In the latest interview with Claude Code's author: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/lennys-podcast-product..., Boris said that writing code is a solved problem. This brings me to a hypothetical question: what if engineers stop contributing to open source, in which case would AI still be powerful enough to learn the knowledge of software development in the future? Or is the field of computer science plateaued to the point that most of what we do is linear combination of well established patterns?

> Boris said that writing code is a solved problem

That's just so dumb to say. I don't think we can trust anything that comes out of the mouths of the authors of these tools. They are conflicted. Conflict of interest, in society today, is such a huge problem.

He is likely working on a very clean codebase where all the context is already reachable or indexed. There are probably strong feedback loops via tests. Some areas I contribute to have these characteristics, and the experience is very similar to his. But in areas where they don’t exist, writing code isn’t a solved problem until you can restructure the codebase to be more friendly to agents.

Even with full context, writing CSS in a project where vanilla CSS is scattered around and wasn’t well thought out originally is challenging. Coding agents struggle there too, just not as much as humans, even with feedback loops through browser automation.

I think you mean software engineering, not computer science. And no, I don’t think there is reason for software engineering (and certainly not for computer science) to be plateauing. Unless we let it plateau, which I don’t think we will. Also, writing code isn’t a solved problem, whatever that’s supposed to mean. Furthermore, since the patterns we use often aren’t orthogonal, it’s certainly not a linear combination.

Or does the field become plateaued because engineers treat "writing code" as a "solved problem?"

We could argue that writing poetry is a solved problem in much the same way, and while I don't think we especially need 50,000 people writing poems at Google, we do still need poets.

I saw Boris give a live demo today. He had a swarm of Claude agents one shot the most upvoted open issue on Excalidraw while he explained Claude code for about 20 minutes.

No lines of code written by him at all. The agent used Claude for chrome to test the fix in front of us all and it worked. I think he may be right or close to it.

>writing code is a solved problem

sure is news for the models tripping on my thousands of LOC jquery legacy app...

My prediction: soon (e.g. a few years) the agents will be the one doing the exploration and building better ways to write code, build frameworks,... replacing open source. That being said software engineers will still be in the loop. But there will be far less of them.

Just to add: this is only the prediction of someone who has a decent amount of information, not an expert or insider

There's so many timeless books on how to write software, design patterns, lessons learned from production issues. I don't think AI will stop being used for open source, in fact, with the number of increasing projects adjusting their contributor policies to account for AI I would argue that what we'll see is always people who love to hand craft their own code, and people who use AI to build their own open source tooling and solutions. We will also see an explosion is needing specs for things. If you give a model a well defined spec, it will follow it. I get better results the more specific I get about how I want things built and which libraries I want used.

The creator of the hammer says driving nails into wood planks is a solved problem. Carpenters are now obsolete.

> is the field of computer science plateaued to the point that most of what we do is linear combination of well established patterns?

Computer science is different from writing business software to solve business problems. I think Boris was talking about the second and not the first. And I personally think he is mostly correct. At least for my organization. It is very rare for us to write any code by hand anymore. Once you have a solid testing harness and a peer review system run by multiple and different LLMs, you are in pretty good shape for agentic software development. Not everybody's got these bits figured out. They stumble around and them blame the tools for their failures.

"Writing code is a solved problem" disagree.

Yes, there are common parts to everything we do, at the same time - I've been doing this for 25 years and most of the projects have some new part to them.

Prediction: open source will stop.

Sure, people did it for the fun and the credits, but the fun quickly goes out of it when the credits go to the IP laundromat and the fun is had by the people ripping off your code. Why would anybody contribute their works for free in an environment like that?

Even as the field evolves, the phoning home telemetry of closed models creates a centralized intelligence monopoly. If open source atrophies, we lose the public square of architectural and design reasoning, the decision graph that is often just as important as the code. The labs won't just pick up new patterns; they will define them, effectively becoming the high priests of a new closed-loop ecosystem.

However, the risk isn't just a loss of "truth," but model collapse. Without the divergent, creative, and often weird contributions of open-source humans, AI risks stagnating into a linear combination of its own previous outputs. In the long run, killing the commons doesn't just make the labs powerful. It might make the technology itself hit a ceiling because it's no longer being fed novel human problem-solving at scale.

Humans will likely continue to drive consensus building around standards. The governance and reliability benefits of open source should grow in value in an AI-codes-it-first world.

I don’t believe people who have dedicated their lives to open source will simply want to stop working on it, no matter how much is or is not written by AI. I also have to agree, I find myself more and more lately laughing about just how much resources we waste creating exactly the same things over and over in software. I don’t mean generally, like languages, I mean specifically. How many trillions of times has a form with username and password fields been designed, developed, had meetings over, tested, debugged, transmitted, processed, only to ultimately be re-written months later?

I wonder what all we might build instead, if all that time could be saved.

> Boris said that writing code is a solved problem.

No way, the person selling a tool that writes code says said tool can now write code? Color me shocked at this revelation.

Let's check in on Claude Code's open issues for a sec here, and see how "solved" all of its issues are? Or my favorite, how their shitty React TUI that pegs modern CPUs and consumes all the memory on the system is apparently harder to get right than Video Games! Truly the masters of software engineering, these Anthropic folks.

That is the same team that has an app that used React for TUI, that uses gigabytes to have a scrollback buffer, and that had text scrolling so slow you could get a coffee in between.

And that then had the gall to claim writing a TUI is as hard as a video game. (It clearly must be harder, given that most dev consoles or text interfaces in video games consistently use less than ~5% CPU, which at that point was completely out of reach for CC)

He works for a company that crowed about an AI-generated C compiler that was so overfitted, it couldn't compile "hello world"

So if he tells me that "software engineering is solved", I take that with rather large grains of salt. It is far from solved. I say that as somebody who's extremely positive on AI usefulness. I see massive acceleration for the things I do with AI. But I also know where I need to override/steer/step in.

The constant hypefest is just vomit inducing.

Even if you like them, I don't think there's any reason to believe what people from these companies say. They have every reason to exaggerate or outright lie, and the hype cycle moves so quickly that there are zero consequences for doing so.