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Comment by light_triad | Hacker News Reader

There's a great Joel Spolsky post about developers starting businesses and realising that there's a bunch of "business stuff" that was abstracted away at big companies. [1]

One way to future proof is to look at the larger picture, the same way that coding can't be reduced to algorithm puzzles:

"Software is a conversation, between the software developer and the user. But for that conversation to happen requires a lot of work beyond the software development."

[1] The Development Abstraction Layer https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/04/11/the-development-ab...

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Yep, I learned this the hard way. I thought meeting customers, selling them on an automated, cheaper version of their current crufty manual system would be so easy I'd barely need to try.

I'd never been more wrong.

There are always people vested in the current way of doing things. If they happen to be influential, you will have to swim upstream no matter how much better your solution is. Companies are ultimately people, not in the Citizens United sense but in that they are made by people, staffed by people, and you will be dealing with people and all their foibles.

Beautiful article, thanks for sharing. Miss his writing.

But conversations are exactly LLMs strength?

It looks like it, but LLMs still lack critical reasoning by and large. So if a client tells them or asks for something nonsensical it won’t reason its way out of that.

I’m not worried about software as a profession yet, as first clients will need to know what they want much what they actually need.

Well I am a bit worried that many big businesses seem to think they can lay off most of their software devs because “AI” causing wage suppression and overwork.

It’ll come back to bite them IMHO. I’ve contemplated shorting Intuit stock because they did precisely that, which will almost certainly just end up with crap software, missed deadlines, etc.

True but I think Spolsky meant it more as a metaphor for understanding users' psychology. Knowledge workers need empathy and creativity to solve important problems.

And design, product intuition, contextual knowledge in addition to the marketing, sales, accounting, support and infrastructure required to sell software at scale.

LLMs can help but it remains to be seen how much they can create outside of the scope of the data they were trained on.

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