Ask HN: Is Coding Solved?
7 comments
What's writing code?
Is importing a library and then calling `sort` means solved?
Is adding a theme to Wordpress meaning you have a website?
i.e. then it was "solved" ages ago.
If not, no.
If the question is will there be less needs for developers then I'd argue most large organizations have always just over-hired; AI or not, especially during COVID.
If the question is do we still need a brain then yes. LLMs have been fed so much crap from the masses that it can be terrible.
You ask it the best solution and it often shills for AWS etc and pushes you in that direction.
There's so much training data from use-postgresql-for-everything spam that 90%. it'll also spit that out (this isn't to say PG is bad but we do have ClickHouse, MongoDB, Cassandra, MySQL/MariaDB, etc and each do still have their use cases).
Is importing a library and then calling `sort` means solved?
Is adding a theme to Wordpress meaning you have a website?
i.e. then it was "solved" ages ago.
If not, no.
If the question is will there be less needs for developers then I'd argue most large organizations have always just over-hired; AI or not, especially during COVID.
If the question is do we still need a brain then yes. LLMs have been fed so much crap from the masses that it can be terrible.
You ask it the best solution and it often shills for AWS etc and pushes you in that direction.
There's so much training data from use-postgresql-for-everything spam that 90%. it'll also spit that out (this isn't to say PG is bad but we do have ClickHouse, MongoDB, Cassandra, MySQL/MariaDB, etc and each do still have their use cases).
Software development always was a way to explain the real task to computer. As developer you should understand the domain, you should understand the solution, you should understand tools and approaches. Coding languages and tools are changing and evolving. I started from IBM360, 8080 and MCS48 assemblers and Fortran. A year ago I used C++, Dart, Go and Python. More than year I do not manually write code at all. But I still a software developer.
Tools changing, but software development is the same: applying domain knowledge and business requirements to the computing domain.
So yes, coding is solved. But software development still alive.
Yes. I think coding is solved and has been for me in production since Claude Opus 4.5.
What is not solved is the question of how or why any particular piece of software serves human and business needs, or how it might be changed to do that better.
The combination of understanding both the human/business side and the computer operations side of a problem is still the domain of programmers, but we don't have to directly write that code now.
What is not solved is the question of how or why any particular piece of software serves human and business needs, or how it might be changed to do that better.
The combination of understanding both the human/business side and the computer operations side of a problem is still the domain of programmers, but we don't have to directly write that code now.
No, and it never will be.
See: https://scribblethink.org/Work/kcsest.pdf
*Large limits to software estimation " by J.P. Lewis
See: https://scribblethink.org/Work/kcsest.pdf
*Large limits to software estimation " by J.P. Lewis
Coding may always have been solved, in a sense. Requirements are not solved and may never be, because that is an organizational problem, not a technical one. But it will keep you working.
I had an interesting interaction with Claude Code. I was trying to write this tool to process metadata from a website, and the websites API’s had rate limits so I was slowly downloading website metadata 1 api call at the time. I told Claude code “I want to cache the data locally so I can run queries against it, make sure the data persists.” With a long explanation.
Now what I didn’t realize at the time, because I’m not an expert in all like design patterns, is I didn’t in fact want a cache I wanted a catalot. I wanted to store all this data in a database long term.
But it was too late, Claude had gone out and used local storage (which is technically persistent. Like it has fucked all the things.
Coding problem? Skill issue? Did I try the latest models?
I don’t think these things are entirely separable. The code compiled but didn’t do what I asked, I don’t know what we mean by “is coding solved”. But if in order to be relatively efficient we require the user to know which model to use depending on the complexity of the coding task, then I’d say it’s not “solved”.
To answer your other question, I write code in the drivers seat. I’m looking to optimize my workflow, but I try to work atomically and do a combination of understanding the general code layout and architecture of the application before prompting Claude to make relatively specific changes. More autocomplete less agent (though I use agents or other things just not adding all the code blind.
Now what I didn’t realize at the time, because I’m not an expert in all like design patterns, is I didn’t in fact want a cache I wanted a catalot. I wanted to store all this data in a database long term.
But it was too late, Claude had gone out and used local storage (which is technically persistent. Like it has fucked all the things.
Coding problem? Skill issue? Did I try the latest models?
I don’t think these things are entirely separable. The code compiled but didn’t do what I asked, I don’t know what we mean by “is coding solved”. But if in order to be relatively efficient we require the user to know which model to use depending on the complexity of the coding task, then I’d say it’s not “solved”.
To answer your other question, I write code in the drivers seat. I’m looking to optimize my workflow, but I try to work atomically and do a combination of understanding the general code layout and architecture of the application before prompting Claude to make relatively specific changes. More autocomplete less agent (though I use agents or other things just not adding all the code blind.
- Do you believe that "coding is solved"? Whatever that may mean.