About whether AI could learn how software systems work from their behavior.
Has this happened?
Yes 80 (60%)Not sure 31 (23%)No 23 (17%)
Votes cast 1–2 October 2026: 100,590 votes from 9,694 people.
Hacker News has set AI a lot of challenges over the years. Which ones has it met?
About whether AI could learn how software systems work from their behavior.
Votes cast 1–2 October 2026: 100,590 votes from 9,694 people.
Software systems are the perfect data generating processes. They are often compositional and yet complex because of simple interactions blowing things up. And we have effectively infinite data so it's a good place to get started. It would be amazing if an AI could reverse engineer a backend of an app just based on using the product and maybe making some scaling assumptions. But we're not that good with loss functions yet.
Maybe someday we can have an AI watch our log streams and tell us the ideal architecture for our systems. Then the trick will be to generate fake log data for what we want to happen in general. Perhaps we can just keep it coarse grained and say the AI can fill in the rest. The future of systems architecture!
Even more interesting is Conway's law. What if an AI could tell you how best to organize your company?