AI coding - Hacker News

Posted by abhaynayar 9/13/2025

AI coding(geohot.github.io)

410 points | 284 commentspage 4

drumdance 9/19/2025|

IMO the value of AI coding is less about what we're seeing now and more about what will happen once anyone can program their phone, watch or smart speaker just by feeding it a prompt.

manx 9/13/2025||

This pre-AI article makes a very similar argument: https://mortoray.com/programming-wont-be-automated-or-it-alr...

Once we realize that what we actually want is turning specifications into software, I think that English will become the base for a new, high level specification language.

skydhash 9/13/2025|

We are turning specifications into software precisely because English (and any natural languages) lacks the formality that makes it not reliable (necessary quality for a tool), but great for imagination (the source of invention).

We always start from natural language. RFC, docs, tickets,... are in natural language. But gaining formality (losing ambiguity) is what programming is (software engineering is doing programming well). People that struggled with programming struggle in fact with formality.

within_will 9/13/2025||

Natural language becomes like an abstraction above the high-level languages then, even above things like Scratch and Basic. But you can't define how big of an abstraction it is exactly, like I can say "write an GPS app" or "write a function that does x"

The former is more abstracted and the latter is less. It's this ambiguity and non-determinism that's tricky.

faangguyindia 9/13/2025||

AI coding is working really good for us.

My teammate shared 3 phase workflow we are using on our team to deliver project at rapid phase.

It's shared on ClaudeCode subreddit https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeCode/s/iy058fH4sZ

I've been using it for months with great success

roxolotl 9/13/2025||

These workflows always surprise me. Isn’t this what you’ve been doing with humans all along? Write up a basic project plan likely following some structure the product team likes. Share it with the eng team. One to a few members of the eng team writes up a more specific plan. Everyone gets together again and goes through the specific plan to iron out the kinks. You the implement the plan.

I’ve seen at my workplace people are more willing to help Claude with a plan than their fellow humans. I pointed that out and one engineer replied with “well I know Claude will read the documentation”. It’s a depressing observation but I don’t know if it’s wrong.

faangguyindia 9/13/2025||

I can implement 20 such features on my own each day with no input from others though. That's why i am using this method in the first place.

h4ch1 9/14/2025||

This is just basic spec based development, don't see what's so interesting about this. People have been using this method for quite a while, even Kiro now uses this for its entire process.

faangguyindia 9/16/2025||

>People have been using this method for quite a while, even Kiro now uses this for its entire process.

Kiro is terrible at this (I assume it's your product), maybe stop shilling it every now and then

stevage 9/13/2025||

Anyone dismissing AI coding without having seriously tried it or looked at the outputs of people who have can't be taken seriously. Yes, it shouldn't worked in theory. But it's disturbingly good in practice, for someone who knows what they are doing.

th0ma5 9/13/2025|

So anyone that doesn't know what they're doing can dismiss it without seriously trying it? I mean, I agree, but I feel like you wouldn't with this implication of what you're saying...

anabis 9/13/2025||

I also had a compiler related description come to me after using Copilot. It allows you to partially generate imperative code declaratively, by writing a comment like

//now I will get rows X, Y, Z from ContentsProvider

then tab tab complete. You can then even tweak the generated code, very useful!

runlevel1 9/13/2025|

There's the rub: AI coding is like super tab complete. It's a useful tool. Full stop.

urbandw311er 9/13/2025||

That was a really great read. Not saying I agree with it all, I’m maybe more in the camp that believes AI assisted coding is a time-saver but it’s refreshing (and overdue) to have a counterpoint to the deafening and repetitive drumbeat of the VC-backed hype machine.

pier25 9/13/2025||

> It’s why the world wasted $10B+ on self driving car companies that obviously made no sense

Anyone knows what the author is referring to here?

I'm guessing a lot more than $10B has been invested into self driving. So probably referring to failed companies. But which ones?

huevosabio 9/13/2025||

There is some amount of truth on the AI coding claims.

But, what's with the self driving hate? I take Waymos on a regular basis, and he is basing his credibility on the claim that they are not a thing. Makes him sound bitter more than insightful.

vessenes 9/13/2025||

George famously started a self driving hardware-as-an-addon company. He started after both claiming self driving was easy, and reportedly taking up an Elon bounty/bet in the seven figure range to make self driving AI for Tesla.

apercu 9/13/2025||

I think some of the “hate” is the hype. We’re all tired of companies announcing ground breaking tech that isn’t readily available a decade later.

I don’t live in California (like most of the population of the planet) - Toronto for 18 years and now the American side of the Great Lakes.

Ice storms, snow, sleet, cold weather 5-6 months out of the year. Batteries suck in the cold, sensors fail or under-perform. Hell, door handles and windows struggle in this weather.

Waymo is not a thing in NY or Chicago or Minneapolis or Philadelphia (I could go on).

abraxas 9/13/2025||

And that's just in North America where cities were built for cars and with cars in mind. Autonomous driving in Europe or Asia is likely a magnitude harder due to windy roads, non trivial intersections, complex interactions of humans, bikes, trams and cars etc.

softwaredoug 9/13/2025|

Instead of everyone telling their personal anecdote, we should look at the actual research.

Asking ChatGPT to summarize the state of AI coding research that’s not done by one of the providers, and I feel like I got the sanest summary of the actual state of things:

> If you weight independent work more heavily: current best evidence says don’t expect speedups for senior devs in complex, well-known codebases without process changes; expect security pitfalls unless you add guardrails. Gains look more reliable for novices, unfamiliar code, and templated tasks

Seems the most sane PoV on the actual benefits I’ve seen.

Actual link if you want to pick apart GPT-5s summary

https://chatgpt.com/share/68c56214-1038-8004-b1ed-359393eb15...

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