s more of an engineering and management role.
- rvz 2mo ago> Although code quality may sometimes suffer That doesn't sound like a good thing in the long term. > no one can deny the productivity gains AI brings to software development. What are those "productivity gains"? Rapidly building hundreds of the wrong things that people do not want? It means you cannot stop and the competition only moves far more quicker and its a forever race to the bottom.
- sjducb 2mo agoYou absolutely can deny long term productivity gains. Pre AI it took 100 engineers 5 years to get into a legacy code situation. Once you’re in a legacy code situation it’s very hard to add new features and your code is full of bugs. Fortunately most old companies with legacy code are making loads of money so they can pay the increased development costs to add features to their legacy code. Now with AI five engineers can build a legacy codebase in six months.
- i2km 2mo agoI do. I deny the "gains". The "gains" will turn out to be a mirage in the medium to long term. The technical and cognitive debt incurred will be too extreme.
- greenchair 2mo agoBest use cases are along the periphery: security checks, performance checks, test generation.
- mrdw 2mo agotests generated by ai, especially which generates each time codex are completely useless and needed only for beautiful "44/44 tests passed"
- loluturnkey 2mo ago[flagged]
- sajithdilshan 2mo agoI don’t think that would ever happen. AI as a tool made the life so much easier removing initial inertia. I agree that we still haven’t figured out what’s the best way to use AI tools, but over the time it would mature and people would come up with patterns, conventions, and design principles so the quality of what is produced will be maintained or increased while keeping the productivity gains.
- lacedeconstruct 2mo agoYeah I cant imagine my job without it anymore, in my hobby projects I dont really use it because its more about learning new stuff but for work I dont really care
- piyuv 2mo agoThe key part is “but for work I don’t really care”
- lacedeconstruct 2mo agoNo! the key part is "they dont't care why should I" ?
- conartist6 2mo agoThat's so depressing, and a real loss for your employer. Even if they neither know nor care that you are now sandbagging them, you still are. You aren't making real gains because you're tossing out value of equivalent or greater worth (your learning and engagement)
- flohofwoe 2mo agoBut that's obviously exactly what the employer expects, I don't see the problem tbh ;)
- conartist6 2mo ago
- gamerDude 2mo agoIn my startup, I am currently in consideration for doing this exact thing. The interesting part is it's not really the AI that's causing the issue. It's the ease of my developer to make a mess, either with messy code or feature bloat. After figuring out the exact product we need with some very quick development cycles with AI, we now have some problems that I can't keep under control because of AI. So, currently under consideration to rewrite the core functionality without AI so we can keep it simple, understandable and slower to change. The interesting part is that AI could do this, but managing developers with AI has become very difficult to get them to slow down and build stable simple things. EDIT: I found it interesting how negative the comments were and I thought it would be easier to add context to the root. My developers wanted to use AI. I was a skeptic for several reasons. But I agreed that it was worth committing to and seeing what came of it. And all in all, the rapid prototyping is excellent. However, as parts of the software are past the point of rapid prototyping, I talked with my team and everyone agreed that the core piece deserved a re-factor/re-write because of the mess it was. Classic tech debt of deprecated code hanging around and prototype features with patchwork additions that now are a poor way of executing the intended function. So, we agreed to do a significant re-factor and did. However, quickly it got incredibly messy again. Partially due to AI using git to look at prior commits and add things back. And so, it was essentially an unsuccessful refactor and we find ourselves with the same issue. They also agree that using AI is the problem here because it's very easy to get new things. And the temptation to solve a problem quickly is high (I am stressing the opposite, to go slow), but it can be hard to say no to a co-worker who isn't dealing with the technical issues. So, both myself and my developers agree that AI is the issue in creating a messy that has resulted in unstable code. The reason I say that I am considering this choice is because while they acknowledge the issues it's causing, they aren't excited about returning to coding without them. Which is also why I'm considering the right move here, since the goal is both a happy team and well functioning software.
- gilrain 2mo ago> I am currently in consideration for doing this Try “I am considering”.
- 2mo ago
- jatins 2mo agoI think devs themselves won't want to work for a company that doesn't let you use Codex et al.
- mrdw 2mo agoI disagree. Personally, I would work in company which respects more code/infra quality than coding speed. When you vibe-deliver a lot of features per sprint after some time codebase becomes an unpredictable AI Slop.
- jatins 2mo ago> I would work in company which respects more code/infra quality than coding speed Same. But that doesn’t have to be in contrast to using AI tools. There’s a lot of grunt in day to day coding as well. The problem is not the tools
- strange_quark 2mo agoThe problem is the tools. The tools encourage you to hand over all control to the AI, taking the user out of the drivers seats resulting in slop. If we were more honest about where the utility of using LLMs for coding, we wouldn’t be burning nearly as many tokens.
- arcaen 2mo agoI dunno, I have friends and family at Meta, Roblox, $JOB, etc that would all prefer a no-AI environment. It's definitely not a majority of devs, but it's not an insignificant amount either.
- bbyford 1mo agotalk to any young devs and see what they say
- adamtaylor_13 2mo agoIn what context would generating code faster not be a desired outcome? Assuming of course everything else stays the same (quality, etc.)
- nubg 2mo agoI think most AI doomers will tell you that the quality of their code is better than LLM-generated code.
- c2h5oh 2mo agoI did witness ai output advantage dwindle as codebase grew in a team of experienced devs who switched to 99% ai generated changes. The last time I've checked ai still had an edge adding new features, but the team collectively lost the project knowledge and any problem discovered that llm could not fix took significantly longer to correct - they were effectively working on a new to them codebase.
- c2h5oh 2mo agoI think that question hinges on the second part of your comment and should be answered as: Does anyone know any company that went back to hand-written code because it decided drawbacks of ai generated code or some other concerns outweight the output benefits?
- probably_wrong 2mo agoLines-of-code has long been accepted as a terrible measure for code quality, and I believe it has been strongly correlated with poorer code quality.
- samlinnfer 2mo agoIt's correlates directly with business objectives.
- adamtaylor_13 2mo agoNo one is advocating for lines of code here.
- huflungdung 2mo ago[dead]
- pluc 2mo agoFord did: https://www.forbes.com/sites/joetoscano1/2026/06/30/ford-hiring-350-engineers-after-ai-failed-shows-human-value-in-ai-era/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/joetoscano1/2026/06/30/ford-hir... So did Commonwealth Bank of Australia and IBM: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/01/employers-who-laid-off-workers-for-ai-are-reversing-their-decisions.html https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/01/employers-who-laid-off-worke... And I'm sure many others who didn't publicize it because they have to keep this circular economy going.
- rokob 2mo agoNo they didn’t. Did you read either of the things you posted?
- anonym29 2mo agoRehiring large numbers of people after AI-motivated layoffs is not the same as getting rid of LLM-generated code and going back to hand-written code as a whole.
- sajithdilshan 2mo agoThe original question was about developers going back to manually coding without using AI. The link you posted is not about it. IBM replaced its Human Resources team with AI and hired them back. They didn’t remove AI usage in development and went back to manual coding. Please read your sources completely before posting them only reading the title
- quaintdev 2mo agoI was surprised to see IBM on that list
- sajithdilshan 2mo agome too, till I read the article linked. As far as I know IBM actually encourages using AI, they have a really good youtube channel (ibmtechnology) that explains AI concepts and usages
- 2mo ago
- rokob 2mo agoDo you know of any company that banned IDEs and went back to plain text only editing? Do you know of any company that banned compilers and went back to hand written assembly? Do you know of any company that banned stack overflow and went back to figuring everything out?
- ramblerman 2mo agoSomeone answered the question with some actual examples. Please refrain from the hyperbole
- i2km 2mo agoExactly. It's quite scary that some people are reacting viciously to this type of question. There's real insecurity here...
- archagon 2mo agoLLM use breeds insecurity, as well it should.
- rpdillon 2mo agoAnd those examples were not cases where companies went back to manual work after using AI. They were examples of companies regretting laying off their experts. The point GP is making, which I understand seems dismissive, is that AI is a tool that people are not retreating from, because it offers the same sorts of gains as previous tool improvements we've seen in the field: from compilers to IDEs to sites like Stack Overflow. I think adding AI to that group of improvements makes a ton of sense, as it has the capacity to provide similar gains in productivity.
- ape4 2mo agoThose things don't hallucinate. (Of course, stackoverflow can be wrong but at least its peer reviewed)
- rokob 2mo agoThe best part of the downvoting of this is the answer to all of these is yes. Companies have banned all of these in the past when they were coming up. If you don’t learn from the past, …
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- markus_zhang 2mo agoWe don’t have a no-AI policy but I’m trying to hand roll some code, because it is useful for interviews. It is very difficult to memorize the exact syntax unless I hand write code everyday.
- mrdw 2mo agoWhat's your grade?
- markus_zhang 2mo agoSenior. So I still get coding tests. I wouldn’t worry if I’m Staff and above.
- mplanchard 2mo agoI would. Just finished up a job search recently for staff+, and still got leetcode interviews for most companies.
- markus_zhang 2mo agoThanks. That's tough. Did you only interview at big tech?
- mplanchard 2mo agoBig, medium, and startups. Big and medium definitely biased more towards leetcode, but I also got it at around a quarter of startups I applied to.
- markus_zhang 2mo agoThanks for sharing. This is really surprising. Sigh, we still have to waste time grinding on these pointless stuffs. Just wish I get my FU money and never look back. Good luck to you!
- i2km 2mo agoI'm running a startup and we deliberately don't use AI for development. We only use it for review. We're working in a really deep area where having full understanding of our code is more important than speed. Besides, in this area, clients getting one whiff of AI code would be an immediate deal-killer
- absoluteunit1 2mo agoOut of curiosity - what space are are in?
- thunky 2mo ago> Besides, in this area, clients getting one whiff of AI code would be an immediate deal-killer If you implement AI code review suggestions then you're using AI code, just the hard way. Also I don't see why your clients would be ok with having AI review and influence your code. Seems hypocritical, or like you're trying to cheat them.
- i2km 2mo agoThat's a fair challenge. AI review can mean many different things though. We treat it like a slightly better CppCheck, for context. TBH the way we use it doesn't really add much beyond regular static analysis tools. Re "the hard way", I disagree. While it may seem like the hard way, in the medium and long term this is turning out to be the easy way. We have basically no technical debt, we can fix issues rapidly and (intangible I know) we can stand behind our codebase with absolute confidence.
- GTP 2mo agoIMO there's a big difference between using AI to write code and using it to review your code. In the latter, you know the code well (you are the one who wrote it), and so it is much easier to understand if AI suggestions are good or hallucinations. In the former case, realizing when the AI is making mistakes is harder, because you don't have the full context anymore.
- amelius 2mo agoDo you know any company that went back from local AI to centralized AI?
- fra 2mo agothe number of companies using local AI for development is too small to draw any conclusions from.
- quantumwoke 2mo agoNot for code, but my wife is a doctor and has gone from using AI scribes back to manually typing out notes and has multiple friends who've done the same. Turns out the gains were eroded by having to check the work and turn verbose prose into an actual note.
- i2km 2mo agoExactly. It fascinates me when I'm emailed long AI transcripts of meetings with the disclaimer "generated by AI. Be sure to check for accuracy". Like, did somebody seriously think through the meaning and implication of that disclaimer and still write it?
- thunky 2mo ago> Turns out the gains were eroded by having to check the work and turn verbose prose into an actual note. LLMs are great at this. I'd be very surprised if it wasn't possible to improve the actionable notes. Most human-made doctor notes I've seen have not been comprehensive, anyway, and the doctor has had to spend a good chunk of a rushed appointment scribbling notes rather than interacting with the patient.
- quantumwoke 2mo agoAs explained to me, the notes are verbose and do not focus on actionable parts of the consultation. Doctors often have to add a lot of missing detail for legal reasons and if they had to tweak the output through multiple LLMs they would have even less time for their consults.
- Decabytes 2mo agoOne think I think is strange about the m programming world we live in now is the mythologization of pre llm code. As if people weren’t copying code from stack overflow, auto completing their way through APIs using intellisense, intellicode, tab nine, or checking in code there didn’t properly test or understand
- pockybum522 2mo agoThere is a big difference between intellisense and LLMs. I've never used intellisense to input something I wasn't already looking for/about to type out. It just saved me remembering the exact wording and/or keystrokes.
- QwenGlazer9000 2mo agoThat shit used to be frowned upon, now it's celebrated!
- jaccola 2mo agoI was using tabnine in 2020, I used copilot autocomplete + ChatGPT, then Claude Code. All this to say, I willingly adopted each wave. Having said that, for all our startups “interesting” code I use no AI, not even tab complete. For a few reasons: - having derived the code and built a mental model is something like 90% of the work, the code artefact being 10%. (You can probably verify this yourself, if you’ve implemented something once and then someone deleted it all, you could rewrite it MUCH faster the second time). - once I have this model / vision in my mind, I’m streaming it from my mind into reality via code and having code suggestions pop up breaks that flow state for me. - using Claude code even on throwaway scripts can mask problems. Why is doing this thing so difficult that it needs an AI to write the code? And usually when I’m writing those scripts I have a thought or insight about the system. in other words it’s nice to have that low stakes time. - models are still frustratingly bad at spatial reasoning and I don’t see this improving anytime soon, which is a problem for a lot of graphics code. - the code models produce still isn’t what I’d consider great code; subjective of course but it’s our product and we think having great code in our core technology is well worth it in the long term! I do still use Claude code on various commoditised pieces (account UI, etc) and I use Claude as a great search engine, though its explanations of complex topics still kind of sucks and a human blog is almost always better. We are a small company of 15 engs.
- btbuildem 2mo agoMy employer is encouraging AI adoption across the board, to the point of basically making tokenmaxing part of performance KPIs. I think they're pushing headlong into disaster, but they are not the kind of people to take advice, or admit mistakes. I use AI coding tools both at work and in my hobby projects. It very clear to me they're nuclear-powered footguns, and we have a long, long way yet in developing practices, structures and workflows that will enable true benefits while minimizing the absolutely toxic baggage/fallout/side effects. I look at the big corp push for AI adoption as another instance of boards of directors choosing the large investors / their own personal gain over the success of the corporations they govern (first instance being the "back to the office" push in attempt to shore up commercial real estate). I think the circular economy of the AI bubble has spread far and wide, and we're watching a lot of invested players trying to keep it going.
- moustache_hn 2mo ago[flagged]
- PikachuEXE 2mo agoMy company hasn't switched at all... does that count?
- thesdev 2mo agoWhat a dream! Don't you have investors that need hyping up all the time?
- didgetmaster 2mo agoI think there are many companies that have not hopped on the AI bandwagon yet. This is why AI companies still see a huge potential for continued growth. Some are hesitant to chase after the latest fad (fearing it will soon fade); others want the industry to shake out many of the flaws first. We saw the same thing with the Internet. Many companies (including some really big ones) were slow to embrace it until everyone else was on board.
- glimshe 2mo agoStepping back from AI completely (vs changing how AI is used in the company) is like stopping using IDEs, compilers etc. It's a tool. I don't understand why people would even entertain that. They are completely fine using random libraries written by random people but not having AI helping with a small refactoring? Nobody is making you use AI to do the entire work. I see developers using languages with garbage collectors and projects based on heavyweight frameworks while saying "we can't use AI because we still need to understand the code" or "I love coding and AI doesn't allow me to do what I love" If you are one these people... Dude, you aren't doing the work yourself already. Back in the day memory management was one of the hardest pieces of the programming work. A lot of time went also to building stable and bug free string libraries, math libraries, UI toolkits etc. Without shifting complexity (and tedious work) elsewhere, we wouldn't have been able to build the software ecosystem we have today
- archagon 2mo agoAI is not an abstraction.
- root-parent 2mo agoI guess also useful to answer your question, is look at the companies who had a successful track record, of delivering reliable, consistent software over 5 to 10 years, went full vibe coding and got into a massive end crash. You have evidence video here, that the AWS AI Division (04:23) went literally full vibe coding: "I was laid off from my AI software engineering job at Amazon" - https://youtu.be/ZAom6f4-vh0?t=263 https://youtu.be/ZAom6f4-vh0?t=263 The whole division has been dismantled...
- moustache_hn 2mo ago[flagged]
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- modgate 2mo ago[flagged]
- rafalgraniczny 2mo ago[flagged]
- BonanKou 2mo agoTBH I think those who went back to hand-written code overreacted. In my experience, once you have nailed down the data structures and test cases (and for frontend, the visual design), letting AI fill the gap in between is a valid approach. The important thing is humans still own the spec and architecture. Security is a concern ofc, but models are getting better and better at finding bugs.
- alessandroarosa 1mo agoCoding by AI is not Rewarding. AI is threating the world as natural habitat, the Job market, and the ability of people to think over things. No technology is worth the great waste of energy and water. Whats wrong with accepting our limits as humans? AI is the next tech held by the Rich to rule over the pour.