251–260 of 312 posts
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As a counter to this, I had grok build an entire set of micro services and all I had to clean up was some format strings. It blew me away. Did in an hour what should have taken a week.
nice. did you use grok web interface or some ide + grok?
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Why are you so certain that flaws will be fixed? Seems like there is a giant leap between a machine spewing words based on probability and actual deep understanding of the code it's suppose to write
A "machine spewing words based on probability" is an implementation detail. I'm not making a grandiose prediction about the future. All I'm saying is that these machines are improving super fast. I'm also stricken by the superficiality of analysis like "oh it's just probabilities" from so many devs; might as well say "it's magnets".
You can call it an implementation detail but it's like both a wheel and a wing can take your over some distance but the difference between them is staggering. Wheel will never send you flying (normally)
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> This is the go community saying a computer will never best human go players. I don’t see this. Board games are fundamentally different from software development problems. The latter have imperfect information, unknown requirements and constraints, fuzzy success criteria, and more.
Which means that as long as you can specify the requirements, constraints, and success criteria you can automate the coding part.
This is the go community saying a computer will never best human go players. We already have examples of a model finding more performant sorts [0], given the right incentives and time, and the right system for optimizing (LLMs trained on “average code” probably aren’t it) the computer will best us at creating things for the computer. Is “vibe coding” real today? Not in my experience, with even Claude code. My hand ha…
I've been "Vibe-TDDing" all afternoon and I'll tell you what, vibe tests are better than no tests. And so long as you have some decent-to-solid understanding of coding and testing (this is non-trivial, I've been coding for professionally for ~20 years) then you can direct the machine to put up decent guardrails first, and then you can kinda go nuts and let shit grow, prune it back, repeat. Basically, if you know what…
Just for fun, I asked the AI assistant in IntelliJ (free trial) to write most of the tests for me. I was actually blown away. The tests were largely really good. In many cases they were more thorough than I would have bothered with. Even when it didn't manage to write good tests on its own, the AI complete as I was writing them myself was incredibly useful. Most of the time it would predict the line I was going to write next, just press tab to accept.
I did have to review the tests, and there were a few minor mistakes I had to correct. The entire process took about 4 hours - and I was trying it out for the first time.
So this is a massive time saver for me, and lets me take on coding in future I would simply not have had the patience to complete.
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Which means that as long as you can specify the requirements, constraints, and success criteria you can automate the coding part.
So you’re saying you can automate the coding part by… writing the code (in an inferior language)
Not OP, but yes. But that means you don't need a dev, just someone who knows how to spec correctly in English/Jira, right? Is that likely a dev who moved on to PM? Very likely in 2025.
For better or worse, the future I imagine is a Jira plugin or MCP server that can read a project, the LLM IDE client then asks questions to fill in the blanks... and out comes the app.
For many years this will require a human in the loop. But will that human need to know the intricacies of the latest frontend framework? Less and less as time goes on.
Disclaimer: predicting the future is hard.
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> the seagull guys who come in, declare that their favorite framework will solve everything, and leave are more vulnerable to being replaced by an LLM than someone who knows how to code but is also bringing actual business-relevant experience and judgement which an LLM can’t have. But that's just a continuous variant of the discrete-sounding claim that programming will get eaten by AI soon. After all, the "actual bus…
I think that’s a question of how you define jobs. For example, I’ve worked with very few managers who could document their business processes in sufficient detail to build an app. Now, is the person who does a business analyst, architect, senior developer, etc.? Who sits down with the users, gets feedback, but understands the needs of multiple parties well enough to tell which points are traps, which should be develo…
That's a fair take. I do wonder though, how much will those "analytical and social parts of the job" be paying - I imagine you might no longer get six figures for that either, because high tech salaries are fueled by absurd growth of the industry, which manifests in a large part in software that's basically just {framework du jour + basic-level CRUD, that hasn't changed much in 30 years + branding}, and that kind of software I expect to get eaten by LLMs entirely.
Even with cookie-cutter app coders out of the way, the remaining software engineers might see the number of jobs implode, crashing salaries for some time, until (maybe) the growth restarts around new kinds of software, kinds that'll be in high demand and not something that can be made by a few "analytical/social" people herding LLMs. I'd normally say this won't happen, but rather that the software economy will slow down, stabilize, and get boring like everything else - but then, so much of software is driven purely by advertising, and advertising is a negative sum game, so surely they'll invent more bullshit jobs for us.
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> Yes, I'm a developer. It's interesting that you describe yourself as a developer now. Because just three months ago, in your first post [1] to HN, you said: > I'm somewhat non-technical but I've been using Claude to hack MVPs together for months now. Sure: you might feel as though you have now 10x'ed yourself. But, quite honestly, when the reality is that just a few months back you self-described as "somewhat non-t…
Yikes. Can/should this guy be banned from commenting? People like him substantially degrade the quality of the conversation.
But that’s why I call it out: yes, exactly, it degrades the conversation when someone is preaching about a new tech, and how it’s gonna change development, and claiming they’re a developer themselves - while not being upfront about the fact that they’ve not actually got much real-world experience as a developer at all in general.
And this kind of thing should always be called out when spotted. It’s just plain disingenuous at the end of the day.
I’ve probably been contracted to fix more broken projects (by devs who royally messed up), than the count of MVPs this person has made, or indeed the number of months they’ve been coding.
But at the end of the day, these kinds of folk simply make us more experienced folk more valuable to those that need a professional service in a bail-out scenario. I’ve got decades of real-world coding experience, and a healthy list of successfully published / deployed projects, including some fairly big clients over the years. My CV speaks volumes, particularly when contrast against someone with little experience in the field of software development. I’ve seen languages and tooling come and go. I’ve headed teams and worked solo. I’ve witnessed plenty of folk like this in my time. It’s certainly not my first rodeo!
Unfortunate that someone chose to downvote me, as opposed to engaging me in conversation as to why my view might perhaps be incorrect or maybe shortsighted - as per the HN guidelines. But no real surprise - I guess that in itself is quite telling here.
Karma points might come and go sometimes, but whatever: I’ve been posting on HN (and other sites) for years, on and off. I’ve no need to try and portray myself as something I’m not, nor portray myself to have skills or experience that I don’t have. I generally post to share my knowledge and experience, because real-world experience adds up over time.
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I think the point being made is that even though the specific set of requirements may be unique in a stakeholder basis, all the components already exist, and have been combined in many ways. So it really boils down to prompting in such a way that the right set of components are brought together in the right way. That's where the skill now lies.
> So it really boils down to prompting in such a way that the right set of components are brought together in the right way. That's where the skill now lies. And how is this different from just calling the libraries in the right way to make it adhere to stakeholder requirements? The statement isn't "its impossible to get an AI to print the code for a right program", but "the work and skills you need to get an AI to p…
In that you need humans that can understand stakeholder requirements, constraints of the domain, and limits of existing software, so that they can write the necessary glue to make everything work.
Thing is, LLMs know more about every domain than any non-expert (and for most software, "domain experts" are just non-domain-expert programmers who self-learn enough of it to make the project work), and they can understand what stakeholders say better than other humans can, at least superficially. I expect it won't take long until LLMs can do all of this better than an average professional.
(Yes, it may take a long time before an LLM can replace a senior Googler. But that's not the point. It's enough for an LLM to replace an average code monkey churning out mobile apps for brands, to have a huge chunk of the industry disappear overnight.)