Ask HN: What are your honest thoughts on AI tools replacing programmers
2 kurrupttt 7 6/1/2025, 2:39:23 AM
I've been coding since 9yo. Thats 2/3rds of my life. These days all I build is agents and ai tools using windsurf.
i find myself building some new niche tool almost daily. so the notion of ai "replacing programmers" seems kinda odd because most of my friends and I just still build stuff and jump in to tweak code here and there. our desire to build stuff and be on our IDEs every day still hasnt gone anywhere.
do you guys think we'll truly get to 0 manual coding or software engineering will slowly get reduced to infra/devops and high level architecture?
AI can skip the 'intermediate process' of description -> programming language -> "machine binary". Still has to be 'trained'/'feed' appropriate info to be able to generate reasonable associations/inferences to do 'AI magic'.
Forseeable future, human will still need to understand & to describe the manual process to the AI agents. (vs. "let the programmer figure it out")
Or “they” have so little general visibility into what’s actually happening at a grass roots level, that “they” are desperate for any news from the front. Again, asking is free. Let’s hope they don’t start using other HFT techniques.
Have to have backround to understand tool(s) using in order to supervise/know what's the right/appropriate tool for job(s)/task(s).
From scratch, try something in range of 1 million or more lines of code for basic functionality. aka OS, database management system, video editor, etc.