Ask HN: Anyone know of that "levels of AI programming" blog post?

Posted by tuvix 2 days ago

I was browsing HN comments a while ago and ran into a wonderful blog on the levels of AI involvement in programming. It started at 0 I think, with no AI involved and went to around 7 where LLMs direct other LLMs and no human is involved.

I wanted to reference these levels in the README of an open source project I'm creating as part of it was hand-programmed while using AI as a kind of search engine, while another part was crafted by AI with me reviewing code and providing a spec.

Any help is greatly appreciated!

Comments

Comment by nivertech 23 hours ago

The Five Levels: From spicy autocomplete to the dark factory

https://www.danshapiro.com/blog/2026/01/the-five-levels-from...

January 23, 2026

72 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46739117

There are several other similar posts/videos. Steve Yegge also talks about it.

Comment by late_night_fix 2 days ago

I feel like we're moving toward needing a standard for this. "Level of AI involvement" could easily become part of project documentation norms.

Comment by asifbc2552 2 days ago

Sure!

Comment by tuvix 2 days ago

Do you happen to have the link?

Comment by gnabgib 2 days ago

The 8 Levels of Agentic Engineering (277 points, 1 month ago, 129 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47320614