"Coding is NOT solved": veteran engineer's rebuttal hits #2 on Hacker News
rseroter · x · 2026-10-02
Veteran reliability engineer Alex Ewerlöf published "Coding is NOT solved," pushing back on the narrative that "LLMs can write decent code" and engineering is now about "taste." The post reached #2 on Hacker News (473 points, 476 comments) with unusually positive feedback.
Key arguments: anyone who has run software in production at scale knows maintenance, reliability, security, and scalability — the non-functional requirements — are the majority of the cost, and cheaper creation doesn't change that. Even functional requirements aren't solved, with a Dunning-Kruger effect where those who don't read the output are most confident in it. Ewerlöf stresses he's not anti-AI — an early adopter who built his own harness and teaches these topics — but rejects the "token sellers'" narrative. Sharer rseroter disagrees with many points but calls it a reasoned, worthwhile read.
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