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Everyone I have talked to who uses coding agents at all now uses them to write almost all their code. The two people I know who don’t use coding agents work in

Everyone I have talked to who uses coding agents at all now uses them to write almost all their code. The two people I know who don’t use coding agents work in government, and in a data science company working with government. I’d say if you work at a tech company and agents aren’t writing the majority of your code, that is weird. But if you work at a traditional company that doesn’t have Claude or Codex subscriptions, there it might be pretty normal to still be writing code by hand.

hypfer 20d ago
My (arguably not very directly communicated, true) actual point is that "weird" is a term that is not really suited for tool choices like this. "Weird" is a social concept. It's an artifact that has its roots in social cohesion and friction induced by individual nodes to glue the group together. Software development otoh is an engineering discipline (or.. it should be). And Engineering does not use the local social consensus algorithm for determining correctness. (or.. it should not)
- aurareturn 20d ago
  Software can be an engineering discipline doesn't change whether it's a human doing it or AI doing it. Arguably engineering is something AI should be really good at since you're just trying to compute a working product given constraints, formulas, resources.
  - hypfer 20d ago
    What are you replying to? Evidently not the content of my comment. Where in the comment tree is this supposed to sit?
    - aurareturn 20d ago
      This one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49708981 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49708981
- Dfiesl 20d ago
  I think they just meant its weird as in if you met a software dev at a dinner party who was still writing all their code by hand it would raise an eyebrow and you’d want to enquire further why that is.
  - hypfer 20d ago
    I think understand the purpose of this comment. I think you're sensing friction and you'd like to reduce that by explaining for the other guy. Which is a common social script, but one that is being exploited here I'd say. But, regardless, what is interesting I think is the scenario chosen there. Because a "dinner party" is not where engineering happens; and that's kinda the point I was getting at. That's pulled from the pool of "social consensus" and not "math" or "physics" or whatever. It's interesting, isn't it? Just like how specific tokens in the context window of LLMs pull probabilities towards specific clusters of ideas (and tokens); with humans, you see similar things happen. (This comment is more coherent than it might look at at first sight.) ___ Anyway, point (and to the point) is: Don't get hacked by the current thing fraudsters/grifters. They don't respect you or me or really anyone the slightest. They're just in it to get rich quick (or simply just inflict psychological damage for sadistic reasons), and they will use any means necessary to do so. This comment chain only exists because some hype guy is trying to induce FOMO into people for not doing more AI. Why is unclear, but it's clearly malicious. Whether they consciously know that they are doing that doesn't matter for that assessment.
    - LeTeutz 20d ago
      what
      - hypfer 20d ago
        Yes, exactly. Let me try another analogy: AI-related comment sections are like a watering hole for both get-rich-quick grifters, but also bad people wanting to hurt others. The technology is so disruptive that there are all sorts of opportunities while stuff is still developing, things aren't regulated, and people themselves have not yet learned how to self-regulate. So if you're looking to make money or to just inflict pain onto others, you're pulled towards this stuff. This is what I am seeing in this specific comment sub-tree. A troll. But in current year, you cannot just call people trolls, so instead you get these elaborate meta comments that bypass the anti-anti-troll defenses, but get so abstract, people just go "what". My advice would be to view any of these comment sections through a zero-trust lens. Godspeed. We will all eventually get through this.
- sothatsit 19d ago
  Maybe "unusual" or "uncommon" would be better terms here. I definitely wouldn't put it at 99% of developers, but I'd say it is the norm among developers I know that agents are their primary mode of writing code now (still using IDEs and GitHub to review changes).
hangrybear666 20d ago
Well in my personal projects I write all code by hand because people relying on agents will have forgotten how to do their fucking job in 3 years and then it will be appreciated to have people understanding what they're actually doing. That being said, in my job ai writes the code just because it's way faster.
- DonHopkins 20d ago
  Your "fucking job in 3 years" will be very different, and if you don't learn how to do it in time, you won't still have a job in the computer industry. Pick an industry where you can stop learning new things once you're out of school, because the computer industry is not one of them and never has been. My fucking job used to be writing 6502 assembly language on an Apple ][, and I loved it, but I hope I've forgotten enough of it to have room to learn new things. If only I could forget all those hex I/O and peripheral addresses from $C000-$CFFF and the Monitor ROM routines from $F800-$FFFF, without forgetting how brilliantly beautiful Woz and and Allen Baum's code is. https://6502disassembly.com/a2-rom/OrigF8ROM.html https://6502disassembly.com/a2-rom/OrigF8ROM.html Forgetting old stuff to make room for new stuff is one of the most valuable skills you can have in this industry. The next most important skill is persistence ;) -- writing stuff down before you forget it, in a way that won't make future-you hate present-you when you need to learn it again.
  - mrheosuper 20d ago
    you said like the only reason you can't learn new stuff is because of old stuff taking room. Do we even run out of memory?
    - DonHopkins 20d ago
      I used to have the answer to that, but I forgot to write it down...
  - JsonDemWitOster 20d ago
    The thing is I think there will come a time when AI tools will not be as accessible as they are now. I just don't know if it is in 3 years or more, because the market can stay irrational longer than I can foresee. I saw this idea from elsewhere that the things AI helps with was never the "profit bottleneck" of companies. 10x engineering productivity gain does not translate to 10x more revenue if your profit bottleneck is customer acquisition and retention. In other words, your profit is limited by how many people are willing to give you money for your services and AI can't really affect that. And even the productivity gains per individual is a generous assumption. An individual can only prompt (and check! You guys check right?) so much. Sooner or later the pendulum is gonna swing in the other direction and it will be cheaper to build a team than equip individuals with AI _to deliver the same value_. I'm also assuming that AI is still in the VC-subsidized pricing stage. Hence why I think the job in the future is gonna be pretty similar to the job four years ago. > The next most important skill is persistence ;) -- writing stuff down before you forget it, in a way that won't make future-you hate present-you when you need to learn it again. Huge amen. Another thing I've found Claude very useful for is writing documentation for legacy systems and cleaning up my own notes on it. I only need Claude to be 70-80% correct because from there I can take it. That error margin is no different from moderately-outdated-but-still-useful documentation. When that pendulum swings, I will have a documentation binder that I will print money with.

hypfer 20d ago

My (arguably not very directly communicated, true) actual point is that "weird" is a term that is not really suited for tool choices like this. "Weird" is a social concept. It's an artifact that has its roots in social cohesion and friction induced by individual nodes to glue the group together. Software development otoh is an engineering discipline (or.. it should be). And Engineering does not use the local social consensus algorithm for determining correctness. (or.. it should not)

aurareturn 20d ago
Software can be an engineering discipline doesn't change whether it's a human doing it or AI doing it. Arguably engineering is something AI should be really good at since you're just trying to compute a working product given constraints, formulas, resources.
- hypfer 20d ago
  What are you replying to? Evidently not the content of my comment. Where in the comment tree is this supposed to sit?
  - aurareturn 20d ago
    This one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49708981 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49708981
Dfiesl 20d ago
I think they just meant its weird as in if you met a software dev at a dinner party who was still writing all their code by hand it would raise an eyebrow and you’d want to enquire further why that is.
- hypfer 20d ago
  I think understand the purpose of this comment. I think you're sensing friction and you'd like to reduce that by explaining for the other guy. Which is a common social script, but one that is being exploited here I'd say. But, regardless, what is interesting I think is the scenario chosen there. Because a "dinner party" is not where engineering happens; and that's kinda the point I was getting at. That's pulled from the pool of "social consensus" and not "math" or "physics" or whatever. It's interesting, isn't it? Just like how specific tokens in the context window of LLMs pull probabilities towards specific clusters of ideas (and tokens); with humans, you see similar things happen. (This comment is more coherent than it might look at at first sight.) ___ Anyway, point (and to the point) is: Don't get hacked by the current thing fraudsters/grifters. They don't respect you or me or really anyone the slightest. They're just in it to get rich quick (or simply just inflict psychological damage for sadistic reasons), and they will use any means necessary to do so. This comment chain only exists because some hype guy is trying to induce FOMO into people for not doing more AI. Why is unclear, but it's clearly malicious. Whether they consciously know that they are doing that doesn't matter for that assessment.
  - LeTeutz 20d ago
    what
    - hypfer 20d ago
      Yes, exactly. Let me try another analogy: AI-related comment sections are like a watering hole for both get-rich-quick grifters, but also bad people wanting to hurt others. The technology is so disruptive that there are all sorts of opportunities while stuff is still developing, things aren't regulated, and people themselves have not yet learned how to self-regulate. So if you're looking to make money or to just inflict pain onto others, you're pulled towards this stuff. This is what I am seeing in this specific comment sub-tree. A troll. But in current year, you cannot just call people trolls, so instead you get these elaborate meta comments that bypass the anti-anti-troll defenses, but get so abstract, people just go "what". My advice would be to view any of these comment sections through a zero-trust lens. Godspeed. We will all eventually get through this.
sothatsit 19d ago
Maybe "unusual" or "uncommon" would be better terms here. I definitely wouldn't put it at 99% of developers, but I'd say it is the norm among developers I know that agents are their primary mode of writing code now (still using IDEs and GitHub to review changes).

hangrybear666 20d ago

Well in my personal projects I write all code by hand because people relying on agents will have forgotten how to do their fucking job in 3 years and then it will be appreciated to have people understanding what they're actually doing. That being said, in my job ai writes the code just because it's way faster.

DonHopkins 20d ago
Your "fucking job in 3 years" will be very different, and if you don't learn how to do it in time, you won't still have a job in the computer industry. Pick an industry where you can stop learning new things once you're out of school, because the computer industry is not one of them and never has been. My fucking job used to be writing 6502 assembly language on an Apple ][, and I loved it, but I hope I've forgotten enough of it to have room to learn new things. If only I could forget all those hex I/O and peripheral addresses from $C000-$CFFF and the Monitor ROM routines from $F800-$FFFF, without forgetting how brilliantly beautiful Woz and and Allen Baum's code is. https://6502disassembly.com/a2-rom/OrigF8ROM.html https://6502disassembly.com/a2-rom/OrigF8ROM.html Forgetting old stuff to make room for new stuff is one of the most valuable skills you can have in this industry. The next most important skill is persistence ;) -- writing stuff down before you forget it, in a way that won't make future-you hate present-you when you need to learn it again.
- mrheosuper 20d ago
  you said like the only reason you can't learn new stuff is because of old stuff taking room. Do we even run out of memory?
  - DonHopkins 20d ago
    I used to have the answer to that, but I forgot to write it down...
- JsonDemWitOster 20d ago
  The thing is I think there will come a time when AI tools will not be as accessible as they are now. I just don't know if it is in 3 years or more, because the market can stay irrational longer than I can foresee. I saw this idea from elsewhere that the things AI helps with was never the "profit bottleneck" of companies. 10x engineering productivity gain does not translate to 10x more revenue if your profit bottleneck is customer acquisition and retention. In other words, your profit is limited by how many people are willing to give you money for your services and AI can't really affect that. And even the productivity gains per individual is a generous assumption. An individual can only prompt (and check! You guys check right?) so much. Sooner or later the pendulum is gonna swing in the other direction and it will be cheaper to build a team than equip individuals with AI _to deliver the same value_. I'm also assuming that AI is still in the VC-subsidized pricing stage. Hence why I think the job in the future is gonna be pretty similar to the job four years ago. > The next most important skill is persistence ;) -- writing stuff down before you forget it, in a way that won't make future-you hate present-you when you need to learn it again. Huge amen. Another thing I've found Claude very useful for is writing documentation for legacy systems and cleaning up my own notes on it. I only need Claude to be 70-80% correct because from there I can take it. That error margin is no different from moderately-outdated-but-still-useful documentation. When that pendulum swings, I will have a documentation binder that I will print money with.