About AI coding assistants duplicating code and rarely changing or deleting existing code.
Has this happened?
Yes 54 (45%)Not sure 24 (20%)No 41 (34%)
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 AI coding assistants duplicating code and rarely changing or deleting existing code.
Votes cast 1–2 October 2026: 100,590 votes from 9,694 people.
The most painful part is the “add instead of change/delete” habit. The real test for AI coding assistants isn’twhether they can generate code, but whether they can understand the existing system, reuse the right abstraction,remove bad code, and own the whole call chain after the change.