Ask HN: Will software still matter when AI write all our programs?
I’m curious to know: if you let something like Astra 6 or Fable run with $10 million worth of tokens, how close could we get to a successful implementation and performance — say, porting the Adobe suite to Linux, or even FreeBSD, or whatever operating system you happen to use? Personally, I think this would be a very interesting benchmark...And this is where I’d like to get to: why Linux or FreeBSD? If we had this ability to port software, then in many respects the platform, as we know it, would become irrelevant, just like the programs that run on it.
- ▪I’m curious to know: if you let something like Astra 6 or Fable run with $10 million worth of tokens, how close could we get to a successful implementation and performance — say, porting the Adobe suite to Linux, or even FreeBSD, or whateve
- ▪Personally, I think this would be a very interesting benchmark...And this is where I’d like to get to: why Linux or FreeBSD?
- ▪If we had this ability to port software, then in many respects the platform, as we know it, would become irrelevant, just like the programs that run on it.
Hacker News (AI / LLM) files mainly under ai. We currently carry 6,153 of its stories.
Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
inspect →
Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Ycombinator |
| Canonical URL | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49818484 |
| Publication time | Wed, 23 Sep 2026 16:24:27 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-09-23T16:29:30.850Z |
| Last seen | 2026-09-23T16:29:30.850Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | R2lfhPLYYk7J · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
I’ve often reflected on how AI will change software development, and on what happens when reverse engineering — “everything is open source if you can reverse engineer it” — or clean-room reverse engineering, and porting a program from platform A to platform B, become essentially automatic processes.Personally, this is a capability that would impress me quite a bit. I’m curious to know: if you let something like Astra 6 or Fable run with $10 million worth of tokens, how close could we get to a successful implementation and performance — say, porting the Adobe suite to Linux, or even FreeBSD, or whatever operating system you happen to use? Personally, I think this would be a very interesting benchmark...And this is where I’d like to get to: why Linux or FreeBSD? If we had this ability to…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Ycombinator.