Thread

1. tolugenius · 1790091450 · focus · HN ↗

   > About 20 Markdown files described browser use, connectors, payments, credentials, data handling, generated files, voice, goals, and scheduling.

   This the state of software engineering in 2026.

   Edit: clarified engineering to software engineering, which is more correct

   1. wccrawford · 1790092249 · focus · HN ↗

      You're being downvoted, but I think you've hit the nail on the head.

      So many people, especially managers, have decided they can just give the rules to the AI in English and let it make "decisions", and they think it'll do it correct every time.

      "Engineering" a few years ago meant that code was written, was (mostly) deterministic, and could be debugged. Computer processing didn't mean relying on Human-like processes, it meant relying on hard-coded logic.

      This is absolutely one of those "gets worse before it gets better" things, and will probably never go away fully now.

      Programmers know not to tell ChatGPT to do a bunch of data processing. If they use it at all, they tell it to write code that will then do the processing. It's more efficient on tokens, and if it fails, you can fix the process, instead of wondering why it went wrong, like too much context, or the LLM model version changed and doesn't work the same now, or just randomness.

      1. colejohnson66 · 1790094600 · focus · HN ↗

         It's been like this since programming was "invented". Managers and business minds have, for decades, tried to remove the need for programmers. "If we provide a detailed enough spec, why do we need programmers?"

         For example, COBOL's big shtick was that non-programmers could write code using a contrived English dialect, and things would work. Decades of no-code or low-code languages have come and gone. AI is just the hip new thing because it actually manages to produce results - just of dubious quality half the time.

         1. voakbasda · 1790096922 · focus · HN ↗

            And let’s be clear: when wielded by the unwashed masses, AI produces the same quality of systems as those low-code tools did. It still takes a human engineer to drive AI to produce a maintainable, cohesive, and reliable system. This may change at some point, but I don’t think we are there yet - even with the latest frontier models.

Unofficial Hacker News client; not affiliated with Y Combinator.