There is no substitute for reading the code in many many cases. I spend more than 3k/mo on tokens. I find incorrect assumptions baked into the code (the ultimate spec) and missed by the agents and tests daily. This is more pronounced in data analysis and complex systems.
As a side effect having to read the code at least once inevitably makes it way shorter and usually much better.
That's right. And you have to read what the agent is doing as well. Once I said (Opus 5.5), given this list, find issues that are both critical and related to {X feature}.
Guess what: because I said "both", Opus decided I was looking to pick out exactly two of the issues. If I hadn't read that reasoning log, I would've remained oblivious and thought there were only two it could find.
Nothing against the post itself, but something I find funny: the development in AI is so rapid, that everyone thinks they are ahead of everybody else. Here we have a blog post telling us "coding is solved". In Oct 2026, how many of us don't know this already?
Find a lot of tech adjacent jobs on reddit and see them talk about being outskilled by new hires using AI to automate sysadmin tasks. I used to a sysadmin very early in my career and given the tools today and the problems back then, a lot of these jobs are going to be obsoleted or dramatically automated to not require FTEs. This is already started in those fields. Powershell and bash scripting is very good from these things and has been for longer than a year IMO.
We're in our own bubbles where a good part of HN population woke up to coding agents being good enough ~1 year ago, there's a group of folks that found out ~6 months before that, and then the people banging their heads on these a bit earlier than that. If you aren't using a coding agent everyday most people are just using these things to apply an instagram filter, or sort a grocery list. Muse is probably the closest thing to 'full automation' a lot of people are seeing for the first time.
Unfortunately I don't think the bubble that exists at the moment is on the promise of automating so much coding as trying to penetrate consumer use cases, which I think are still lacking and not reliable enough yet. As much as I use coding agents every day I still will not let a claw-like near a bank account or a credit card.
The structure of the post seems like a comparison of snapshots between a date this year and last. On HN, it's an odd statement. In the context the author is writing in, it seems fair.
OP: [last year][1], I shared how I was using AI day-to-day as an ordinary engineer. This year, I did it again!
It's crazy realizing that Claude Code only started getting big in the last year or so. It feels so different now, with all the new models & tools we have to use. I hope you enjoy!
> I still believe I use AI fairly typically, but I’ve had a notable change in background. Last October, I was an engineer on Microsoft’s Windows AI team. I am now a research engineer at Salesforce AI Research.
Priest wears robes.
I guess it’s one of those nonsensical automatic rules.
Controversial take: AI music is more interesting than the autotuned, quantized, mass-market-optimized slop that dominates contemporary pop "music".
I walked into a paint store recently and there was some interesting music playing on the PA. It was some sort of spanish-language 80s new wave I'd never heard before. It had a nice groove. I asked the guy at the counter about it and was surprised to find out it was AI.
So... was it as good as great music? No. But it beat the hell out of muzak. And it was genuinely novel in a way that pop music isn't. I will sacrifice a lot of pride for novelty.
Seems weird to contrast AI music with auto-tuned music. Most of the AI music I've heard has been tuned perfectly. And I don't generally have a problem with music being in tune.
For my part, I mostly dislike AI music. But if there was to be some AI music that I didn't already dislike for its content, then I would dislike it specifically for being AI. Call me close-minded if you will. Some people don't really like music at all. In general, I love music.
> Controversial take: AI music is more interesting than the autotuned, quantized, mass-market-optimized slop that dominates contemporary pop "music".
> And it was genuinely novel in a way that pop music isn't. I will sacrifice a lot of pride for novelty.
For one thing, "interesting" and "novel" are not particularly the point of art. An infinite TikTok feed of AI slop is in some sense infinitely interesting and novel.
But also, those concepts are subjective. Pop music has a ton of evolution and innovation if you break it down. Sure, not every hit is doing something clever, but plenty of them are. You might not find those features to be interesting but it takes ingenuity to stand out in an era where the barrier to entry is so low.
>Controversial take: AI music is more interesting than the autotuned, quantized, mass-market-optimized slop that dominates contemporary pop "music".
Controversial take: AI shows that people simply don't give a shit and just confirms that mass culture is a mistake and the death of everything that is good and sacred.
AI music is far less interesting than anything any person could create. Even if it's acoustically interesting, it's hollow and pointless because it contains no human expression.
AI music is a complete waste of compute. It exists only to further enrich an already wealthy stakeholder, and we should all be ashamed to have ended up in a place where it even exists.
It contains plenty human expression. It's ultimately made by people.
And I think it can be uniquely fun, because it allows for the very rare combination of truly off-beat ideas with excellent execution.
In real life, it very rarely happens that somebody will spend a lifetime learning, gather a band, and then record something extremely off-beat. Because there are risks to that. Destroying your image, having to find people that are on the same wavelength, having to justify the time and money it costs to record something weird and not marketable.
Sure, people make weird stuff once in a while, but very rarely, and generally it takes unique individuals that find some particular weird niche to work in, like Weird Al or Max Raabe. And even then they tend to pick something relatively tame and marketable and stick to that.
But AI can bypass all that, and that makes things interesting.
Look, I don't know the song so I can't say how novel it is, but to me, it completely misses the point if its made by a music generation model. The point of music is not to make a bunch of novel sounds. Music is a means by which a human can express themselves, the whole _point_ of art is human expression.
Art is subjective. It sounds like AI music did evoke an emotional response from OP, which IMO is also just as important of what we define as the purpose of art: evoking emotion and awe from consuming art. A connection is being made from the creator to the consumer. I view AI as merely another tool to that means.
Human expression with art can go both ways from producing and experiencing.
I don't know what to tell you, but me and my kid are having a blast writing ridiculous songs and plopping them with song descriptions and some of those make it to our drive playlists.
you can totally tell Claude to take some AI technical writing (which is, to be clear, writing where you explicitly need to not sound creative or interesting, and you need to maintain very strict "voice" [a term I only even know because claude explained it to me] so this is not a creative endeavor) and make it sound "less AI". At least working with opus 5.5, textual output already has a lot fewer of the colons and "load bearing" of a few months ago, and if a PR does have that kind of lingo I can just have Claude rewrite it "like a human" and it does great.
OP: I'm not surprised you/other people are able to get better output than me.
And I agree that "less AI" edit passes reduce a lot of the hallmarks, but I think these models truly struggle with expressing complicated ideas. Have Opus been good at that for you?
As a side effect having to read the code at least once inevitably makes it way shorter and usually much better.
Guess what: because I said "both", Opus decided I was looking to pick out exactly two of the issues. If I hadn't read that reasoning log, I would've remained oblivious and thought there were only two it could find.
We're in our own bubbles where a good part of HN population woke up to coding agents being good enough ~1 year ago, there's a group of folks that found out ~6 months before that, and then the people banging their heads on these a bit earlier than that. If you aren't using a coding agent everyday most people are just using these things to apply an instagram filter, or sort a grocery list. Muse is probably the closest thing to 'full automation' a lot of people are seeing for the first time.
Unfortunately I don't think the bubble that exists at the moment is on the promise of automating so much coding as trying to penetrate consumer use cases, which I think are still lacking and not reliable enough yet. As much as I use coding agents every day I still will not let a claw-like near a bank account or a credit card.
LLMs still mess up a lot if you just let them loose and don't guide what they do.
It's crazy realizing that Claude Code only started getting big in the last year or so. It feels so different now, with all the new models & tools we have to use. I hope you enjoy!
[1]: https://ben.stolovitz.com/posts/how_use_ai_oct_2025
> I still believe I use AI fairly typically, but I’ve had a notable change in background. Last October, I was an engineer on Microsoft’s Windows AI team. I am now a research engineer at Salesforce AI Research.
Priest wears robes.
I guess it’s one of those nonsensical automatic rules.
I think I would rather shoot myself in the head
I walked into a paint store recently and there was some interesting music playing on the PA. It was some sort of spanish-language 80s new wave I'd never heard before. It had a nice groove. I asked the guy at the counter about it and was surprised to find out it was AI.
So... was it as good as great music? No. But it beat the hell out of muzak. And it was genuinely novel in a way that pop music isn't. I will sacrifice a lot of pride for novelty.
For my part, I mostly dislike AI music. But if there was to be some AI music that I didn't already dislike for its content, then I would dislike it specifically for being AI. Call me close-minded if you will. Some people don't really like music at all. In general, I love music.
> And it was genuinely novel in a way that pop music isn't. I will sacrifice a lot of pride for novelty.
For one thing, "interesting" and "novel" are not particularly the point of art. An infinite TikTok feed of AI slop is in some sense infinitely interesting and novel.
But also, those concepts are subjective. Pop music has a ton of evolution and innovation if you break it down. Sure, not every hit is doing something clever, but plenty of them are. You might not find those features to be interesting but it takes ingenuity to stand out in an era where the barrier to entry is so low.
Controversial take: AI shows that people simply don't give a shit and just confirms that mass culture is a mistake and the death of everything that is good and sacred.
I saw a live band last week (daft punk meets prince), they wrote a song about Ai and used an auto tuner for it
AI music is a complete waste of compute. It exists only to further enrich an already wealthy stakeholder, and we should all be ashamed to have ended up in a place where it even exists.
And I think it can be uniquely fun, because it allows for the very rare combination of truly off-beat ideas with excellent execution.
In real life, it very rarely happens that somebody will spend a lifetime learning, gather a band, and then record something extremely off-beat. Because there are risks to that. Destroying your image, having to find people that are on the same wavelength, having to justify the time and money it costs to record something weird and not marketable.
Sure, people make weird stuff once in a while, but very rarely, and generally it takes unique individuals that find some particular weird niche to work in, like Weird Al or Max Raabe. And even then they tend to pick something relatively tame and marketable and stick to that.
But AI can bypass all that, and that makes things interesting.
>it was genuinely novel
Look, I don't know the song so I can't say how novel it is, but to me, it completely misses the point if its made by a music generation model. The point of music is not to make a bunch of novel sounds. Music is a means by which a human can express themselves, the whole _point_ of art is human expression.
Human expression with art can go both ways from producing and experiencing.
Bird's aren't making art when they sing, I still like listening to birds. Why can't the sounds AI make be in the same category.
2. Call it slop
3. Claim victory
I don't know what to tell you, but me and my kid are having a blast writing ridiculous songs and plopping them with song descriptions and some of those make it to our drive playlists.
And I agree that "less AI" edit passes reduce a lot of the hallmarks, but I think these models truly struggle with expressing complicated ideas. Have Opus been good at that for you?