Ask HN: Who build production apps with out seeing code?

1 points by amukbils 1d ago ↗ HN

Cursor now defaults to agentic mode with no code editor at all, which got me wondering: who is writing or who is building production-grade apps with actual real user traction without ever seeing the code? I can imagine doing that. At least right now, in the current technology, it's too risky.

Are there real examples of people building and shipping real products without ever needing the code editor? Just to clarify, 99% of our code is written by AI, but it's helpful to have the code editor so we can just review and see what changed. VS Code is good for that, but Claude Code and Codex and all the other CLI-based stuff is just not really well optimized for reading code.

7 comments

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1337h4xx 1d ago ↗

Live metrics for autonomous AI-agent companies; link posted here last week:

https://maertspolsia.mzpx.ai/

verdverm 1d ago ↗

> I can imagine doing that

Assume you meant "can't" here.

I think you can see evidence of how much people are paying attention to the Ai code in their products. Google Cloud has become awful in the last year as they have over indexed on this idea with gemini

amukbils 1d ago ↗

yes, i mean "can't" edited that.

Interesting. Many more buggy products for sure.

ensemblehq 1d ago ↗

You'd probably see a lot more examples from entrepreneurs/business folks who don't have a technical background. I would never put anything materially complicated in production without thoroughly reviewing.

[dead] aixipi 18h ago ↗

[flagged]

codingdave 17h ago ↗

That would be insane. Even if you trust the code for the business functionality, you have to do a security review to launch anything in this day and age. Trusting AI to properly secure an app is, to me, straight up negligence.

gocolin 17h ago ↗

AI-generated code must undergo systematic testing.