That point was specifically addressed in the article.
Given that a compiler doesn't include a statistical model likely to create one's written Rust code, the compiled bytecode is quite clearly an expression of said writing.
If you go to a coffee shop and ask for extra ice, whole milk, double espresso latte - did you make the coffee or did the Barista make it. You gave him some specific directions didn’t you?
When I'm building, and get approached by large customers who have specific needs for them, those needs go at the end of our backlog. There's a hard and fast rule that unless it's an issue with authentication or accepting money, nobody gets to jump the line. We re-evaluate our backlogs periodically, and treat large-customer requests similarly to small-customer requests; who is this going to serve, what additional revenue could this generate, will this increase retention. If there are other projects that, combined, will move the needle more than doing one project for one enterprise client, guess what, that enterprise client doesn't get to jump the line.
"If a local district starts losing funding, then it would have to close / shrink schools, and people from outside the educational system would be allowed to establish independent (secular) charter schools within the district."
There is zero incentive for "people outside the educational system" to do this. Kids will absolutely suffer because of this plan.
The answer to this, like always, is that teachers need to be paid more.
If "we will opt everyone in because otherwise we won't get enough data because we know users won't opt in" is your business model, maybe it's time for a rethink.
Agreed but "it's always been shitty" isn't a reason to do nothing about it.
For much of human history slavery was fine too, but thankfully that's been dealt with in many nations. I know some folks argue that capitalism is just the next iteration of slavery but that's different.
not sure why you think stating facts implies nothing should be done about it
slavery is still fine in the US as long as you're incarcerated, and the US still does business with countries that regularly use the old fashioned kind — hell, some people still want to bring chattel slavery back here and still proudly display the confederate flag
these are just very slow things to change... in the timespan of centuries if you're lucky, but in the case of wealth bringing privilege we haven't cracked the issue for thousands of years
I'd recommend at least doing a short spike to see if you can build your own in some way. We did that for the purpose of experimentation and now we've built our own metrics platform that we completely own.
I sincerely hope this never comes to pass, but you or your loved ones may someday find themselves in the position of wishing more people were opted in for organ donation.
The same cannot be said for some random corporation training AI models off your data to make a buck or two.
I think it might be better to get rid of the organ *donation* system entirely.
Organ transplant surgery costs hundreds of thousands of dollars, yet donors get zilch, which is completely unfair when everyone else in the value chain gets paid.
If instead it was "allow my organs to be sold for my estate" I think the supply of organs would greatly increase, which would be win/win.
there are a number of problems with people selling their organs for profit, it's a perverse incentive — the people in the chain who otherwise get paid don't get paid for the organs, they get paid for the labor of doing their jobs
If you keep commenting like this, we'll have to ban you. We've asked you before, not to do this, and you've been using HN long enough to know that this is unacceptable. If you keep it up, we'll have to assume that you want to be banned.
Off topic but I'm curious what's evil about that article. Bizarre, sure, but evil? They took a brain (an organ) from a dead person who had previously given consent to use their organs for that purpose.
I think most people, and definitely myself, when they sign up to be an organ donor, they think of the liver, kidney, and heart. Things that will help other people.
Not the brain, the center of conscience, being kept in some sort of horror-movie half-alive state. I do not think we understand consciousness enough to rule out what those brains are experiencing.
That's fair. Personally I wouldn't mind, but when you put it that way it makes sense people would be wary. Kind of reminds me of the series Pantheon, which is amazing but also kinda disturbing for similar reasons.
> Another way to look at this is that AI coding agents take the fun out of a software engineer's job.
Completely backwards - the fun in the job should be to solve problems and come up with solutions. The fun in the job is not knowing where to place a semicolon.
>> Another way to look at this is that AI coding agents take the fun out of a software engineer's job.
> Completely backwards - the fun in the job should be to solve problems and come up with solutions.
Aren't the coding agents supposed to be doing that too? You give them the problem, they code up a solution, then the engineer is left with the review it to see if it's good enough.
> The fun in the job is not knowing where to place a semicolon.
That's like such a minor and easy-to-do thing that I'm surprised you're even bringing it up.
Eh, that’s not at all how I do it. I like to design the architecture and spec and let them implement the code. That is a fun skill to exercise. Sometimes I give a little more leeway in letting them decide how to implement, but that can go off the rails.
imho “tell them what you want and let them come up with a solution” is a really naive way to use these tools nearly guaranteed to end up with slopware.
the more up front design I’ve given thought to, they are usually very accurate in delivering to the point I dont need to spend very much time reviewing at all. and, this is a step I would have had to do anyway if doing it by hand, so it feels natural, and results in far more correct code more often than I could have on my own, and allows multitasking several projects at once, which would have been impossible before.
I think i'm going to let people decide for themselves what they enjoy in their job rather than pretending I know better than they do what they should and should not enjoy.
> the fun in the job should be to solve problems and come up with solutions
Who are you to tell anyone what the fun "should" be?
Personally, I find writing code very fun, because building the solution is also very gratifying.
Besides which, in my experience until you actually write the code you haven't proven that you solved anything. It's so easy to think you have solved a problem when you haven't, but you won't figure that out until you actually try to apply your solution
> The fun in the job is not knowing where to place a semicolon.
This can be solved with simple linters, no need for LLMs
Except you kind of do -- understanding data structures, understanding software engineering concepts, all of the things that you learn as a good engineer, those are ways that you help guide the LLM in its work.
I don't think kids are learning those things in 2026, they just ask an LLM.
Someone posted on here the other day about how they were taking a non-credit writing class in college so as to improve their writing, that was the reason the course existed. 90% of the class was kicked out because they were using LLMs to write for them, when the entire purpose of the class was to improve ones own writing.
Why do you think it will be any different with programming?
> Except you kind of do -- understanding data structures, understanding software engineering concepts, all of the things that you learn as a good engineer,
Companies aren't investing in AI because they want to solve the problem of semicolon placement. They want AI to solve problems and come up with solutions. Then they want to fire most of their programmers and force the rest to do nothing but check over and fix the slop their marketing departments are churning out.
I don't know why they'd stop at most programmers instead of all programmers. And the marketing department will also be AI. Companies want AI to remove the need for any labor so they can more directly gain money based on already having money.
They'll need at least a few programmers because AI doesn't actually work very well and fixes will be required. The marketing department may end up replaced by AI but so far marketers have convinced companies that they're so essential that even the most popular and well known brands in the world feel the need to spend billions on more and more marketing. If anyone can talk their way into staying employed it'll be marketers.
Exactly, the fun part is when the code works and does what you wanted it to do. Writing code itself is not fun. People forget this because they get small wins / dopamine hits along the way, a clever function, an elegant few lines of code, a bug fix, but the majority of that time coding is just a grind until the end where you get the big dopamine hit.
Fun is not measured objectively. Different people find different things fun. I enjoy writing code very much (in addition to solving big problems; one can enjoy both).
Title clickbait for sure, but the process has radically changed in the past 6 months due to this new generation of models.
"Perfect code from the agent everytime" isn't really what the expectation is. Bugs are always going to be shipped into production, no matter who or what is writing the code. Where SDLC is really getting compressed is in the iteration phase.
For example:
- "This is a known good state; write tests to enforce this state" is something that takes minutes now instead of days. That is incredibly powerful for understanding and maintaining a system.
- Bugfixing is a matter now of an agent watching error logs, diagnosing traces, and immediately issuing PRs with suggested fixes, something that again would have taken hours at least and is now down to minutes (and can be a 24x7 operation, which for most businesses is a revelation).
- Engineers have the freedom to land enhancements that in the Before Times would have sat in the backlog for months and years on end because of the time commitment. That has knock-on effects of quality, features, and just overall improvements for users.
It is a very, very, very different world that we're operating in, and what used to be huge steps of the SDLC now take less time than checking your email in the mornings with your first cup of coffee.
> This is a known good state; write tests to enforce this state" is something that takes minutes now instead of days.
Pointing the AI agentic SLoC cannon at that sounds like a way to speedrun a set of tests that completely ossify the codebase.
Careless slapping down of tests feels great and looks good in the CI at first but a good test that only tests what it needs to do and leaves flexibility for maneuver is at least as hard to write as the code to start with.
- "This is a known good state; write tests to enforce this state" is something that takes minutes now instead of days. That is incredibly powerful for understanding and maintaining a system.
Not if you don't describe the tests before. AI will generate absolutely useless tests, and since it seems even the latest version have difficulties to generate working test doubles (which i'm _still_ surprised about, but i took 4 hour generating a dogshit test double i could have written in half the time. To me this should be a something AI should be absolutely great at, and it's not), if your test are AI-only, understanding of the underlying system will be hard.
On bugfixing I agree with your message, but disagree on the scope: bugfixing changed for some categories of bugs (most of them tbh), but some will still have you dig deep into the database or the transaction history/monitoring.
On enhancement i agree 100%, i think this is the biggest benefit of AI. Even new hires can land a few enhancement a week without any domain knowledge. Our backlog is almost empth, and only the largest enhancement are up (basically performance improvement)
Sorry i wanted to nitpick, I do that very often when i think i mostly agree with someone except on very specific points.
reply