Yes, and
- ID
- 33519
- Status
- summarized
- Published
- 08 Oct 2026, 5:48 PM
- Fetched
- 09 Oct 2026, 2:57 PM
- Provider
- Hacker News
- Category
- dev-community
- Original URL
- https://htmx.org/essays/yes-and/
- Source URL
- https://hnrss.org/best
Summary
- Score
- 6.0
- Created
- 09 Oct 2026, 2:58 PM
- Tags
- Audience
- developersvibe_codersai_ml_learnerssaas_founders
What happened
In an htmx.org essay dated February 27, 2026, Carson Gross — who states he teaches computer science at Montana State University — answers the question "given AI, should I still become a programmer?" with "Yes, and...", arguing programming is fundamentally problem-solving plus controlling complexity. He warns AI is "very dangerous for junior programmers": if they generate code instead of writing it, they never learn to read code and fall into what he calls the Sorcerer's Apprentice Trap of building systems they don't understand. He rejects the analogy that coding-to-prompting is like assembly-to-high-level-languages, because compilers are largely deterministic while LLM output is not, and he argues LLM-generated code often fails to remove accidental complexity and can add it. The Hacker News thread drew 335 points and 96 comments.
Why it matters
If your workflow is prompt-first, this is a concrete argument about a specific failure mode: code you can't read is code you can't debug when it breaks in production, and the essay claims LLM output tends to add accidental complexity rather than strip it out. The practical decision it forces is about how you use AI on a codebase — treating generated code as something you must read and rewrite, not just ship — and whether junior hires or juniors on your team are getting reps writing code at all. It is an opinion essay with no measurements, benchmarks, or tooling, so treat the claims as an argument to test on your own code, not as evidence.
Discussion angle
Test Gross's determinism argument live: pull one prompt you use regularly, run it several times, and compare the outputs for accidental complexity — does the non-determinism point hold up for your stack, or is the assembly-to-LLM analogy closer than he allows?