Comment by daviding
5 days ago
There seems a fair enthusiasm in the UI of these to hide code from coders. Like the prompt interaction is the true source and the actual code is some sort of annoying intermediate runtime inconvenience to cover up. I get that productivity can be improved with a lot of this for non developers, just not sure using 'code' as the term is the right one or not.
> There seems a fair enthusiasm in the UI of these to hide code from coders. Like the prompt interaction is the true source and the actual code is some sort of annoying intermediate runtime inconvenience to cover up.
I've finally started getting into AI with a coding harness but I've take the opposite approach. usually I have the structure of my code in my mind already and talk to the prompt like I'm pairing with it. while its generating the code, I'm telling it the structure of the code and individual functions. its sped me up quite a lot while I still operate at the level of the code itself. the final output ends up looking like code I'd write minus syntax errors.
This is the way to do it if you're a serious developer, you use the AI coding agent as a tool, guiding it with your experience. Telling a coding agent "build me an app" is great, but you get garbage. Telling an agent "I've stubbed out the data model and flow in the provided files, fill in the TODOs for me" allows you the control over structure that AI lacks. The code in the functions can usually be tweaked yourself to suit your style. They're also helpful for processing 20 different specs, docs, and RFCs together to help you design certain code flows, but you still have to understand how things work to get something decent.
Note that I program in Go, so there is only really 1 way to do anything, and it's super explicit how to do things, so AI is a true help there. If I were using Python, I might have a different opinion, since there are 27 ways to do anything. The AI is good at Go, but I haven't explored outside of that ecosystem yet with coding assistance.
If you use a type checker in strict mode (e.g. pyright with "typeCheckingMode: strict") and a linter with strict rules (e.g. ruff with many rules enabled), the output space is constrained enough that you can get pretty consistent Python code. I'm not saying this is "good Python" overall, but it works pretty well with agents.
Ai is even good in turbo pascal if you instruct it right
My workflow is quite similar. I try to write my prompts and supporting documentation in a way that it feels like the LLM is just writing what is in my mind.
When im in implementation sessions i try to not let the llm do any decision making at all, just faster writing. This is way better than manually typing and my crippling RSI has been slowly getting better with the use of voice tools and so on.
This is the way.
The funny thing is my expectation was that adoption of AI coding would kill the joy of getting into a flow state but I've actually found myself starting to slip into an alternate type of flow state.
Instead of hammering out code manually over an hour the new flow state is a back and forth with the LLM on something that's clear in my mind. It's a collaborative state where I'm ultimately not writing much code manually but I'm still bouncing between technical thoughts, designing architecture, reviewing code, switching direction etc.
Yeah - similar thing for me as well. A lot of times there would be something I want to work on that would be boilerplate/repetitive/laborious work and I would just procrastinate it for as long as possible, working on other things, until I'd finally get around to doing it. Now those are just immediately completed with a simple prompt and instead of going with the initial implementation, I have the bandwidth to tweak and refine details that I would have skipped over before just to ship.
I personally have been finding good results "hiding the code" behind the harnesses. I do have to rely on verification and testing a lot, which I also get the AI to do, but for most of the cases it works out well enough. A good verification and testing setup with automated, strict reviewing goes a long way.
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The fact that the Codex app is still unavailable on Linux makes me think the target audience isn't people who understand code.
Are you referring to the CLI Codex? That can be installed with NPM or Homebrew, and is fully open source.
Yes and the official docs even mention that if you’re on Windows you should run Codex CLI via WSL. Meaning, it’s specifically designed for unix systems.
Right. It's rather for vibecoders than for software engineers.
The power to the people is not us the developers and coders.
We know how to do a lot of things, how to automate etc.
A billion people do not know this and probably benefit initially a lot more.
When i did some powerpoint presentation, i browsed around and draged images from the browser to the desktop, than i draged them into powerpoint. My collegue looked at me and was bewildered how fast I did all of that.
I've helped an otherwise very successful and capable guy (architect) set up a shortcut on his desktop to shut down his machine. Navigating to the power down option in the menu was too much of a technical hurdle. The gap in needs between the average HNer and the rest of the world is staggering
This. I’m sure everyone has a similar story of how difficult it was to explain the difference between a program shortcut represented as a visual icon on a desktop versus the actual executable itself to somebody who didn’t grow up in the age of computing. And this was Windows… the purported OS for the masses not the classes.
Initially I thought you meant “software architect” and I was flabbergasted at how that’s possible. Took me a minute to realize there’s other architects out there lol.
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Oh boy, the gap between the average it professional and ai pros here is already staggering, let alone the rest of the world. I feel like an alien, no matter where.
right clicking start menu and clicking shutdown is too hard? amazing
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> The power to the people is not us the developers and coders.
> We know how to do a lot of things, how to automate etc.
You need to know these things if you want to use AI effectively. It's way too dumb otherwise, in fact it's dumb enough to be quite dangerous.
Yes, the code is still important. For example, I had tasked Codex to implement function calling in a programming language, and it decided the way to do this was to spin up a brand new sub interpreter on each function call, load a standard library into it, execute the code, destroy the interpreter, and then continue -- despite an already partial and much more efficient solution was already there but in comments. The AI solution "worked", passed all the tests the AI wrote for it, but it was still very very wrong. I had to look at the code to understand it did this. To get it right, you have to either I guess indicate how to implement it, which requires a degree of expertise beyond prompting.
Yep, all models today still need prompting that requires some expertise. Same with context management, it also needs both domain expertise as well as knowing generally how these models work.
Do you ask it for a design first? Depending on complexity I ask for a short design doc or a function signature + approach before any code, and only greenlight once it looks sane.
I understand the "just prompt better" perspective, but this is the kind of thing my undergraduate students wouldn't do, why is the PhD expert-level coder that's supposed to replace all developers doing it? Having to explicitly tell it not to do certain boneheaded things, leave me wondering: what else is it going to do that's boneheaded which I haven't explicit about?
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I think this would work much better if there were constraints in place, a software stack clearly separating different concerns - e.g. you just ask AI to write business logic while you already have data sources, auth, etc, configured.
But that's not how popular, modern software stacks work. They are like "you can do anything, anything at all!".
Consider Visual Basic for Applications - normally your code is together with data in one document, which you can send to colleague. It can be easily shared, there's nothing to set up, etc.
That's not true for JS, Python, Java, etc - you need to install libraries, you need to explicitly provide data, etc. Software industry as a whole embraced complexity because devs are paid to deal with complexity.
Now AI has to use same software stacks as the rest of the industry, making software fragile, requiring continuous maintenance, etc. VBA code which doesn't use any arcane features would require no maintenance and can work for decades.
So my guess is that the bottleneck might be neither models nor harness/wrapper - but overall software flimsiness and poor architectural decisions
It's reminds me what happened with Frontpage, ultimately people are going to learn the same lesson, there's no replacement for the source code.
In UI, I’m pretty sure that replacement is already here. We’ll be lucky if at least backend stays a place where people still care about the actual source.
I'd say the opposite, the frontend code is so complex these days that you can't escape the source code.
If you stick to tailwind + server side rendered pages you can probably go pretty far with just AI and no code knowledge but once you introduce modern TS tooling, I don't think it's enough anymore.
Check it out: you can open the repo in vim and compare changes with git, for the coderiest coding experience
I knew a guy who did 6510 and 68000 assembler for many years and had a hard time using higher order languages as well as DSLs. “Only assembler is real code. Everything else is phony, bloat for what can be done way better with a fraction of the C++ memory footprint.”
Well that guy was me and while I still consider HOLs as weird abstractions, they are immensely useful and necessary as well as the best option for the time being.
SQL is the classic example for so called declarative languages. To this day I am puzzled that people consider SQL declarative - for me it is exactly the opposite.
And the rise of LLMs proof my point.
So the moral of the story is, that programming is always about abstractions and that there have been people, who refused to adopt some languages due to a different reference.
The irony is, that I will also miss C like HOLs but Prompt Engineering is not English language but an artificial system that uses English words.
Abstractions build on top of abstractions. For you code is HOL, I still see a compiler that gives you machine code.
A cross join is a for loop
As a child I couldn't understand why I have to talk in a cryptic language and can't just write a for loop when working with DBs. In hindsight it was a valuable lesson that implementation details matter even though I wouldn't want them to.
I think the intent is more "we won't need coders" ... the real goal is to get to the point where Product Managers can just write specs and a working product comes out the other end.
These people HATE that developers have been necessary and highly paid and, in their view, prima donnas. I think most of the people running these companies actually despise developers.
Hot take: we (not I, but I reluctantly) will keep calling it code long after there's no code to be seen.
Like we did with phones that nobody phones with.
Code isn't going anywhere. Code is multiple orders of magnitude cheaper and faster than an LLM for the same task, and that gap is likely to widen rather than contract because the bigger the AI gets the sillier it gets to use it to do something code could have done.
Compare the actual operations done for code to add 10 8-digit numbers to an LLM on the same task. Heck, I'll even say, forget the possibility the LLM may be wrong. Just compare the computational resources deployed. How many FLOPS for the code-based addition? How many for the LLM? That's a worst-case scenario in some ways but it also gives you a good sense of what is going on.
Humans may stop looking at it but it's not going anywhere.
I think grandparent comments were talking about how Codex designers try to push LLMs to displace the interface to code, not necessarily code itself. In that view, code could stay as the execution substrate, but the default human interaction layer moves upward, the way higher-level languages displaced direct interaction with lower-level ones. From a HCI perspective, raw computational efficiency is not the main question; the bottleneck is often the human, so the interface only has to be fast and reliable enough at human timescales.
Very much agree.
Everyday people can now do much more than they could, because they can build programs.
The idea that code is something sacred and only devs can somehow do it is dying, and I personally love it, as I am watching it enable so many of my friends and family who have no idea how to code.
Today, when we think of someone "using the computer" we gravitate towards people using apps, installing them, writing documents, playing games. But very rarely have we thought of it as "coding" or "making the computer do new things" -- that's been reserved, again, for coders.
Yet, I think that a future is fast approaching where using the computer will also include simply coding by having an agent code something for you. While there will certainly still be apps/programs that everyone uses, everyone will also have their own set of custom-built programs, often even without knowing it, because agents will build them, almost unprompted.
To use a computer will include _building_ programs on the computer, without ever knowing how to code or even knowing that the code is there.
There will of course still be room for coders, those who understand what's happening below. And of course that software engineers should know how to code (less and less as time goes on, though, probably), but no doubt to me that human-computer interaction will now include this level of sophistication.
We are living in the future and I LOVE IT!
> I am watching it enable so many of my friends and family who have no idea how to code.
Be careful what you wish for, this is going to be a double edged sword like YouTube is. YouTube allowed regular people without money and industry connections to make all sorts of quality, niche content. But for every bit of great content, there’s 1000 times as much garbage and outright misleading shit.
Giving people without any clue how computing works the ability to create software that interfaces with the outside world is likewise going to create some great stuff and 1000 times as much buggy and dangerous stuff. And allow untold numbers of scammers with no technical skill the ability to scam the wider world.
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> The idea that code is something sacred and only devs can somehow do it is dying, and I personally love it, as I am watching it enable so many of my friends and family who have no idea how to code.
People on HN are seriously delusional.
AI removed the need to know the syntax. Your grandma does not know JS but can one shot a React app. Great!
Software engineering is not and has never been about the syntax or one shotting apps. Software engineering is about managing complexity at a level that a layman could not. Your ideal word requires an AI that's capable of reasoning at 100k-1 million lines of code and not make ANY mistakes. All edge cases covered or clarified. If (when) that truly happens, software engineering will not be the first profession to go.
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> Everyday people can now do much more than they could, because they can build programs.
Indeed. Just spoke to a buddy, he's got some electronics knowledge, he's been code-curious but never gotten past very simple bash scripts and Excel sheets (vlookup etc to drive calculations).
He got himself a Claude subscription and has now implemented a non-trivial Arduino project, involving multiple CAN-bus modules and an interactive, dynamic web interface to control all this. The web interface detects the CAN-bus modules and populates the web interface based on that, and allows him to adjust the control logic.
It's a project he's had in his head for a few years and now was able to realize on his own (modulo Claude).
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i WISH we weren't phoning with them anymore, but people keep trying to send me actual honest-to-god SMS in the year 2026, and collecting my phone number for everything including the hospital and expect me to not have non-contact calls blocked by default even though there are 7 spam calls a day
In what world would I prefer to give someone access to me via a messaging app rather than a fully-async text SMS message? I don't even love that people can see if you've read their texts now.
Fully agree about phone calls though.
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Yeah, that's indeed a hot take. I am curious what kind of code you write for a living to have an opinion like this.
It's not the code I write, it's what I've noticed from people in 25 years of writing code in the corner.
All of my friends who would die before they use AI 2 years ago now call themselves AI/agentic engineers because the money is there. Many of them don't understand a thing about AI or agents, but CC/Codex/Cursor can cover up for a lot.
Consequently, if Claude Code/"coding agents" is a hot topic (which it is), people who know nothing about any of this will start raising money and writing articles about it, even (especially) if it has nothing to do with code, because these people know nothing about code, so they won't realize what they're saying makes no sense. And it doesn't matter, because money.
Next thing you know your grandma will be "writing code" because that's what the marketing copy says. That's all it takes for the zeitgeist to shift for the term "code". It will soon mean something new to people who had no idea what code was before, and infuriating to people who do know (but aren't trying to sell you something).
I know that's long-winded but hopefully you get where I'm coming from :D.
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> Like we did with phones that nobody phones with.
Since when? HN is truly a bubble sometimes
Easily less than 10% of my time spent using a phone today involves making phone calls, and I think that's far from an outlier.
You'll cause mild panic in a sizable share of people under 30 if you call them without a warning text.
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