Hacker News Reader

Comment by dakial1 | Hacker News Reader

I don't get some coders/devs/software engineers surprised that LLM can now pretty much create a whole code out of a prompt.

Wasn't this the final objective of the programming languages abstraction evolution? From Binary/Assembly to Natural Language Programming? I think it is awesome that more people will be able to create software/products as this accelerates innovation cycles a lot.

And, for now, I believe devs that don't rely solely on copy/paste coding from stack exchange don't need to worry about their job stability no?

View on HN

I am banging my head against a heisenbug. I wrote the code that works yesterday. I spent a lot of time rewriting it a dozen times. Now I am back to the original and it works for unexplainable reasons. I doubt that a chatbot could have sped this up.

I envy the people who are bottlenecked on their typing speed and benefit 10 times more from the chat bot than I do.

Have you tried? GPT-4 is pretty good at spotting bugs. It would probably also spot a bunch of other 'bugs' that don't exist, but that would still be better than rewriting it a dozen times.

Indeed, as I write, this is sorta what I have been working toward my whole career. And it's not like this was a giant leap from what ChatGPT already showed it was capable of. People have already been doing stuff like this with LangChain. Nonetheless, seeing that this was OpenAI's plan, that this is now here for real, was a weird experience for me.

Job stability is measured in years. Looking forward, assuming it improves, it’ll do more than just copy/paste code. It’ll be a senior dev capable of explaining the pros and cons of a solution, able to do code reviews and so on.

It's time to build a business I guess?

Others have said exactly what I'm thinking, welcome to the age of the micro-startup, 1-3 engineers, designers, product mangers building some very cool, albeit niche products.

And what that business will be worth when any random guy can create an identical one using a LLM? You remove the scarcity and the value plummets.

Any random guy can copy just about any startup already. It’s the domain expertise and insight into a potential market that builds companies not a few engineers throwing together a react app

Any random guy with a shitload of cash to spend on development. These "few engineers" can cost $1kk annually and if you think some random guy can just throw away such cash then well...

"Domain expertise and insight into a potential market" won't get you a working product that you can sell.

Anyone driven can throw together an MVP for a CRUD app. Having the domain expertise to prove a market edge can get you funding. Most engineers can’t do that second part.

More importantly, accountants, lawyers, sales people and other generic business expenses are now making up a bigger portion of your company expenses than the development process.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com