news.ycombinator.com• Aug 16, 2026• 1 min read
Ask HN: Do you know of any company that went back to hand-written code?This is intended as a question about the current phase of the LLM hype cycle, and, at the same time, as a reality check about whether reluctance to rely on LLMs is economically viable for an average developer.You've definitely seen that many companies progressed from "use LLMs for anything and everything" policies to limiting budgets and scopes of approved LLM usage. It wouldn't be unexpected to see that some companies might decide that generating more code faster doesn't meaningfully contribute to their bottom line, and forego LLMs in favour of human authoring, but does it ever happen?I'm not trying to point out any (de)merits of the new way of software development, I simply want to know if there are many/any companies that went back to the old ways.
