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.
> But just go ahead and give the latest models (Opus 5.5 / Astra 6 as of today) another try.
I find my self going opposite direction recently. I start using frontier models less and less and smaller models more and more. I recently tried Opus Opus 5 with ultra-code level of effort and I wasted like 2 days on trying to migrate some project to new libs because it spits out a huge wall of text as replies/plans and waste huge amount of time on things I didn't ask it to check and see no point in checking. At the end I just took a smaller model and used it in more controlled fashion playing the role of orchestrator/planner. Smaller models are good enough and also much faster. My collisions from that, frontier models and high reasoning effort levels are for pure vibe-coding when you don't really control or understand what is happening. My application area is not pure SWE though, I didn't churn a lot of code before and I don't now, so I have enough time on understanding/polishing my projects if needed.
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.
maxnevermind · · focus · HN ↗
I find my self going opposite direction recently. I start using frontier models less and less and smaller models more and more. I recently tried Opus Opus 5 with ultra-code level of effort and I wasted like 2 days on trying to migrate some project to new libs because it spits out a huge wall of text as replies/plans and waste huge amount of time on things I didn't ask it to check and see no point in checking. At the end I just took a smaller model and used it in more controlled fashion playing the role of orchestrator/planner. Smaller models are good enough and also much faster. My collisions from that, frontier models and high reasoning effort levels are for pure vibe-coding when you don't really control or understand what is happening. My application area is not pure SWE though, I didn't churn a lot of code before and I don't now, so I have enough time on understanding/polishing my projects if needed.