Maybe I've just given up, or maybe I'm a realist? But I fully believe AI will just...catch up with everything?
There's so much money in it right now. There's such a momentum. There are zero incentives to slow down for those that are in charge.
I've accepted that in 5-10 years, the vast majority of human devs. and engineers will not touch a single line of code. It'll be small increments, with a couple of big ones here and there.
And there will not be any triumph for those that hold steadfast to the principle of human coding. They'll be tiny boutique shops that do custom stuff, in the same way cobblers are to the mega shoe factories.
Yeah, I have a really hard time buying the "AI code isn't maintainable long term" because if you look at the quality increase from January of this year to now, it's insane. We've gone from Opus 4.6 and GPT 5.4 to Fable 5.1 and GPT 6 in less than a year, where we went from 0 mathematics problems being solved by AI to a Millennium prize problem being solved in a few days of compute. Obviously not the same as coding skills, but it shows the growth in raw reasoning and abstraction.
I understand why people are resistant to this from an emotional perspective, but I really don't see a plateau in sight. RLVR is clearly still cooking and narrow RSI seems to be on the horizon.
But I'm also a realist. If the technology exists, it will be used to the maximum economical extent.
That would be like saying the first vehicle off the assembly line had to be profitable; there is an ocean of optimization that will drive the economics.
feels like pure copium to believe that won't change rapidly.
You can get a decent idea running some of this stuff locally. Depending on how efficient you want your agent to be, you can get an awful lot done on beefy local hardware and ~300W power consumption. Just inference of course ...
> if you look at the quality increase from January of this year to now, it's insane.
It's non-existent. LLMs still suck at writing code just as much as they did at the beginning of 2026, or 2025 for that matter. LLM proponents are always trying to hype everyone up on the supposed improvements, but they have never yet been real. That means they are unlikely to be real in the future either.
That's just ... not true? Have you tried qwen3.8 (compared to qwen3) or deepseek 4? they've improved tremendously, maybe not at every class of problems, but if you take a disciplined approach and don't ask them to one-shot everything (e.g. update agents.md as you go, actually use the thing you build, give feedback etc), it's positively absurd what you can get done now with a single agent.
I agree that not every class of software or problem or this or that is going to be decimated/revolutionized whatever, but to not see any improvement since 2025 just sounds like you're not looking.
TrackerFF · · focus · HN ↗
There's so much money in it right now. There's such a momentum. There are zero incentives to slow down for those that are in charge.
I've accepted that in 5-10 years, the vast majority of human devs. and engineers will not touch a single line of code. It'll be small increments, with a couple of big ones here and there.
And there will not be any triumph for those that hold steadfast to the principle of human coding. They'll be tiny boutique shops that do custom stuff, in the same way cobblers are to the mega shoe factories.
jrflo · · focus · HN ↗
I understand why people are resistant to this from an emotional perspective, but I really don't see a plateau in sight. RLVR is clearly still cooking and narrow RSI seems to be on the horizon.
But I'm also a realist. If the technology exists, it will be used to the maximum economical extent.
falserum · · focus · HN ↗
Economics depend on that a lot.
arbitrary_name · · focus · HN ↗
feels like pure copium to believe that won't change rapidly.
falserum · · focus · HN ↗
I have no data for neither, so I’ll wait for numbers.
Will LLMs stay being useful? Definitely. Will in 10 years touching/changing code be somewhat niche, like ASM development is now? Not clear yet.
And optimisations are not a given, a lot of low hanging fruit are already taken, because it actually saves lots of money already now.
spopejoy · · focus · HN ↗
bigstrat2003 · · focus · HN ↗
It's non-existent. LLMs still suck at writing code just as much as they did at the beginning of 2026, or 2025 for that matter. LLM proponents are always trying to hype everyone up on the supposed improvements, but they have never yet been real. That means they are unlikely to be real in the future either.
spopejoy · · focus · HN ↗
I agree that not every class of software or problem or this or that is going to be decimated/revolutionized whatever, but to not see any improvement since 2025 just sounds like you're not looking.