About Devin, the AI software engineer, and whether AI can replace developers.
Has this happened?
Yes 16 (13%)Not sure 23 (18%)No 86 (69%)
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 Devin, the AI software engineer, and whether AI can replace developers.
Votes cast 1–2 October 2026: 100,590 votes from 9,694 people.
Let's get realistic here - I just beat GPT-4 at tic tac toe, since it failed to block my 2/3 complete winning line ...
Sure, one day we'll have AGI, and one day AGI will replace many jobs that can be done in front of a computer.
In the meantime, SOTA AI appears to be an airline chatbot that gets the company sued for lying to the customer. This is just basic question answering, and it can't even get that right. Would you trust it to write the autopilot code to fly the airplane? Maybe to write a tiny bit of it - just code up one function, perhaps?
I sure as hell wouldn't, and when it can be trusted to write one function that meets requirements and has no bugs, it's still going to be a LONG way before it can replace the job of the developers who were given a task of "write us an autopilot".