Essay 'AI Has No Wisdom and Neither Will You' ignites HN debate on vibe coding
A developer's blog post arguing AI-written code erodes maintainability and human skill tops Hacker News, splitting commenters between agreement and pushback.
What to know
- The essay claims AI cannot be trained to value code maintainability because its costs only surface months or years after the fact, unlike immediately measurable reward signals.
- It warns that developers who let AI write and read code for them will never build the intuition of an expert and will remain 'advanced beginners' indefinitely.
- The post drew a large Hacker News discussion (178 comments) split between developers who share the institutional-knowledge concern and others who call the claim unfalsifiable, outdated, or already a losing argument against AI-driven development.
The dispute Whether code maintainability is a measurable, provable casualty of AI coding tools or an unfalsifiable claim being asserted too early to judge. · positions read across 48 posts and comments
AI-assisted coding is eroding institutional knowledge and engineering skill, much like manufacturing outsourcing hollowed out domestic expertise.
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“The problem imo is the slow deterioration of institutional knowledge that offloading the mental task of wisdom gathering to AI is causing.”
NalNezumi · Hacker News ↗
The essay's claims about maintainability are unfalsifiable or premature given how new coding agents are.
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“We've had strong coding agents for less than a year. Anyone making such a definitive statement about how vibe-coded projects progress over time is basing it on guesswork, not evidence.”
sobiolite · Hacker News ↗
This genre of anti-AI-coding warning is repetitive, preachy, and unlikely to persuade anyone.
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“At least I did not find a new thought in that (granted, relatable) rant.”
hypfer · Hacker News ↗
Manual coding and even architecture design are already becoming obsolete; resisting this is a conservative, losing position.
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“As much as I'd love to believe it, it is now a conservative take. Sure, having a solid architecture in mind still matters right now, but manually writing code is completely unnecessary and, before long, even designing the architecture is…”
addag · Hacker News ↗
Alexandru Nedelcu Software developer, blog authordavedx Hacker News commenterNalNezumi Hacker News commenter
How it unfolded 3 developments, newest first · click a bar or a number to jump articlespostscomments
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Commenters split over whether the claim is provable or already obsolete
Hacker News commenters argued over whether maintainability can be measured at all, whether the essay's predictions are premature given how young agentic coding tools are, and whether resisting AI-written code is now a losing, 'conservative' position.
“We've had strong coding agents for less than a year. Anyone making such a definitive statement about how vibe-coded projects progress over time is basing it on guesswork, not evidence.”
— sobiolite -
From what I understand, the things that empirically make code accessible to LLMs are the same things that make it accessible to humans - good documentation, consistent structure and style, robust test suites, use of well-known idioms, and so on. From the theoretical perspective, it also makes sense that many code maintenance benchmarks and…
2 more of the top 3 · 41 posts in this stretch
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I believe many of us here knows that the idea of a simple prompt to make something more than a sketch or a prototype don’t really work.Unless you steer and understand what an LLM will produce, you will end up with something that possible ”works” that has no future plans baked in. Suno generated music has a very unpleasant feeling of sounding like…
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> In the future we will see more and more companies proudly boasting their “NO-AI” policy as a competitive advantage. And they will be right. I appreciate the prediction, but I think it’s definitely wrong, even though I’m not someone who advocates against reading the code. I don’t know how to make it testable, but I’m confident that the use of AI…
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Post hits Hacker News front page, cross-posted to Lobsters
The essay was submitted to Hacker News (score 138, 178 comments) and independently cross-posted to Lobsters and syndicated via the HN Frontpage RSS feed the same morning.
“Fact is, vibe-coded projects devolve over time into an unmaintainable mess.”
— Alexandru Nedelcu, blog author · source -
There's a continuum between "vibe coded by someone with no technical knowledge or inclination" and "hand written domain driven design development". You can absolutely use coding agents AND have maintainable code. But yes, the coding agents will not magically make everything maintainable if you don't tell them to."Code maintainability and good…
2 more of the top 3 · 7 posts in this stretch
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> You can absolutely use coding agents AND have maintainable code. But yes, the coding agents will not magically make everything maintainable if you don't tell them to.The trillion dollar question is how you do this, if your employees do not care (they are optimising for salary & time spent not code quality) and you have no way of telling apart AI…
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Tbf, at this point, this has been said ad-nauseam.At least I did not find a new thought in that (granted, relatable) rant."This is bad and you are bad" requires people to not defend their reality through rationalization, but the point we're at with AI right now is driven by exactly that. So this is at best highly ineffective at reaching the people…
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Nedelcu publishes essay warning vibe coding produces unmaintainable code
The blog post argues AI models cannot be trained to value long-term code maintainability because its costs only appear months or years later, and warns that developers who rely on AI to write and read code will never develop expert intuition.
Also covered reported alongside — the timeline has no entry for these yet
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2 outlets AI Has No Wisdom and Neither Will You
first by HN Best, 1d ago · also HN Frontpage
What people are saying 18 voices from 2 sites · best of 48 · verbatim
- How, concretely, should code maintainability be measured if not by existing metrics like cyclomatic complexity?
- Will companies actually adopt 'no-AI' policies as a competitive/quality advantage, as the essay predicts?
- Yesterday
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We tried to explain that simpler is better, since it saves on CPU time and RAM; and shorter is better, since it is easier to maintain and definitionally accrues less technical debt. Managers have not stopped operating feature factories, though; as long as they don't have to understand computational complexity, they will merely complain that their…
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Hm. True that, if these metrics are outside the bell curve, they **do** matter. I agree. My initial statement is wrong, in absolute terms.
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I find the basic argument slippery because it's generic: we all agree that there's an optimum between quality and verbosity. But that's like saying we like _beautiful things_. Where is this optimal range in the spectrum? Does it overlap for the vast majority of programmers? I doubt it. ps. There's a quote to which I was alluding to in my previous…
- Sep 22
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Nothing, because this isn’t really how LLMs work anymore. For some time, labs have been using coding tests in simulated environments for reinforcement learning as part of post-training. It would be easy to have the reinforcement learning prioritize shorter outputs. Computational complexity is more involved, but you could measure that and make it…
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So what's your disagreement with the comment you replied to above, then…?
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https://discourse.haskell.org/t/how-to-keep-enjoying-programming-in-a-world-of-llms/14705 was an interesting post on trying to get the good parts of llm assisted coding without losing that wisdom. Seems like it requires discipline though (so hopefully the slot machine theory of llms is wrong)
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I think we were telling them that these metrics don't measure the performance of individual developers. I don't know anyone who would disagree that there is an optimal region for verbosity and complexity.
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Didn't we spent the last twenty years trying to explain to managers who wanted to quantify performance that these metrics don't matter?
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There are also objective measures, such as computational complexity of algorithms or lines of code, under which chatbots tend to emit bad code. We have a good explanation for this: chatbot output is definitionally mediocre and the median hunk of wild code has bad computational complexity.
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I'm extremely bullish about AI-assisted development in general, so take that as a grain of salt. I do agree with the foundational premise that AI is not very good at writing _human_-maintainable code. I put _human_ in italics because the author does not state this but it is heavily implied that is what they mean. But writing code that both AI and…
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I think (hope?) our industry will reach some equilibrium between fully agentic development and reviewing/hand tuning the code.Personally for my job I struggle to justify writing code by hand. Agents are much better at typing the code, reading the code, finding patterns and discovering bugs. They don't have my knowledge and my background so the…
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Most software is not good, using these rules. And that is written by human developers. The problem is that most software developers have less than 5 years experience. The community doubles every 5 years. Experience is scarce. So AI, learning from all the stuff online, does not learn great code, it learns from available code. You can make it…
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In the beginning of August 2026, I started a hobby project: building a MongoDB-like database. I have 20 years of industry experience and a master's degree in computer science, so I followed a disciplined, spec-driven development model using Claude, Kiro, Qwen Coder, and Cursor.The first version was built in about two weeks of part time work. Then…
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Maybe I've just given up, or maybe I'm a realist? But I fully believe AI will just...catch up with everything?There's so much money in it right now. There's such a momentum. There are zero incentives to slow down for those that are in charge.I've accepted that in 5-10 years, the vast majority of human devs. and engineers will not touch a single…
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This analogy really only works assuming that maintaining [insert company]'s institutional expertise requires N engineers to maintain individual lines of code manually.This is already showing not to be true with AI. Institutional knowledge is not the same as knowing how to implement low-level software details. Even today, every company does not…
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> I feel like you could take all the handwavy comment that are made today to dismiss this caution, and find equal dismissal back then when companies were actively outsourcing the manufacturing.Absolutely people were extremely dismissive to anyone saying that we're losing the ability to make things in this country!There were all these theories like…
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As far as maintainability is concerned, have we all forgotten the 12 Factor App in the age of AI?https://12factor.net/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twelve-Factor_App_methodologyKevin Hoffman expanded on that with the 15-factor app: https://developer.ibm.com/articles/15-factor-applications/Mind you I may be dating myself as I was first introduced…
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The problem imo is the slow deterioration of institutional knowledge that offloading the mental task of wisdom gathering to AI is causing.One interesting comparison is to the history of manufacturing. West/America decided one day that manufacturing would be cheaper to outsource and better (short term) profit was to be made by outsourcing it all to…