About whether AI can do deep reasoning and expert-level error detection in code.
Has this happened?
Yes 66 (67%)Not sure 13 (13%)No 19 (19%)
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 can do deep reasoning and expert-level error detection in code.
Votes cast 1–2 October 2026: 100,590 votes from 9,694 people.
AI is not good enough yet for anything requiring deep reasoning, mission-critical work, error detection at a human-expert level, or handling unpredictable edge cases.
It just talks like it's very smart, and humans apparently have a bias for persuasive communication skills. It's also very fast, which humans also think indicates general intelligence. But it's not, and that's why most LLM tools are author-focused, so that a human expert can catch errors.
The way you know fully autonomous driving is nowhere near ready is by noticing we don't even trust robots to do fully autonomous cooking and cleaning. Similarly, let's see it understand and refactor a massive codebase first.