A year after the 100% AI mandate nobody understands our code

Wow, good catch. I was fooled by this, and I'm usually not.

...how is this "anti AI content"? This is a real issue.

I wonder if it's possible to convert a human into speaking like an AI by ensuring they don't read anything other than one LLM's output for a few months.

You also see very new accounts on both HN and Reddit with similar claims. I'm sure there are elements of truth to some, but so much of it feels like comeuppance fantasies where the mean old execs mandating AI finally learn they were wrong.

Honest question, some time ago people were claiming chatgpt zero or other ai detectors were not good, now everybody uses pangram. Is it that reliable?

It doesn't have to be this way. LLMs can be quite helpful in analysis and small coding tasks. I understand everyone doesn't control their environment, but surely there are some sane places out there?

We don't have try to use them as 'agents' to write and understand all the code for us, frankly I wouldn't trust them to do so, they make too many mistakes and foolish decisions about architecture.

Why work ten hours a day if the computer is doing the work?

Trying to code with a harry potter magic spell will have issues of alignment over time.

Software development has always evolved.

A preference for it to stay the same way isn't always in our hands.

You can have a say in how software development evolves by how you choose to learn the tools in a way that can influence other people.

If you have downtime ("waiting") and are complaining about not learning anything, I think that's on you.

In my experience, using LLMs to automate boring tasks gives time to learn about the interesting parts.

As to working 10 hours a day, was he working less hours before LLMs, or what's the relevance?

If he's waiting around, he should give it bigger chunks of work or work on multiple projects in parallel. Give it larger prompt and go for a walk.

Thankfully, Claude is pretty good at refactoring and bug sweeping. :) You have to keep at it for a while, but eventually, sanity will prevail.

Growth and change is so fast that waiting is almost a virtue. Why spend effort getting opus 4.8 to work on my codebase when opus 5.5 will arrive within 8 months anyway? Why spend effort getting opus 5.5 to do anything when opus 6 will arrive in the near future?

The only things that I do with AI at my job are easy things. AI hasn’t transformed hard work in quite the same way, but it has given me access to knowledge and information about things and processes that I didn’t have before. It also forces me to write things down, which is perhaps a not insignificant amount of the improvement in our business

You could make this claim right now as well, may as well wait now until the models are cheaper and better later.

You could say in a years time that going in now was kind of insane.

So what you're really saying is to... hodl your tokens?

But then you won't know how to efficiently use AI, so you'll still end up spending more money when you start using it, nullifying any of the micro-optimization you were trying to do in the first place.

It depends on how you read the market - not the AI market, but the one your code is addressing. If it's a growth market with some lock-in, being first matters a fair amount. If you didn't have the people to hand-code it, then you want to code it as soon as you have the (people + money for tokens) that will get it done.

But if that isn't your competitive landscape...

> There's ostensibly this reverse token value inflation where whatever you spend on AI today, you'll get much more for the same dollar tomorrow

"reverse token value inflation"?

Do you perhaps mean "deflation"?

Wouldn't be surprised if a "year ago" is a rough estimate.

I recall mid-to-late November 2025 being a big inflection point where it finally became obvious that these things could actually be trusted to do a decent amount (but not all) of the coding. So maybe it was more like 8 months ago or whatever that they went all-in, close enough to a year for a random reddit rant.

The overall gist of what the person posted matches my experience though. The fall-off on understanding the code to any meaningful degree happens very quick once you give full rein to the LLM and lean into mostly-automated reviewing.

> saving your money unless you expect your profit to grow faster than AI becomes more powerful.

You haven't really said how you actually get "more". Selling stuff usually works by resolving a need or want your customers have. If you can use AI as a tool to resolve one such want today, how will resolving it for 1/10th the cost in a few months actually help your business?

Even if you're making a new invention or something, sitting on the idea until you can make it for fewer dollars, will just open up to somebody else doing it earlier. And they'll have time to work out any kinks that inevitably only appear during actual testing...

This has already been studied in the context of Moore's law [0]. The answer is that if you assume a doubling every 18 months, then any project that takes less than (18 / ln 2) ~= 26 months (assuming a fixed hardware budget) will finish fastest if begun immediately. For a project that takes longer, you should wait until your project will take 26 months to complete with current hardware, and buy your new hardware and start it then.

You can plug in whatever numbers you want for the growth rate, but I don't think there are many uses of LLMs that require anything like months' worth of tokens to generate results at this point. Feel free to slack off if you are one of the exceptions.

[0] https://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/9912202

Nah, that just means yolo now and even if it's a mess unfucking it tomorrow will cost less, right? But seriously though, people seemingly aren't looking ahead like that tbh.

> In this case it accelerated piling up the tech debt.

So far, evidence is that's all it accelerates. We haven't seen any success stories where people make quality, maintainable software with LLMs at a rate any faster than humans would on their own.

If only we'd tried shipping all the understanding to coding sweatshops in India with identical disastrous results 20 years ago, maybe we would have learned from that.

Also think about it in terms of start up value. The value of your business is a combination of employee expertise and customer/client relationships. Everything else can be reverse engineered. If all you have is a product written by AI then who cares?

Where I used to work we had hundreds of microservices. Forget looking at the code, I couldn't even tell if the service was live in production or not sometimes, and if so, was it still doing its job?

The react app was almost unworkable, with people just cloning components and dropping them in as another tab with 95% shared code but obtuse names.

For the overwhelming majority of people, doing is necessary for understanding. If you read a math or physics textbook, you might think you understand it but you won't until you do some questions. Even a history book is deceptive. Much of it will be in one ear and out the other unless you take notes, summarize, ask yourself questions, place things in a mental framework, etc..

When you rely on AI to explain code to you and then make changes to the code, the AI does most of the doing.

> many people don't understand the majority of the code at their company anyways

Many people don't but at least until last year somebody did.

> This is the part that bugs me with AI usage is that it drives the use of it to benefit the company but not the individual. Yes AI allows me to be faster as work (in theory), but as a result I lose out in my own learning as an employee, I lose out in my own cognitive ability to learn, make mistakes and build upon my knowledge and skills.

Your well-being and self-improvement is not a priority for your capitalist employer, especially given ideological changes over the past 70 or so years. They would just as rather use you up, throw you away, and replace you with something else, if that was more convenient for them.

Isn't it wonderful to be on your own? Remember that next time someone talks about starting a union.

benefiting the company is the whole point, they cut the checks, yes? why would any company give a hoot about yours or mine cognitive ability to learn or your knowledge/skills? if they deteriorate to the point you can’t be productive any longer they will replace you

Engineers adopting this so quickly always looked like useful idiot behavior to me.

What benefit is there for the individual to have cognition when we reach out to AI to do all of this for us?

Even disregarding the direct arguments that can be made against normalizing this attitude, there isn't a bag of money for most developers. HN is biased to think of the typical smart, hard-working software developer as making enough for a middle-class or upper-middle-class lifestyle, but that hasn't been the case even since before the LLMs of the past couple years. Businesses are offloading more and more and more of the effects of inflation onto employees, rather than sharing the burden. A handful of factors are being used as excuses to accelerate this trend, and AI is one of them.

“Ripe for disruption”, like ready to be picked.

The dead internet theory was a joke until it wasnt. I find it genuinely unsettling.

> and ends with a question.

It's a reddit post - it ending by asking if others have had a shared experience hardly seems out of the ordinary.

It's not surprising someone like that has stopped using their brain for writing English as well.

> Pangram said

I wish people stopped posting what Pangram said. Pangram set an impossible task before them — either they're grifters or naive. They use a magic box to determine whether someone else used a magic box, giving you a bullshit result.

It's def written by AI but that doesn't mean that he's a bot. Just a coward. LOL!

>also has a hidden profile

Everyone should have a hidden profile. I mean... you went snooping didn't you? People always try to randomly dredge shit up. It's creepy AF.

the non-disparagement clause of my contract precludes me from naming names unless I feel like suffering great financial harm through civil litigation..