Writing code by hand is over, forever

Re:Writing code by hand is over, forever by meowface on Saturday October 03, 2026 @07:19PM (#49948751)

I question the epistemology of people who did not realize this by around late-2024. (Sonnet 3.5 was out and could do some things okay.)

It's defensible to say "October 2026 is not yet the time when we should be 100% deferring code writing to AI (let alone not even looking at the code any longer)". But the writing is very obviously on the wall. It's likely not going to take longer than 10 years.

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Re:Writing code by hand is over, forever by the_duke on Saturday October 03, 2026 @07:24PM (#49948786)

I adopted Copilot, Claude and Codex quickly, but I remained skeptical how far they would get us ... until the beginning of the year.

Then we saw the capabilities really take off, and it was obvious how things would go.

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Re:Writing code by hand is over, forever by meowface on Saturday October 03, 2026 @08:18PM (#49949228)

I am not claiming to be a great forecaster, or anything, but to me "it sucks now, it's gonna get better, and then it's gonna get even better" was already apparent to me as highly likely starting around GPT-3. (The rationalist bloggers apparently already knew it as of GPT-2. Scott Alexander and Gwern, for example.)

I did not know when it would become so practical that I'd not feel much desire to hand-write code, but I was pretty confident it was coming.

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