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Comment by johnwheeler | Hacker News Reader

Thank you for your response. This is exactly the type of commentary I'm talking about. The key phrase is "at the moment." It's not that developers will be replaced, but there will be far less need for developers, is what I think.

I think the flaws are going to be solved for, and if that happens, what do you think? I do believe there needs to be a human in the loop, but I don't think there needs to be humans, plural. Eventually.

I believe this is denial. The statement that the best AI can't be reliable enough to do a modest refactoring is not correct. Yes, it can. What it currently cannot do is write a full app from start to finish, but they're working on longer task execution. And this is before any of the big data centers have even been built. What happens then? You get the naysayers that say, "Well, the scaling laws don't apply," but there's a lot of people who think they do apply.

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If anybody who disagrees with your assessment is "in denial (sic)", why should people bother responding to your question seriously?

it's not about people disagreeing with my assessment. It's that people keep saying, "I'm not afraid of AI because it makes mistakes." That's the main argument I've heard. I don't know if those people are ignorant, arrogant, or in denial. Or maybe they're right. I don't know. But I don't think they're right. Human nature leads me to believe they're in denial. Or they're ignorant. I don't think there's necessarily any shame in being in denial or ignorant. They don't know or see what I see.

I don't have to write code anymore, and the code that's coming out needs less and less of my intervention. Maybe I'm just much better at prompting than other people. But I doubt that

The two things I hear are:

1. You'll always need a human in the loop

2. AI isn't any good at writing code

The first one sounds more plausible, but it means less programmers over time.

Claude regularly looses it's mind when refactoring or generating code. I'm talking about failures to the point where files are unrecoverable except to fall back to the head of main. I see this even with opus 4.5 every day. I can't imagine anyone "not writing code anymore" and still able to pass a code review if they are just committing what Claude vibe coded. If you feel good about the code Claude wrote for you to the extent that you are just going to commit it with your name on it, power to you. If you did so and you worked for me and the result was a failed deployment and you could not justify it other than you committed what Claude wrote then I would simply fire you.

I've been doing this for 25 years though so maybe that's why. But the bigger point is that again you're not giving me anything more than "it makes mistakes" Sure it does but it makes less of them now. It will make less in the future. Also Anthropic guys are in the same boat: They don't write _much_ code anymore. They just use Claude code, So I'm not the only one.

I've been doing this for more than 35 years. Honestly, why make this a superiority contest?

My perspective is that claude (the best at the moment in my opinion) cant make unsupervised changes. If you want to allow it to do so, power to you. While I love what anthropic have done, of course they are going to say they dog food and it is great.

The part that I find personally important is that senior people can be relied on to ask the right questions, give the right prompts and spot confident AI bullshit. As such, AI amplifies experience it does not replace it. I don't see that changing.

The best AI (and I do believe that Claude is one of the best) is able to hold a conversation, maintain context, and respond to simple requests. The key is understanding that not every dev know what questions to ask or when the answers are bad. Call it delusional if you like, but I don't see that changing any time soon if ever.

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