from Hacker News

Ask HN: What are your honest thoughts on AI tools replacing programmers

by kurrupttt on 6/1/25, 2:39 AM with 9 comments

I've been coding since 9yo. Thats 2/3rds of my life. These days all I build is agents and ai tools using windsurf.

i find myself building some new niche tool almost daily. so the notion of ai "replacing programmers" seems kinda odd because most of my friends and I just still build stuff and jump in to tweak code here and there. our desire to build stuff and be on our IDEs every day still hasnt gone anywhere.

do you guys think we'll truly get to 0 manual coding or software engineering will slowly get reduced to infra/devops and high level architecture?

  • by byoung2 on 6/1/25, 2:55 AM

    I think the notion of what a programmer is will change. Programmers used to write punch cards, and then they wrote machine code, then code that had to be compiled, then interpreted code, and so on. It may just be that programmers will be paid to wrangle AI, or it may be that you use your skills to build tools out of AI agents. That's what excites me at the moment is building things that use AI agents to automate manual processes, and selling the service to others. This is more interesting than working for a big company as a software engineer.

  • by sargstuff on 6/1/25, 3:12 AM

    > i find myself building some new niche tool almost daily. so the notion of ai "replacing programmers" seems kinda odd because most of my friends and I just still build stuff and jump in to tweak code here and there. our desire to build stuff and be on our IDEs every day still hasnt gone anywhere.

    From scratch, try something in range of 1 million or more lines of code for basic functionality. aka OS, database management system, video editor, etc.

  • by austin-cheney on 6/1/25, 2:51 AM

    Why do people keep asking this? This question pops up on here almost everyday and the answers remain the same.