Goalposts

Hacker News has set AI a lot of challenges over the years. Which ones has it met?

2022 Februarydiehunde

About whether AlphaCode and Copilot will make programming obsolete.

My bet would be that it will never happen in a reasonable time frame. And also by that logic, writing that "documentation/spec" would just mean learning a new programming language the AI engine can parse making it as useful as a compiler. Anyone who has been writing and designing software for a while knows the cycle is way more complex than take some input and write code.

Let me know when the AI engine is able to do complex refactoring or adding features that keeps backwards compatibility, find a bug in a giant codebase by debugging a test case or write code that's performant but also maintainable.

An AI does complex refactoring, adds backward-compatible features, or finds bugs in a giant codebase by debugging a test case.

Has this happened?

Yes 85 (78%)Not sure 16 (15%)No 8 (7%)

Votes cast 1–2 October 2026: 100,590 votes from 9,694 people.