Code is clay now: HN debates the shift in software craft in the AI era
albertodenia · hn · 2026-10-19
A personal essay, "Code is clay now," sparked discussion on Hacker News. Its core metaphor: in the AI coding era, code has become clay — developers shape software through intent and iteration instead of line-by-line writing, making rewrites cheap and shifting the process from design-then-implement to shape-and-reshape. The thread debates whether this erodes engineering judgment and what it means for maintainability.
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