[HN Gopher] Ape Coding [fiction]
___________________________________________________________________
Ape Coding [fiction]
Author : rmsaksida
Score : 151 points
Date : 2026-03-01 14:07 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (rsaksida.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (rsaksida.com)
| gas9S9zw3P9c wrote:
| "Humans are now writing code in strict specification language so
| that AI agents have completely context and don't mistakes. This
| specification language is called C' and has led to a whopping 20%
| reduction of code. 1000 of C++ code can be expressed in no more
| than 800 lines of specification C' code written by humans"
| hanifbbz wrote:
| WTF is this?! Sattire? AI generated propaganda? I honestly don't
| get it. Can OP elaborate why it's a good content worthy of
| people's time? Thanks in advance.
| rmsaksida wrote:
| It's fiction. I did not use AI to write it. On whether it's
| worthy of people's time... well, I'm not presumptuous enough to
| say. :)
| jjcc wrote:
| Ape writing? (kidding)
| jshmrsn wrote:
| I enjoyed reading it. Whether one believes the future will
| look like this fictional/hypothetical one, it encourages the
| reader to think about what would need to become true for this
| future to be plausible.
| serious_angel wrote:
| Who knows? 5 people? 10? Only those who actually read it, and
| still not sure. Did they read it? Or did they also believe
| it's written by AI? I tried to believe it's written by a
| human when noticed its footer's note. It was hard to believe
| knowing my fear of today's trends, where many read is an
| empty dark where human time is voided. Yet, what is the main
| idea behind it then, nowadays, when just a few will actually
| read it?
|
| Considering, how some modern attitude works for certain
| people, and how much power of trends and socials may offer,
| such terms get boosted over... and you just hope and keep
| believing in people...
|
| Related: https://medium.com/@nathanladuke/b56da64a09ee (To
| Those Who Comment Their Opinion Without Reading the Whole
| Story... I was shocked at how many people simply read the
| title and then posted their opinion on the whole article...)
| rmsaksida wrote:
| Yes, I understand what you're saying perfectly. And I had
| similar thoughts while I was writing this. I do not want to
| talk too much about the process of writing it, or the
| content itself, because I feel it's not right for me (the
| author) to talk about it. But I'd like to make it clear
| that I wrote this myself, and that many of the questions
| and points people have raised here have also been in my
| mind, and it was my intention to elicit this type of
| thinking. Thank you and all others for the comments - I
| really appreciate it, even the very negative ones. This is
| the first time I published something online and I'm very
| happy that it resonated with people.
| AreShoesFeet000 wrote:
| [flagged]
| dang wrote:
| Please don't cross into personal attack, no matter how
| wrongheaded another comment is or you feel it is.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| raxskle wrote:
| The merits and demerits of this product vary from person to
| person, and I dare not make a definite assertion
| the__alchemist wrote:
| > "Autonomous Proxies for Execration, or APEs," Pluto said. > "By
| typing in a few simple commands, I can spawn an arbitrary number
| of APEs in the cloud," Pluto said. > "I have hand-tuned the inner
| loops to the point where a single APE can generate over a
| megaBraden of wide-spectrum defamation. The number would be much
| larger, of course, if I didn't have to pursue a range of
| strategies to evade spam filters, CAPTCHAs, and other defenses."
|
| "Have you tried this out yet?" Corvallis asked.
|
| "Not against a real subject," Pluto said. "I invented a
| fictitious subject and deployed some APEs against it, just to see
| how it worked in the wild. The fictitious subject has already
| attracted thousands of death threats," he added with a note of
| pride.
|
| "You mean, from people who saw the defamatory posts seeded by the
| APEs and got really mad at this person who doesn't even exist."
| YarickR2 wrote:
| Every joke has a bit of a joke, as they say. I'm proudly ape-
| coding two of my current projects.
| delichon wrote:
| I am ape writing this post after ape cooking breakfast, and then
| I'll go for an ape walk. In the future, maybe by Thursday, I can
| have agents do all of that and relax.
| robby_w_g wrote:
| > In the future, maybe by Thursday, I can have agents do all of
| that and relax.
|
| Wall-E seems like it's getting closer to reality every day
| patrickmay wrote:
| If you're selling Ape Coding merchandise, send me the link!
| mvanbaak wrote:
| I am reading the comments to see if there's a merch shop haga
| lyu07282 wrote:
| Why has nobody mentioned yet how dangerous this really is? Have
| we all forgotten the great Datacenter burnings of 2031? The APEs
| are one step away from becoming fully fledged Luddite terrorists.
| Artisanal software is unamerican just like President Barron said
| the other day on his Twitch stream.
| hparadiz wrote:
| If everything is C why not generate the entire bootloader to
| kernel stack with programs specifically tailored to the user.
| saulpw wrote:
| Tokens cost money; bugs get created and have to be found and
| fixed. Mature software has been more valuable than new software
| since 1946.
| tshaddox wrote:
| I'm a fan of the term "human slop," which I've seen pop up
| recently regarding certain tech company feuds on Twitter.
| theusus wrote:
| AI can produce thousands of line of code. But that's not the
| goal.
| segmondy wrote:
| What is the goal?
| sph wrote:
| What is art? What is the point of anything? Why write code
| instead of eating bananas all day? There is no answer to your
| question.
| saghm wrote:
| Producing code that does what's intended. The metric is fuzzy
| and based on the usage of the software, not the scale of
| lines of code. The extent of the importance of the code
| itself is that I'm practice software tends not to be "one and
| done", so you need to be able to go back and modify it to fix
| bugs, add features, etc., and it turns out that's usually
| hard when the code is sloppy. Those needs still should stem
| from the sandal actual user experience though, or else we've
| lost the plot by treating the mechanism as the goal itself
| shepherdjerred wrote:
| Would my user rather have a program that works 100% in 2
| weeks, or a program that works 80% in one day?
|
| When the user needs a change made, would they prefer I
| spend another two weeks extending my perfect program, or
| throw a few LLMs at their sloppy code and have it done in a
| day?
| msteffen wrote:
| I liked this a lot in retrospect.
|
| I really like to understand the practice of software engineering
| by analogy to research mathematics (like, no one ever asks
| mathematicians to estimate how long it will take to prove
| something...).
|
| Something I think software engineers can take from math right
| now: years of everyone's math education is spent doing things
| that computers have always been able to do trivially--arithmetic,
| solving simple equations, writing proofs that would just be
| `simp` in Lean--and no one wrings their hands over it. It's an
| accepted part of the learning process.
| amelius wrote:
| So we are apes now?
|
| It's so great to be alive in this time of of dehumanizing AI.
| johanvts wrote:
| Are we not men!?
| Freak_NL wrote:
| We're certainly devo(lving).
| nehal3m wrote:
| ...But humans are apes taxonomically?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_taxonomy#History
| amelius wrote:
| Yes, we're animals too, I suppose.
| pbohun wrote:
| It's not ape coding. It's skill coding. People who don't have the
| skill to do math and logic ask others to do it for them.
|
| The reason we have programming languages is the same reason we
| have musical notation or math notation. It is a far more concise
| and precise way of communicating than using natural languages.
|
| We could write music using natural language, but no one does
| because a single page of music would require dozens of pages of
| natural language to describe the same thing.
| justinhj wrote:
| This is why I never use a calculator. Since my school days I
| have the skill to do long division. Why hit the sin button when
| I have the skill to write out a Taylor series expansion? For
| many other purposes I have the skill to use Newton Raphson
| methods to calculate values that mostly work.
|
| Those who use a calculator simply don't have these skills.
| aqua_coder wrote:
| There is a notable difference between say, calculating long
| division through a calculator compared to prompting an AI to
| calculate the derivative of a simple continuous function. one
| requires _understanding_ of the function, while the other
| just skips the understanding and returns the required
| derivative. One is just a means to skip labor intensive and
| repetitive actions, while the other is meant to skip the
| entire point of _why_ you are even calculating in the first
| place. What is the point of dividing two numbers if you don't
| even understand the reason behind it ?
| aspenmartin wrote:
| I'm not quite sure I understand the logic of this and how
| people don't see that these claims of "well now everyone is
| going to be dumber because they don't learn" has been a
| refrain literally every time a major technological /
| Industrial Revolution happens. Computers? The internet?
| Calculators?
|
| The skills we needed before are just no longer as relevant.
| It doesn't mean the world will get dumber, it will adapt to
| the new tooling and paradigm that we're in. There are
| always people who don't like the big paradigm change, who
| are convinced it's the end of the "right" way to do things,
| but they always age terribly.
|
| I find I learn an incredible amount from using AI + coding
| agents. It's a _different_ experience, and I would argue a
| much more efficient one to understand your craft.
| justinhj wrote:
| 100%. I have been learning so much faster as the models
| get better at both understanding the world and how to
| explain it me at whatever level I am ready for.
|
| Using AI as just a generator is really missing out on a
| lot.
| pbohun wrote:
| You probably also don't use a calculator because it uses a
| scary language called arabic numerals. Why write 123,456 when
| you could write out in english: One Hundred Twenty-Three
| Thousand Four Hundred Fifty-Six? English is your programming
| language and also your math language, right?
| soulofmischief wrote:
| I hope this comment is sarcastic.
|
| LLMs are able to ingest numbers. And not just Arabic
| numerals; Did you know that there are other kinds of number
| systems?
|
| Believe it or not, they also ingest multimedia. You don't
| need the English language to talk to a language model.
| Anything can be a language; you can communicate using only
| images.
|
| And for that matter, modern LLMs are great at abstract math
| (and like anything else the results still need
| proofreading).
| RaftPeople wrote:
| > _This is why I never use a calculator._
|
| I always use the calculator.
|
| But, because the numbers that get returned aren't always the
| right numbers, I try to approximate the answer in my head or
| with paper and pencil to kind of make sure it's in the ball
| park.
|
| Also, sometimes it returns digits that don't actually exist,
| and it's pretty insistent that the digit is correct. If I
| catch it early I just re-run the equation but there is a
| special button where I can tell it that it used a digit that
| does not actually exist.
|
| Sometimes, for complex ones, it tells me it's trying to
| calculate and provides some details about how it's going
| about it and keeps going and going and going, for those ones
| I just reboot the calculator.
| lioeters wrote:
| Solution for a hallucinating calculator: get a second
| unreliable calculator to verify the work of the first one.
| This message brought to you by a trillion dollars in
| investment desperately trying to replace the labor force
| with pseudo-intelligent calculators.
|
| Also, the calculator may refuse to process certain
| operation deemed to be offensive or against the interest of
| the corporate-state.
|
| Not to forget, the calculator consumes so much processing
| power that most people are unable to run it at home, so you
| need a subscription service to access general-purpose
| calculation.
| skeledrew wrote:
| Meanwhile those who use a calculator merely hit that sin
| button and get on with the actual problem at hand, and life
| in general.
|
| Strongly suspect this is sarcasm, but if it isn't, I applaud
| your... gusto? Or whatever it is you have going on here.
| ssivark wrote:
| Bad analogy. The things I delegate to a calculator, I'm
| _absolutely sure_ I understand well (and could debug if need
| be). These are also very _legible_ skills that are easy to
| remind myself by re-reading the recipe -- so I 'm not too
| worried about skills "atrophying".
| skeledrew wrote:
| > It is a far more concise and precise way of communicating
| than using natural languages.
|
| No. We have programming languages because reading and writing
| binary/hexadecimal is extremely painful to nigh on impossible
| for humans. And over the years we got better and better
| languages, from Assembly to C to Python, etc. Natural language
| was always the implicit ultimate goal of creating programming
| languages, and each step toward it was primarily hindered by
| the need to ensure correctness. We still aren't quite there
| yet, but this is pretty close.
| boomskats wrote:
| It's funny that you mention music and notation: sheet music is
| very compact for musical absolutes like pitch/rhythm/harmony,
| but a huge part of what we care about with music is nuance,
| which doesn't reduce cleanly to symbols. Hence there are plenty
| of words in musical notation that try to describe the desired
| characteristics of performance, that can't be otherwise encoded
| into that notation. For example, "with feeling".
|
| That reminds me of an argument on here a while back: where I
| said I wished Spotify let you filter tracks by presence of
| pitch-correction or autotune. This wasn't because I thought
| autotune was 'bad' or modern artists were 'fake', but because
| sometimes I wanted to listen to vocals as a raw performance -
| intonation, stability, phrasing - I wanted the option of
| listening to recordings that let me appreciate the _skill_
| possessed by the artists that recorded them.
|
| I got _absolutely destroyed_ in that comments section, with
| people insisting i'm a snob, that I'm disrespectful, bigoted
| towards modern artists, there's no way i can actually hear the
| difference, and if i cant why does it even matter, and anyway
| everyone uses it now because studio time is expensive and it's
| so much cheaper than trying to get that perfect take. People
| got so angry, I got a couple of DMs on Twitter even. All the
| while I struggled to articulate or justify why I personally
| value the _skill_ of exceptional raw vocal performance - what I
| considered to be performance "with feeling".
|
| But, I had to come to terms with the fact that anyone can sing
| now - no-one can tell the difference, so the skill generally
| isn't valued any more. Oh, you spent your entire life learning
| to sing? You studied it? Because you loved music? Sorry dude, I
| dunno what to say. I guess you'll have to find another way to
| stand out. You could try losing some weight. Maybe show some
| skin.
| avaer wrote:
| "Aping in" in crypto means (meant?) buying crypto without doing
| any research.
|
| I know it's not what the thought piece is about, but it's equally
| accurate to say engineers are "aping in" on AI coding without
| doing any research. Very much the same vibe, my anti-AI friends
| suddenly flipped their tune to shill slopped together apps.
|
| I expect it to go about as well as it did in crypto.
| blurbleblurble wrote:
| Who's still here in 2026
| BrianDGLS92 wrote:
| This made me lol
| andai wrote:
| I call it Tradcoding. Not using AI for anything. (You just copy-
| paste from StackOverflow, as our forefathers once did ;)
|
| I also have two levels "beneath" vibe coding:
|
| - Power Coding: Like power armor, you describe chunks of code in
| English and it's built. Here you outsource syntax and stdlib, but
| remain in control of architecture and data flow.
|
| - Backseat Coding: Like vibe coding but you keep peeking at the
| code and complaining ;)
|
| - Vibe Coding: Total yolo mode. What's a code?
| mikepurvis wrote:
| I feel like this distinction isn't made often or clearly
| enough. AI as a superpowered autocomplete is far more useful to
| me than trying to one-shot entire programs or modules.
| samoit wrote:
| I always thought that ape coding is what we call vibe-coding
| nowadays. Maybe the write of the article (maybe an ai generated
| blog?) misunderstood the terms.
| jayd16 wrote:
| It's pretty strange to me that we imagine a world where AI can
| handle every problem but we still talk about code. It's like how
| the Jetson's had bulky TVs.
|
| You don't talk about all the assembly high level languages make,
| or at least it's no longer how people view things. We don't say
| "look at this assembly I compiled." Instead the entire concept
| fades to the back.
| mvanbaak wrote:
| > You don't talk about all the assembly high level languages
| make, or at least it's no longer how people view things. We
| don't say "look at this assembly I compiled." Instead the
| entire concept fades to the back.
|
| Some still do. Os and compiler devs to name a few
| moregrist wrote:
| > You don't talk about all the assembly high level languages
| make, or at least it's no longer how people view things.
|
| Speak for yourself. I routinely look at assembly when worrying
| about performance, and occasionally drop into assembly for
| certain things. Compilers are a tool, not a magic wand, and
| tools have limits.
|
| Much like LLMs. My experience with Claude Code is that it gets
| significantly worse the further you push it from the mean of
| its training set. Giving it guidance or writing critical "key
| frame" sections by hand keep it on track.
|
| People who think this is the end of looking at or writing code
| clearly work on very different problems than I do.
| djha-skin wrote:
| I would probably just call it _hand coding_ , as we say we use
| _hand tools_ in wood working. Many do this for fun, but knowing
| the hand tools also makes you a better woodworker.
|
| It's an interesting question: Will coding turn out to be more
| like landscaping, where (referring to the practice specifically
| of cutting grass) _no one_ uses hand tools (to a first
| approximation)? Or it will it be more like woodworking, where
| everyone at least _knows_ where a Stanley hand plane is in their
| work shop?
| rnimmer wrote:
| Can't wait to sell my artisinal hand-crafted software at the
| farmer's market.
|
| Humor aside, long-handed programming is losing its ability to
| compete in an open market. Automate or be left behind. This
| will become increasingly true of many fields, not just
| software.
| philipallstar wrote:
| I think this is going to be very prescient! Just as Baristas died
| out once we got machines that could make coffee from powders.
| lioeters wrote:
| People also stopped ape-walking after the invention of the
| bicycle.
| ghm2199 wrote:
| I would call it code-plumber. It's like a plumber who are today
| socio-economocally very distinct from architects, civil and
| structural engineers.
|
| They will have very narrow to zero understanding -- don't need it
| to fix -- of shear forces, navier stokes.
|
| They will command high rates if labor is limited(a plumber in
| Indonesia will commande lower ppp adjusted hourly rates than
| America). CS education become a subset of applied math since
| graduate hiring of code-plumber will require a narrower
| certificate to fix an AI system -- which works very much like how
| plumber working to fix a building leak is different from a person
| fixing a water pipe burst under a road.
|
| A few AI systems will become dominant, That should be a mix of
| Anthropics and your Googles. They will hire code plumbers to
| plumb together all the things they provide.
|
| You don't have to use much brain at all as a code-plumber. You
| become a remote journeyman logging in and plumbing with given
| tools, making sure there is low back pressure(a term where load
| on future plumbers interacting/fixing with ai decreases) and the
| like.
| 0xcafefood wrote:
| I can't tell if yourr comparison to plumbers who don't
| understand theory (Navier-Stokes) is supposed to apply to "ape
| coders" who write code by hand or to "vibe coders" who
| outsource their understanding.
| g-b-r wrote:
| This is meant to insult AI skeptics, let's not pretend to be
| idiots.
|
| It should be flagged and taken down.
| rmsaksida wrote:
| That is not what this is meant as.
| unconed wrote:
| >Despite the quick spread of agentic coding, institutional
| inertia, affordability, and limitations in human
| neuroplasticity were barriers to universal adoption of the
| new technology.
|
| Blaming lack of adoption purely on regressive factors follows
| the same frame that AI firms set. It isn't very effective
| satire for that reason.
|
| It couldn't be that there is something essential and
| elementary that is wrong with the output, no... all these
| experienced experts are just troglodites and wrong and we
| should instead tag along with the people who offloaded the
| parts of their work they found tough to a machine the first
| chance they got.
|
| There's no such thing as ape coding. There's still just
| coding, and vibe coding.
| ylee wrote:
| > This is meant to insult AI skeptics, let's not pretend to be
| idiots.
|
| Only an idiot would read the piece in that way.
|
| >It should be flagged and taken down.
|
| Even if it really did "insult AI skeptics" (and, again, no one
| with any reasonable ability to comprehend wit and satire would
| take it that way), how is that justification to get it "flagged
| and taken down"?!?
| BrianDGLS92 wrote:
| > Everything in this website was written by a human
| Dansvidania wrote:
| i don't understand the stance of the post and it being the first
| in the blog (congrats on getting this hot on your first post) I
| am unable to further investigate.
|
| Is it sci-fi like writing from the perspective of a future
| person?
|
| It sounds like someone trying to make assumption sounds as fact.
| Not a fan.
| Philpax wrote:
| It is presented as a Wikipedia article from the future
| describing a subculture of tomorrow. See also
| https://qntm.org/mmacevedo for another example of this genre.
| Jolter wrote:
| I assume you didn't make it to the last paragraph, where they
| put the punchline.
| thorum wrote:
| Ape thinking is a cognitive practice where a human deliberately
| solves problems with their own mind. Practitioners of ape
| thinking will typically author thoughts by thinking them with
| their own brain, using neurons and synapses.
|
| The term was popularized when asking a computer to do it for you
| became the dominant form of cognition. "Ape thinking" first
| appeared in online communities as derogatory slang, referring to
| humans who were unable to outsource all their thinking to a
| computer. Despite the quick spread of asking a computer to do it
| for you, institutional inertia, affordability, and limitations in
| human complacency were barriers to universal adoption of the new
| technology.
| masswerk wrote:
| The slogan of _ape thinking_ (deliberately adjusted for machine
| readability): "Not AI, not machine generated slop <em-dash>
| genuine human intelligence."
| layer8 wrote:
| Arguably, it's the LLMs that are doing the aping, and hence the
| ape-coding.
|
| In that picture, aping is probably a step up from stochastic
| parroting.
| lateforwork wrote:
| > _The central view of ape coding proponents was that software
| engineered by AIs did not match the reliability of software
| engineered by humans_
|
| That's not the reason to do ape coding. AI generated code is not
| innovative. If you want to build something that no one has built
| anything similar to then you have to ape code.
|
| See Chris Lattner's blog where he explains the limitations of AI:
| https://www.modular.com/blog/the-claude-c-compiler-what-it-r...
| g9yuayon wrote:
| I like the Chinese alternative better: Gu Fa Bian Cheng . It
| feels like playful self-deprecation, suggesting old-school,
| handcrafted coding with a wink.
|
| Ape coding sounds harsher and more insulting, implying mindless
| or sloppy work rather than humor.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| "Ancient programming", for those who don't read Chinese. (I had
| to use Google Translate.)
| ncr100 wrote:
| Anyone else bothered by ape being overwhelmingly derogatorily
| slang for black people?
|
| Seems like it's a doubly offensive term.
|
| Are there better terms, less encumbered by bigotry, while still
| covering the "meat space" quality to this development approach?
| yomismoaqui wrote:
| So, are we doing fan-fiction now?
| effdee wrote:
| I prefer the term "classic coding".
| shepherdjerred wrote:
| I think this piece makes an excellent point.
|
| Maybe the LLMs today are deeply flawed and cannot replace
| programmers. But, one day, LLMs (or some other AI approach)
| _will_ be successful in replacing programmers. It might not be
| this year or the year after.
|
| I do however feel pretty confident in saying that there will be
| few programmers in 2076. This piece will look quite prescient.
|
| It's just like how we say "can you imagine programming on a
| punchcard?"
| umairnadeem123 wrote:
| NGL the flaw in this piece is the same flaw in every "AI will
| replace X" argument - it assumes the bottleneck was ever the
| typing.it wasn't. the bottleneck is knowing what to build and
| why.I use AI agents for probably 80% of my code output now and
| IMO i'm more productive than ever, but only because i spent years
| "ape coding" first and can immediately tell when the agent is
| heading somewhere stupid. the people i see struggling with AI
| coding are exactly the ones who skipped that part. tbf the
| calculator analogy that keeps coming up in this thread is
| backwards - nobody is arguing you don't need to understand math
| to use a calculator. that's literally the point. you DO need to
| understand it, which is why "ape coding" isn't going away as some
| niche hobby.it's the prerequisite
| gwern wrote:
| Naturally, when hobbyists spend a lot of time in a single block
| to get results (as they are unable to parallelize or meaningfully
| coordinate over multiple invocations of themselves, due to
| lacking key cognitive capabilities such as embeddings), they
| refer to it as 'going ape'.
| ylee wrote:
| >The main value of modern ape coding appears to be recreational.
| Ape coders manifest high levels of engagement during coding
| sessions and report feelings of relaxation after succeeding in
| (self-imposed) coding challenges. Competitive ape coding is also
| popular, with top ranked ape coders being relatively well-known
| in their communities.
|
| I have never been paid to write code, and my formal CS education
| is limited to AP Computer Science, and a one-credit Java class in
| college. I wrote 20 years ago a backup script implementing Mike
| Rubel's insight
| <http://www.mikerubel.org/computers/rsync_snapshots/> about using
| `rsync` and hard links to create snapshots backups. It's
| basically my own version of `rsnapshot`. I have deployed it
| across several of my machines. Every so often I fix a bug or add
| a feature. Do I need to do it given `rsnapshot`'s existence? No.
| Is it fun to work on it? Yes.
|
| (I've over the years restored individual files/directories often
| enough from the resulting backups to have reasonable confidence
| in the script's effectiveness, but of course one never knows for
| certain until the day everything gets zapped.)
| satisfice wrote:
| It's known as hand-coding. We've had this term for many years.
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(page generated 2026-03-01 23:01 UTC)