I read such articles more or less every day.
This article would be 100% correct if it came out 1 year ago, 75% correct 9 months ago, 50% correct 3 months ago and it's probably 25% correct now if not less.
I totally understand where this is coming from. I too am struggling with accepting that my 30+ years of programming experience is quickly becoming obsolete. I'm losing sleep about this, it's tough.
But just go ahead and give the latest models (Opus 5.5 / Astra 6 as of today) another try.
See what they are capable of and read the code which they produce.
Any problem area, low level C++ or high level Typescript or Clojure or a weird combination of these..
Don't be shy, give them a big task, let them build an entire app, UI and all..
Now compare the output to Opus 4 or gpt-5 from 1 year ago - when they couldn't put together a single function without it being weird and buggy.
This is exactly my problem, not that the models are very good already, but how fast they got so good.
So if coding is not solved yet, it'll get there very soon.
Coding is literally solved with current models. It's just a matter of inference cost at this point. Imagine if Astra 6 Max was $0.00001 per 1M ouput...
I can't think of a single example apart from perhaps the 99.9th percentile difficulty of work that wouldn't be solvable with that configuration.
Yet when I wanted the model to implement the naive surface nets algorithm, Astra Max wrote 5+ allocations on inner loops. Alright, fine perhaps, given that I had not told it to preallocate during the inner loops. Except I did give it explicit instructions not to use malloc, and use the arena/pooling API I provided for everything. That was in AGENTS.md.
Alright, fine, I pointed that out. So what did Astra Max do? It replaced the mallocs with raylib MemAlloc functions, which are malloc wrappers. Why? I had explicitly asked not to use any raylib functions or includes on the module with the prompt. And my AGENTS.md has a minimal raylib inclusion note. Asking isn't helpful because AI does not know anyway. But seriously, why? I asked anyway and Astra said it messed up.
Fine, I was able to get it on the 3rd try with arenas. But it had added getters for the internal state (guess who had a clause not to make getters?), and when pointed out, Astra Max included the physics header instead and added some convenience functions there, because apparently that was good practice and DRY.
If I let the reins slip just a little bit, everything turns into a mush; I wish I could get spaghetti instead!
So whenever I read something like this, "coding is literally solved with current models," I always treat it as a self report. I get that certain section of web frameworks may have been completely RL'd to hell and back, and that React and its ecosystem was already made with the explicit purpose of commodotizing the programmers so any panic 1000 junior hires could write something and maybe even contribute before they get laid off. I get that. But there is a whole world out where reality just doesn't work out like that.
FYI, this project was in C. C, as in one of the languages that the LLM's should have the highest amount of data for. So if the model had "literally solved" the programming of today, why is it so god awful?
That was rhetorical. What is solved is the most of the javascript ecosystem being RL'd. Any field that can't be RL'd to that degree (which apparently C isn't), coding is very much not solved.
temp00345 · · focus · HN ↗
I totally understand where this is coming from. I too am struggling with accepting that my 30+ years of programming experience is quickly becoming obsolete. I'm losing sleep about this, it's tough.
But just go ahead and give the latest models (Opus 5.5 / Astra 6 as of today) another try. See what they are capable of and read the code which they produce. Any problem area, low level C++ or high level Typescript or Clojure or a weird combination of these..
Don't be shy, give them a big task, let them build an entire app, UI and all..
Now compare the output to Opus 4 or gpt-5 from 1 year ago - when they couldn't put together a single function without it being weird and buggy.
This is exactly my problem, not that the models are very good already, but how fast they got so good. So if coding is not solved yet, it'll get there very soon.
keel-control · · focus · HN ↗
I can't think of a single example apart from perhaps the 99.9th percentile difficulty of work that wouldn't be solvable with that configuration.
OliveronData · · focus · HN ↗
Alright, fine, I pointed that out. So what did Astra Max do? It replaced the mallocs with raylib MemAlloc functions, which are malloc wrappers. Why? I had explicitly asked not to use any raylib functions or includes on the module with the prompt. And my AGENTS.md has a minimal raylib inclusion note. Asking isn't helpful because AI does not know anyway. But seriously, why? I asked anyway and Astra said it messed up.
Fine, I was able to get it on the 3rd try with arenas. But it had added getters for the internal state (guess who had a clause not to make getters?), and when pointed out, Astra Max included the physics header instead and added some convenience functions there, because apparently that was good practice and DRY.
If I let the reins slip just a little bit, everything turns into a mush; I wish I could get spaghetti instead!
So whenever I read something like this, "coding is literally solved with current models," I always treat it as a self report. I get that certain section of web frameworks may have been completely RL'd to hell and back, and that React and its ecosystem was already made with the explicit purpose of commodotizing the programmers so any panic 1000 junior hires could write something and maybe even contribute before they get laid off. I get that. But there is a whole world out where reality just doesn't work out like that.
FYI, this project was in C. C, as in one of the languages that the LLM's should have the highest amount of data for. So if the model had "literally solved" the programming of today, why is it so god awful?
That was rhetorical. What is solved is the most of the javascript ecosystem being RL'd. Any field that can't be RL'd to that degree (which apparently C isn't), coding is very much not solved.
slopinthebag · · focus · HN ↗