Nobody knows how to build with AI yet

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Perceived Productivity & “Time Dilation”

  • Many describe a real sense of “time dilation”: they can kick off work with an agent between meetings and return to substantial progress, or juggle multiple projects in parallel while AIs run.
  • Some report major speedups (5–20x) for CRUD-style features, refactors, tests, and side projects; others say watching diffs and correcting in real time is faster than fully async “vibe coding.”
  • A cited METR study found devs felt 25% faster with AI but were actually ~19% slower, fueling skepticism that perceived flow ≠ real productivity.

Code Quality, Review, and Maintainability

  • Strong pushback on claims like “10k LOC reviewed in 5 minutes”: many think that’s either exaggerated or dangerous for anything serious.
  • Users report weird, hard‑to‑reason bugs, duplicated types, defensive clutter, and tests that effectively test nothing.
  • Several only trust AI for boilerplate, wiring, tests, and small changes, with humans still designing architecture and reviewing every change.
  • Concerns: security, accessibility, i18n/l10n, performance, long‑term extensibility, and technical debt in “vibe‑coded” codebases; some doubt these can be captured by prompts alone.

Workflows, Prompting, and “Context Engineering”

  • Success seems highly workflow‑dependent: small, well‑scoped tasks; strong specs; tests as oracles; and clear constraints (“don’t touch these files,” “no new types”) matter a lot.
  • People experiment with multi‑document “plans,” adversarial critics, project‑specific system prompts, MCP/tooling, and even git‑tracked “context” files.
  • Others find this overhead cancels any benefit: by the time prompts are precise enough, writing the code would have been faster.

Impact on Roles, Juniors, and the Job Market

  • Seniors enjoy offloading tedium and acting as “architect + code reviewer” for agents; some say this arrived at exactly the right point in their careers.
  • Anxiety is high about how juniors will learn fundamentals when the “stairs” (manual grunt work) are gone; analogies to calculators/IDEs/frameworks cut both ways.
  • Some predict fewer devs, more “AI orchestrators” managing many projects; others argue we’ll just be expected to do more in the same 8 hours, with eventual downward pressure on salaries.

Craft, Enjoyment, and Resistance

  • A sizeable camp dislikes this style entirely: they miss deep focus, understanding every line, and the joy of hand‑crafting; they don’t want to depend on or work with largely AI‑generated code.
  • Others find “micromanaging a very fast junior” surprisingly zen and empowering, especially for exploring alternative designs or unfamiliar stacks.
  • Several compare the hype to Bitcoin/web3 or FSD: impressive demos and niche wins, but far from replacing serious engineering—yet widely portrayed as inevitable.