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[return to "Tell HN: I write and ship code ~20–50x faster than I did 5 years ago"]
1. chrisj+76[view] [source] 2025-12-30 19:54:00
>>EGreg+(OP)
But you aren't writing code. You are getting a machine to do it.
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2. EGreg+tg[view] [source] 2025-12-30 20:56:43
>>chrisj+76
That could be said about compiling higher-level languages instead of rolling your own assembly and garbage collector. It's just working on a higher level. You're a lot more productive with, say, PHP than you are writing assembly.

I architect of it and go through many iterations. The machine makes mistakes, when I test I have to come back and work through the issues. I often correct the machine about stuff it doesn't know, or missed due to its training.

And ultimately I'm responsible for the code quality, I'm still in the loop all the time. But rather than writing everything by hand, following documentation and make a mistake, I have the machine do the code generation and edits for a lot of the code. There are still mistakes that need to be corrected until everything works, but the loop is a lot faster.

For example, I was able to port our MySQL adapter to PostGres AND Sqlite, something that I had been putting off for years, in about 3-5 hours total, including testing and bugfixes and massive refactoring. And it's still not in the main branch because there is more testing I want to have done before it's merged: https://github.com/Qbix/Platform/tree/refactor/DbQuery/platf...

Here is my first speedrun: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yg6UFyIPYNY

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3. chrisj+JC1[view] [source] 2025-12-31 10:54:05
>>EGreg+tg
> That could be said about compiling higher-level languages

You write the program as source code.

Prompting an LLM to cobble together lines from other people's work is not writing a program.

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4. tpmone+k6m[view] [source] 2026-01-07 02:33:22
>>chrisj+JC1
Does a director make a movie? Serious question. Can we say that Steven Spielberg made Jurassic Park? Can we say the George Lucas made Star Wars? Directors rarely act in their own movies, write their own scripts, operate the cameras, operate the lights, operate the mics, edit the final cuts, write the scores, play the scores, create the VFX, do the film printing or the marketing. They prompt Biological Thought Models to do those things and cobble the results together. Really nothing a director traditionally does is actually physically making a film.

And yet, I don't see a problem with saying directors made their movies. Sure, it was the work of a lot of talented individuals contributing collectively to produce the final product, and most of those individuals probably contributed more physical "creation" to the film than the director did. But the director is a film maker. So I wouldn't be so confident asserting that someone who coordinates and architects an application by way of various automation tools isn't still a programmer or "writing software"

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