About whether LLMs must out-code human teams to be worth their cost.
Has this happened?
Yes 55 (46%)Not sure 29 (24%)No 36 (30%)
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 LLMs must out-code human teams to be worth their cost.
Votes cast 1–2 October 2026: 100,590 votes from 9,694 people.
It's pretty obvious to me that this LLM business won't be economically feasible until it can actually produce better code than a team of humans could without it. The reason programmers are paid so highly is because their work is incredibly productive and valuable. One programmer can enable and improve the work of many hundreds of other people. Cost cutting on the programmer isn't worth it because it'll create greater losses in other places. Hence the high salaries. Every saving you make on the programmer is magnified a hundred times in losses elsewhere.