Comment by epolanski
5 days ago
> But we should stop talking about 1s and 0s
I agree, but you contradicted yourself just one line above.
> For generating production code even with a lot of steering and baby sitting? Absolutely not
Moreover this is further in contradiction with several facts:
1. the majority of this industry has always been composed by mediocre/bad developers, often unable to write a fizz buzz
2. the majority of work in this industry is implementing mundane CRUDs to move and transform trivial data across the organization's stakeholders and/or customer or third parties
3. there's lots of stellar and respected engineers leveraging the tools on a regular basis even on problems that are far from trivial and outputting quality code much faster than they would've done otherwise. Mitchell Hashimoto has blogged about it in his work on Ghostty, Sanfilippo has blogged about it in his work on Redis and so did plenty of others. I know several open source stellar developers who benefitted greatly from these tools, yet you think it cannot improve the quality and output of the most mundane tasks out there?
>> But we should stop talking about 1s and 0s
> I agree, but you contradicted yourself just one line above.
>> > For generating production code even with a lot of steering and baby sitting? Absolutely not
with this last sentence I obviously meant in my experience, it's not that hard. I don't buy your facts are highly biased towards web development, that's a common mistake here on HN to think it's the totality of the industry, luckily it's not
I've quoted you two tools (Ghostty and Redis) whose development now regularly uses AI assistance to deliver production code. I quoted those because their authors shared their experiences, the strengths and the limits of the tooling.
There's many more, from Flask to Docker, from Ruby to FastAPI or Tanstack. LLVM has integrated AI-generated PRs, so did Swift and Mojo. Sasha Levin has pushed into Linux Nvidia-related kernel changes that were authored by LLMs in 6.15. You can be certain there's a magnitude more where people don't admit or tag their PRs as AI generated or co-generated.
In fact I am quite confident that projects and developers that are not leveraging the tools are increasingly rare. There's really no reason in 2026 to write a non-trivial PR and not ask a cheap review to an AI tool.
The industry is changing, I don't really like the trends I'm seeing, but to state that LLMs cannot and are not writing production code, very often quality ones, (especially when used, setup and overviewed properly) is plain denial.
Your anecdotal experience isn't relevant, especially when applied to the largest parts of the industry, composed of mediocre developers working on terrible codebases.
You cited mostly web tech, which proves my point ;) Is antirez uses extensively agents to contribute to redis doesn't mean it's a becoming industry trend. I'd say quite the contrary, it isn't in the gaming industry for example, where novel ideas matter. And btw Antirez and Linus for example, put a lot of effort into steering agent into doing the right thing for them which is totally different than "these tools become just good"
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