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Comment by gonzalohm | Hacker News Reader

I don't think that matches what I'm seeing. People use AI, but hand written code is still the norm at my company

Most people on my project are too. But honestly Claude has gotten good and for 100 dollars of tokens the code is more readable than a humans and I prefer to review it.

For what it’s worth a lot of the code in my company is similar in scope and style. Our design documents are very very thorough and catch edge cases .

I’m not in an ic role anymore but I do feel sad about the loss of handwritten code. It hits at my identity.

As for the article it feels like this is an abuse of ai and is being used for executive cover.

This is interesting but sounds insane to me. At my startup the code has been 100% written by AI agents for the past 6 months. It’s like John Henry vs the Steam engine, time to give it up. The human job which is harder to replace is product manager. Understanding what is valuable to the customer and what the product needs to focus on.

In my experience, AI code is really hard to maintain and overly complex which creates unexpected behavior and hard to catch bugs. I inherited some vibe coded repos in my company and it's been really painful removing all the unnecessary complexity

I would have agreed completely with this 12 months ago. 6 months ago maybe. but not today. Of course anyone can have AI agents generate a big pile of shit, but that should no longer be the case for professionals. It actually does require a harness where agents are reviewing code with simplicity in mind, and running static analysis checks to reduce complexity.

Why is it time to give it up? Are you putting out more features than them? Is your startup performing better than their company?

I say this as a person who uses AI for my job, but if someone isn't doing what you are doing and it's working for them, why bother?

> Why is it time to give it up?

I've been a software developer for 25 years, and coding software by hand is not a wise career choice right now.

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