Ask HN: Do we even need code anymore?
A Hacker News user questions whether code is still relevant, suggesting that no one looks at code anymore and that the process has reduced to converting English directly to binary.
Background
- "Ask HN" is a post type on Hacker News (HN), a tech community site run by Y Combinator, where users pose open questions for discussion.
- The post reflects a debate intensifying in 2024–2025: as AI coding assistants (GitHub Copilot, Claude, Cursor) become highly capable, many developers spend more time writing prompts and reviewing AI output than writing code themselves. Some argue that "source code" — human-written programming language — is becoming a transient intermediary that no one actually reads, with intent expressed in English and AI directly producing executable binaries.
- "English → Binary" is a provocative shorthand for a future where natural language replaces programming languages as the primary human input, making traditional coding skills obsolete. This touches on anxieties about developer job security, software reliability, and whether we can trust AI-generated code without human-readable source code to audit.