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Comment by hartator | Hacker News Reader

> AI rarely seems to write better code than humans

The thing is since Fable 5+ generation of models this is not true anymore.

I have access to these models at work. I am not out of touch.

Is it? Go look at ai written pull requests on any open source project, even using the fancy models. The code works but they write needlessly verbose comments above everything, don't follow the existing code style, and reinvent the wheel instead of checking if the source already has implementations for things.

I apologize for my skepticism, but I have literally heard this same claim made with every single generation of models that comes out.

For a while, I dutifully believed it, and would go try again, and it would be awful.

I'd then have another conversation like this, where someone would say something along the lines of, "sure, sure but this NEW model now fixes all that and is really awesome!"

I'll revisit it when I start seeing some real studies that show real productivity increases rather than stuff that just shifts the burden of broken slop onto PR reviewers while claiming awesome speed.

You may also consider that developers (like any person in any profession) exist on spectrum of competency, and you may just be better than most of them.

But models are climbing their way up the percentile charts.

90% of the software development in the work, by volume, can be done by people who are in the 50th percentile of skill.

So these model advances do meaningfully expand the amount of "useful" work that can be done without people. And simultaneously not be "good enough" for the specific kind of work you find yourself doing day to day.

Both can be true.

Grab the last 5,000 lines of code you wrote, and that you thought was bug-free. Run it through Opus 5.5 or Fable 5.1 and post what it finds (and be honest about it, given that nothing is at stake but an Internet argument.)

This is a poor test. Parity would be utilizing the models to implement the functionality of the 5k lines and comparing the outputs.

When's the last time you did that?

Never. I'm also not the OP you responded to. I'm just pointing out the flaw in your proposed test.

Try it, then get back to me about whether the test is "flawed." I guarantee that a frontier model will find more bugs in your code than you will find it a similar volume of code it wrote. I absolutely guarantee it.

Every developer needs to experience this particular flavor of ego death. Me, you, everybody.

>Every developer needs to experience this particular flavor of ego death. Me, you, everybody.

You seem like a deeply unpleasant person.

(Shrug) HN isn't a place where ignorance should be celebrated; there are plenty of other venues for that.

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