Hacker News Reader

Comment by solatic | Hacker News Reader

To quote the author:

> I would never actually ship any code anymore without using AI to review it

I can very much understand how the author can come off as calling people insane for not using AI to generate the code itself, but the impression I got is that he's calling people insane for not using AI at all in the coding process, i.e. for refusing to use AI even for code review.

And let's be fair: if you're not willing to let a completely local model (so as to put aside privacy concerns and API cost concerns), in a sandbox with read-only permissions, conduct code review for you in 2026, then yeah, I think you're doing the equivalent of refusing to take antibiotics. You can decide to reject the review results, or re-word the proposed fixes, but to refuse AI assistance at all as a matter of principle during the review stage is no longer a mainstream defensible position.

View on HN

What an absurd statement. It’s like saying that not using a static analyzer is no longer defensible. Wat?

Somehow, people have been writing software for decades without AI assistance. Nothing about the emergence of AI changes the fact that humans are more than capable of producing good software using just their mushy little brains.

Maybe if you’re writing security-critical software, extra review passes would be welcome. But most software is far from that.

> Somehow, people have been fighting off disease for eons without antibiotic assistance. Nothing about the emergence of antibiotics changes the fact that humans are more than capable of producing antibodies using just their mushy little white blood cells.

If the author just used AI as one element of code review, would the author still have been banned? The answer is obviously unknowable, but I think it is unlikely.

Where do you draw the line with what's considered "AI"?

There's a very clear pattern regarding pushback against AI, and it's not as ideological or political as you're making it out to be.

Lots of devs absolutely hate linters just as much, or maybe even more, than LLMs. It's simply a matter of having precise control over the result that gels with the dev's thought process enough to approve a release.

Let's be honest here. If you've got at least an 8-hour day to wrap up a medium size change of less than 1k LOC, the debate over LLMs is more of a personality judgement than advocating for a productivity tool. It's still going to get reviewed anyway, and most bugs in the software most people write for a living aren't subtle mistakes.

Lots of devs absolutely hate linters just as much, or maybe even more, than LLMs.

I never had much use for lint, myself. Back when Dr. Dobb's Journal used to publish ads for a commercial linter that included "spot the bug" quizzes, I could always spot the bug.

The thing is, though, LLMs are good at spotting semantic issues, not just C++ footgun #69,105. That's the point where I stopped worrying and learned to love the bot, when it found more issues with my code than I found with its own. I think that was Opus 4.6.

> but to refuse AI assistance at all as a matter of principle during the review stage is no longer a mainstream defensible position.

Personally the position strikes me more like the people of yore who would write code entirely in vim/emacs or, god forbid, notepad++, while the rest of us were using IDEs. We can all sit on our high horses and croon about how much more productive they'd be if they just tried a little bit of AI – "come on bro, just a puff" – but they've got their workflow and it isn't broken.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com