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.
We also read these kinds of rebuttals almost every day. The original article made a number of substantive critiques about where AI falls short in the actual requirements for building maintainable, reliable, business-critical software. So its not enough just to point to newer models without explaining how the newer models solve these problems. Can the new models take full end-to-end ownership of a system? If not, how do they solve the problem of humans taking ownership of AI generated code?
Yes they can and tomorrow the models will be better. By the time code hits prod and is used in anger the frontier will have moved.
It’s really not an acceptable opinion to have, that one day we’re going to be developers drowning in ai generated code. That’s a problem for opus 6 in 4-5 weeks time.
Developers are still very much needed, business people just don’t have the chops to wire a deterministic system together. But acting like some poor class naming or 2k loc file is the disaster it once was is dated.
can't be sure the development continues. As much as opus got better at programming the less I understand the output. it keeps inventing terms and skipping steps for the reader to understand what is written properly.
I also feel like progress in programming is becoming a lot slower now.
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.
o_nate · · focus · HN ↗
aunty_helen · · focus · HN ↗
It’s really not an acceptable opinion to have, that one day we’re going to be developers drowning in ai generated code. That’s a problem for opus 6 in 4-5 weeks time.
Developers are still very much needed, business people just don’t have the chops to wire a deterministic system together. But acting like some poor class naming or 2k loc file is the disaster it once was is dated.
fleischhauf · · focus · HN ↗