Ask HN: Are we at the point where software can improve itself?
ManuelKiessling Saturday, February 07, 2026Putting this out here to hear if you think this is feasible and/or useful, but also to find out if this is yesterday's news and everybody is already doing it.
So here is the gist of it: Imagine a user-facing software that is out there in the world, doing its thing. Doesn't have to be anything fancy for this example, let's say an inventory management system called Foo, used by several hundred people a day.
Now imagine you set up a kind of "loop" that works like this:
Every 24 hours, a Coding Agent launches, with the following prompt:
"Here is the codebase for application Foo. Over there are all application and system logs that Foo produced over the past 24 hours. Over here are all emails that went to support@foo-app.com in the past 24 hours. Over here is all UI telemetry that Foo collected: where users clicked, where they scrolled to, etc. Over there is the current database snapshot of Foo. Here is the document that describes the business goals of Foo, and the basic limitations (legal, financial) in which it needs to operate.
This is your mission: analyze all these inputs, analyze the codebase — and then create Pull Requests with the three most pressing improvements that make Foo a better software for its users, based on your analysis."
Yes, there's a ton of details I'm glossing over, and yet: shouldn't something like this lead to some kind of fully automatic improvement of software Foo over time?
Software is used, produces telemetry, Agent analyzes telemetry, improves software according to what the telemetry says, new software version is used, produces telemetry...