About whether coding with LLMs is like moving to higher-level languages such as Python.
Has this happened?
Yes 54 (53%)Not sure 15 (15%)No 33 (32%)
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 coding with LLMs is like moving to higher-level languages such as Python.
Votes cast 1–2 October 2026: 100,590 votes from 9,694 people.
That's not the same thing. LLMs don't just obscure low-level technical implementation details like Python does, they also obscure your business logic and many of its edge cases.
Letting a Python interpreter manage your memory is one thing because it's usually irrelevant, but you can't say the same thing about business logic. Encoding those precise rules and considering all of the gnarly real-world edge cases is what defines your software.
There are no "higher level details" in software development, those are in the domain of different jobs like project managers or analysts. Once AI can reliably translate fuzzy natural language into precise and accurate code, software development will simply die as a profession. Our jobs won't morph into something different - this is our job.