Goalposts

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

2023 Novembernradov

About whether LLMs could maintain legacy software such as the Pentagon's accounting systems.

The hard part of accounting systems is doing the requirements analysis (including interviewing humans who give inaccurate or incomplete answers) and writing detailed functional specifications which account for every possible edge case. No LLM can do that.

Once you have the detailed specifications the coding is relatively easy. Some of that can be partially automated using AI CASE tools, but that only gives a marginal improvement to overall project productivity.

An AI does requirements analysis for accounting systems, interviewing humans and writing specs covering every edge case.

Has this happened?

Yes 23 (22%)Not sure 38 (36%)No 44 (42%)

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