Hacker News Reader

Comment by Xophmeister | Hacker News Reader

My anecdata shows people who have no/limited experience in software engineering are suddenly able to produce “software”. That is, code of limited engineering value. It technically works, but is a ultimately an unmaintainable, intractable Heath Robinson monstrosity.

Coding LLMs will likely improve, but what will happen first: a good-at-engineering LLM; or a negative feedback cycle of training data being polluted with a deluge of crap?

I’m not too worried at the moment.

View on HN

LLMs will have the same effect that outsourcing had on tech jobs i.e. some effect but not meaningful for people that truly know what they’re doing and can demand the money for quality to distinguish themselves from random text generator (AI) slop.

Something similar happened when Rails showed up. Lots of people were able to build somewhat complex websites than ever before.

But there are still specialized people being paid for doing websites today.

My god, sudden flashback of our CTO doing Rails code after hours and showing us how easily and quickly he was building stuff. We called that period of time the "Ruby Derailment"

I can imagine a world, not far from today, where business experts can create working programs similar in complexity to what they do with Excel today, but in domains outside of "just spreadsheets". Excel is the most used no-code/low-code environment by far and I think we could easily see that same level of complexity [mostly low] be accessible to a lot more people.

I don’t quite buy the Excel analogy, because the business experts do understand the Excel formulas that they write, and thus can maintain them and reason about them. The same wouldn’t be the case with programs written by LLMs.

> is a ultimately an unmaintainable

Does it need to be maintainable, if we can re-generate apps on the go with some sort of automated testing mechanism? I'm still on the fence with the LLM-generated apps debacle, but since I started forcing Cursor on myself, i'm writing significantly less code (75% less?) on my day-to-day job.

> if we can re-generate apps on the go with some sort of automated testing mechanism?

Ahh so once we solve the oracle problem and programming will become obsolete…

Reply on news.ycombinator.com