YHK - yet another hacker news clone

Do craft people like outcomes? Sure. Can outcome people appreciate craft? Sure. But fundamentally, you typically fall more in one camp than the other.

And this assertion comes from the outcome people. Is it insane? No. To assert it's insane is insane, because it shows a fundamental disconnect from the economics of software development.

Which is about right, because the craft people don't do something primarily for the economics.

The thing is since Fable 5+ generation of models this is not true anymore.

> I would never actually ship any code anymore without using AI to review it

I can very much understand how the author can come off as calling people insane for not using AI to generate the code itself, but the impression I got is that he's calling people insane for not using AI at all in the coding process, i.e. for refusing to use AI even for code review.

And let's be fair: if you're not willing to let a completely local model (so as to put aside privacy concerns and API cost concerns), in a sandbox with read-only permissions, conduct code review for you in 2026, then yeah, I think you're doing the equivalent of refusing to take antibiotics. You can decide to reject the review results, or re-word the proposed fixes, but to refuse AI assistance at all as a matter of principle during the review stage is no longer a mainstream defensible position.

This assertion is at the crux of a lot of these debates. Fundamentally it depends on what is meant by "better code", does it not?

Code that is bug free? Frontier models are inarguably better at that, because they can think of far more edge cases and test each one much faster than you can. You can argue that its code and surrounding tests are frequently overkill, but that's a dial you can tweak until you're happy.

Code that is performant? Frontier models are inarguably better at that too. They can create a benchmark harness and run it over and over to optimize the code they wrote while you're still poring over the docs on which method of iterating over a list is faster.

Code that is secure? Frontier models are also better at that, for the above two reasons: they can create complex security vulnerability plans and run swarms of agents to audit the code and attack the system that runs that code until it's like a god damn fortress.

Code that is easily understood by humans and fits coherently with the rest? I think humans are better at this still, because humans are definitionally the best at understanding what is easily understood by humans. I posit that this definition of "better code" is quickly going out of fashion though.

When I make manual changes I run them through an audit and risk analysis agent to make sure I didn't miss anything important.

This has caught more errors than our test suite lately.

I think it's largely become focused on generating AI training drivvel for current TV shows.

It's an aristocracy with the progenitors being chosen on a first come first rule base. One could say: "So what? It's a private website with its own rules, make your own!", but then again for most topics and most groups the relevant subreddits are THE biggest forums: Country, province, city specific subreddits, politics, etc. And that makes it extremely problematic.

Reddit might be a private company but the reach of their subreddits makes them a significant player in world wide public opinion forming and opinion sharing -and they largely leave it in the hands of powertripping, chronically online weirdos.

There are tons of smaller ones that offer good value for your time, my personal favourites are r/ragdolls and r/raspberrypi

Monitor my comment go grey in few minutes.

It’s tolerable mostly by dipping in for targeted issues and lurking. I stopped contributing to any subreddit either by commenting or posting. In many subreddits to which I tried to contribute in the past, users seem not to care in the least that I’ve given thoughtful answers. So I lurk, taking what I need without feeling obligated to reciprocate. In other settings I try to add value; but for Reddit, I don’t care.

Given the quality of the output when I ask it to do things I do know how to do, I'm not particularly comfortable with the idea of using AI to do things I don't know how to do myself. It reeks of the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect.

I have a slightly more nuanced take on it — I use Claude to write Ansible playbooks for my homelab because I know enough about server management to have a clear opinion on how I want things done and why, and enough Ansible that I understand the fundamentals and can recognise (but not write) idiomatic playbooks. That's the perfect storm of getting the LLM to do something I'm not good at, while still being able to judge its output.

If you make this stand, you're committed to calling many other professions managers, which you don't. You probably haven't fully cashed out your own position yet.