Comment by epolanski | Hacker News Reader

Comment by epolanski | Hacker News Reader

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> But we should stop talking about 1s and 0s

I agree, but you contradicted yourself just one line above.

> For generating production code even with a lot of steering and baby sitting? Absolutely not

Moreover this is further in contradiction with several facts:

1. the majority of this industry has always been composed by mediocre/bad developers, often unable to write a fizz buzz

2. the majority of work in this industry is implementing mundane CRUDs to move and transform trivial data across the organization's stakeholders and/or customer or third parties

3. there's lots of stellar and respected engineers leveraging the tools on a regular basis even on problems that are far from trivial and outputting quality code much faster than they would've done otherwise. Mitchell Hashimoto has blogged about it in his work on Ghostty, Sanfilippo has blogged about it in his work on Redis and so did plenty of others. I know several open source stellar developers who benefitted greatly from these tools, yet you think it cannot improve the quality and output of the most mundane tasks out there?

>> But we should stop talking about 1s and 0s

> I agree, but you contradicted yourself just one line above.

>> > For generating production code even with a lot of steering and baby sitting? Absolutely not

with this last sentence I obviously meant in my experience, it's not that hard. I don't buy your facts are highly biased towards web development, that's a common mistake here on HN to think it's the totality of the industry, luckily it's not

I've quoted you two tools (Ghostty and Redis) whose development now regularly uses AI assistance to deliver production code. I quoted those because their authors shared their experiences, the strengths and the limits of the tooling.

There's many more, from Flask to Docker, from Ruby to FastAPI or Tanstack. LLVM has integrated AI-generated PRs, so did Swift and Mojo. Sasha Levin has pushed into Linux Nvidia-related kernel changes that were authored by LLMs in 6.15. You can be certain there's a magnitude more where people don't admit or tag their PRs as AI generated or co-generated.

In fact I am quite confident that projects and developers that are not leveraging the tools are increasingly rare. There's really no reason in 2026 to write a non-trivial PR and not ask a cheap review to an AI tool.

The industry is changing, I don't really like the trends I'm seeing, but to state that LLMs cannot and are not writing production code, very often quality ones, (especially when used, setup and overviewed properly) is plain denial.

Your anecdotal experience isn't relevant, especially when applied to the largest parts of the industry, composed of mediocre developers working on terrible codebases.

You cited mostly web tech, which proves my point ;) Is antirez uses extensively agents to contribute to redis doesn't mean it's a becoming industry trend. I'd say quite the contrary, it isn't in the gaming industry for example, where novel ideas matter. And btw Antirez and Linus for example, put a lot of effort into steering agent into doing the right thing for them which is totally different than "these tools become just good"

GenAI is very much being used in the gaming industry, maybe its just you.

proof? except for marketing? There's a GDC anonymous poll that underlines very low percentages of usage

Would also like some proof

Half the projects I listed are system's programming related.

In general you do seem to be unaware of the trend.

And I want to stress it out: I'm not stoked for the trend or changes, but I'm not blind either.

> Half the projects I listed are system's programming related.

No they're not and those who are, are in overwhelming control by the engineers that steer continuously the agents in the right direction. First of all this isn't something you can do for novel ideas, especially in gaming, second it is indeed very bad the code they produce otherwise it won't require that much effort from high end professionals to bend the LLMs to their will.

Denial of nothing, it's pretty clear from my original comment above that gen ai is indeed deployed with varying degree of success in various stuff. My point is there wasn't any "inflection point" just a better integration between agents and os tools all inside a loop.

I successfully use AI in my day to day job, just not that much for coding, if I have a sense a task can be one-shotted by Claude I do, if not I don't. Simple as that

What novel ideas are you thinking of? In my experience there are very few games with novel software engineering. New gameplay mechanics or story or art or design, sure, but they're generally built with very old and standardized patterns.

If what you say it's true, where are the great vibe coded games? Or great non vibe coded games, the killer apps that sold millions on steam?

There's no way to prove it one way or the other. I would be willing to bet money any recent AAA game was made with AI code in it somewhere, though.

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