"No more hand-written code"

Isn't this the new norm for every modern tech company?

Claude Code can help me write and review code faster and better than a human possibly could. I spend my time drafting requirements, steering agents and reviewing diffs instead of writing code manually.

AI is changing knowledge work. Dressing that up with ragebait (game dev, Disney, layoffs) doesn't change that or the fact that the video game industry has always been brutally fickle and hit-driven. The Epic layoffs earlier this year had far more to do with the decline of Fortnite's popularity than AI.

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equinumerous 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

How do you avoid the spaghetti code that (in my experience) most AI models spit out? Sure you can steer it, ask it to make it better, etc... but it's easier to me to be in the driver's seat. Doesn't mean AI isn't useful, but whenever AI designs a feature end-to-end, everything is tightly-coupled, the wrong abstractions are picked, and fundamentally the code is not optimized for human understanding. I don't really understand how people can tolerate this kind of code (assuming they read it, which I think they do not). Just take the Claude Code CLI as an example - is there anyone in the world that knows how that spaghetti machine works?

I agree that AI is very useful in reviewing PRs and searching for bugs. It's definitely a game-changer there. But a human still needs to understand the code and take responsibility for it.

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atworknow 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

>How do you avoid the spaghetti code

You don't. This is demonstrated by

>Claude Code CLI ... is there anyone in the world that knows how that spaghetti machine works

Having a very active, and happy user base.

Now this a simplistic view, and I think even heavily AI first dev teams still glance at the diff to make sure things aren't going too awry or ask questions. But the concept "spaghetti code" and "optimized for human understanding" are assumptions being revisited entirely in 2026.

	▲	equinumerous 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I am not trying to get into a flame war, but I have seen a lot of complaints about Claude Code, not to mention their huge backlog of bug reports (https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues) on GitHub. Just because they have lowered the bar for software quality and people have accepted it, does not mean that they are delivering quality software. I know at the very least we agree that these ideas are being re-explored in 2026, but I don't see evidence that it's a positive improvement for software development/quality. How many sites or services does one use on a daily basis that are just broken? Is that really the best our industry can aspire to? EDIT: also, from the software engineer perspective, it is an order of magnitude more tedious to maintain software projects that lack quality, consistency, or standards. If I could measure the effect of AI vibe-coding in terms of personal pain, I would say it makes software development more painful when code is not well thought-out. There is a way to use AI responsibly, but I see more often people taking shortcuts and throwing "engineering" out the window. It's possible to ship quality with AI, but that's not the path of least resistance.

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bitwize an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

> How do you avoid the spaghetti code that (in my experience) most AI models spit out?

That's the neat thing—you don't.

Frontier models, especially Opus 5.5, have vastly stepped up their game in terms of code quality. Furthermore, the sheer volume and speed of code they produce has meant that humans just don't have time to read and review the code even if it were the most well-written code in the world. The frontier is now structuring your loops, graphs, and evals in such a way that agents with a fresh context review the agent-produced code looking for bugs and errors. If humans review anything, it's an agent-produced summary of the code changes.

Business people now expect speed of delivery that humans can't match. Humans are now the bottleneck; agents will step up to replace them.

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3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[deleted]

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vinyl7 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

If it is, then I see a wide opening for a modern tech company that produces high quality artisanal hand crafted software.

I'm a big fan of the advice "See what everyone else is doing, and do the opposite"