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AI doesn't generate working products, that's still your job

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Re: AI doesn't generate working products, that's still your job

#31

Post by faangguyindia »

tim-projects wrote: post #9

When you have built your working product try this prompt: - Review the codebase is it production ready? I'm selling it for $1million dollars can it meet that standard. Then cry as the ai reveals that it didn't actually do anything close to what it said it did. I call this my million dollar prompt, as in it teaches you just how much you are being fooled.

>? I'm selling it for $1million dollars can it meet that standard.

but people have sold terrible codebases for more than a million dollar.

Re: AI doesn't generate working products, that's still your job

#32

Post by budsniffer952 »

jaccola wrote: post #24

The test is simple: have we seen great new products or improvements in the products we use over the past 12,24,36 months? The only great new product I’ve used is my LLM of choice, and those labs seem to be hiring more humans than ever. Maybe it’s true that Claude only just got good enough and that 12 months from now our day to day lives will be way better thanks to LLM-driven product improvements/breakthroughs. My be…

It's the opposite: people like you will be telling people using these tools successfully, "but where are all great new products???", which, of course, is almost immeasurable.

The Internet is a better fax machine and all that.

Re: AI doesn't generate working products, that's still your job

#34

Post by mikojan »

jdw64 wrote: post #7

I've seen too many similar posts on Hacker News. From 2025 to 2026, I've seen countless articles with titles like 'The Prototype Isn't the Product.' I think these are defensive mechanisms, a kind of lullaby for the Gen AI era. Why is this discourse endlessly reproduced? In my view, it's because the industry is still searching for a new methodology to control the waterfall of Gen AI code. The cognitive dissonance that…

> Because using Gen AI means you're committing to codebases that go beyond individual cognitive limits.

Sure, the amount of code generated is exploding but where are these successful production applications that have "[gone] beyond individual cognitive limits"?

It's been some time now. Half a year ago I was concerned with the impact Gen AI might have on this profession. Today I am primarily tired of Gas Towns, Loops and the next fad.

Why do I have to still debug complex problems myself. Why do I have to still do detailed examinations.

Gen AI helps building big software. But the only thing it has truly replaced me in is building small software that in most cases I wouldn't have bothered building in the first place.

Re: AI doesn't generate working products, that's still your job

#35

Post by watwut »

movedx01 wrote: post #15
jdw64 wrote: post #7

I've seen too many similar posts on Hacker News. From 2025 to 2026, I've seen countless articles with titles like 'The Prototype Isn't the Product.' I think these are defensive mechanisms, a kind of lullaby for the Gen AI era. Why is this discourse endlessly reproduced? In my view, it's because the industry is still searching for a new methodology to control the waterfall of Gen AI code. The cognitive dissonance that…

The lullaby for the Gen AI era exists, but its for CEOs and it is being played in management meetings, it's main theme is about maximizing EBITDA. The defensive mechanisms kick in because even though more code is generated than ever, we are not observing an equivalent rise in software quality or usefulness, some would perhaps argue it's even opposite. If gen ai for code was really what it is being sold as it would al…

> even though more code is generated than ever, we are not observing an equivalent rise in software quality or usefulness

More code produced by a company that has history of low quality ... means more low quality.

A company that is unable to ship useful features will produced useless features whether they generate code or not.

Re: AI doesn't generate working products, that's still your job

#36

Post by pmontra »

ekidd wrote: post #12
chii wrote: post #4

The fear in most people is not of losing the job, but of losing their value in the market as ai raises the floor of capabilities of other people competing for the same job.

What I actually fear is more subtle: I already do a fair bit of project management and technical leadership. I could do more. Sure, I'd miss the coding, but I also enjoy a lot of the stuff around it. But the goal is to expand what the AI can do in each generation. At this point, Fable 5 can ace almost any greenfield project a skilled developer might have written in a few days. But it's bad at refactoring, bad at keep…

Note that they would also need to keep the economy alive because somebody has to pay them money. They can't let everybody to go unemployed.

Of course (let me go distopic) we could end up with a dozen of one man companies powered by AIs and robots selling or bartering products and services to each other, what's enough to have food, a house with a pool, a doctor and everybody else has died long before.

Re: AI doesn't generate working products, that's still your job

#37

Post by sqemo »

AI only does what it is instructed to do. Without deep domain knowledge, results produced from simple prompts alone cannot be turned into production-ready products. In reality, creating detailed prompts, conducting continuous reviews, and providing iterative feedback after the prototype stage often takes even more time than building the prototype itself.

Re: AI doesn't generate working products, that's still your job

#38

Post by embedding-shape »

watwut wrote: post #29
jillesvangurp wrote: post #18

There's going to be plenty of work helping other companies make some sense of their vibe coded efforts. The value of individual projects might decrease, but there will be a lot more of them. And without help they won't actually work out all that well. I talked to a company that does not employ software engineers that were doing some things with Claude Code a few weeks ago. Insightful comment: I want that person to do…

> Insightful comment: I want that person to do what I hired them to do, not mess around with code. What does that mean? Who is that person who should not mess with the code?

I understood it as "code is a means to an end", lots of developers get stuck on just writing and maintaining code, often missing that the business that pay them don't give a damn (for better or worse) about the code or design itself, just that whatever goal they set are being met in the timeline they set.
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