Two things about that. On the one hand, I couldn't believe coding would be replaced when I started Agent Smith in January 2026. On the other hand, I wanted proof.

After 500k lines of code in Agent Smith, none of which I wrote by hand, I have to admit it: coding is more or less solved. That doesn't mean architects, developers, DevOps people and everyone else aren't needed anymore. I think they're needed more than ever.

Just implementing something isn't good enough. The spec has to point to sensible approaches and procedures, and the code has to be well structured (in my view, at least). Then the specs can simply run in parallel all night.

So my actual work on Agent Smith isn't coding at all. It's deciding what the right thing to build is, and how, in terms of design and architecture. I don't even review the code. But I do test it: 10k tests, a harness, a commit hook that blocks a spec while the suite is red, the whole story.

And unfortunately, that works pretty well. I also think last year's programming was more romantic :-D

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memjay an hour ago | parent | next [-]

I agree that “coding” in the sense of hand-writing code is solved.

But code was made to create architecture, to design systems and also to make actual code (machine code) readable for humans.

In my experience with spec-driven development, the lossy layer of specs on top of code is not the right way to drive development of systems and architecture. The English language is not precise enough to describe those systems.

Of course you can use specs or just prompts to drive the creation of code (I do that for 99% of my code) but the “truth” is still the actual code and not the prompts/specs.

Maybe that’s also just a difference between people (like visual learners vs non-visual etc.) and some have an easier time to grasp every detail of the systems they are working on through code and some through descriptions.

Guess it also depends on the complexity of the software you are developing. For private projects I had more success with spec-driven while at work it would be a terrible choice.

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geraneum a day ago | parent | prev [-]

> And unfortunately, that works pretty well.

Why unfortunately?

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hleichsenring a day ago | parent [-]

Because I loved writing code myself, and that feels kind of outdated now. Who's going to pay me to code "slowly" when AI does it a lot faster?

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geraneum a day ago | parent [-]

But people do unpaid painting, horseback riding, calligraphy, etc. which are outdated because they love it. Why is it so unfortunate for you?

	▲	dqh 18 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		In their spare time, with what energy remains after putting most of their energy into work and other obligations. Of course it is unfortunate to lose the ability to get paid for something they enjoyed.
	▲	hleichsenring a day ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Don't take it too seriously. But anyway: I work as a freelancer and started programming at 12. I've been doing it for 40 years now. I guess I'm ambivalent. On one hand these are crazy times, really stunning. Everything is changing, and AI takes over a lot of stuff I never wanted to do, but also parts of what I loved doing. This year the time I spend actually programming dropped to 5–10%. Last year it was still 80%. That's a big change for a professional life. It means developers and architects spend their time on design and on proving the code works, not on writing it. Agent Smith and all the other stuff is one of my side projects. So I'm just being a little nostalgic here, I guess. Nothing too serious ;-)