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Comment by mianos | Hacker News Reader

I am 61, I have been a full time developer since I was about 19. I have lost count of the number of 'next thing to replace developers' many many times. many of them showed promise. Many of them continue to be developed. Frameworks with higher and higher levels of abstraction.

I see LLMs as the next higher level of abstraction.

Does this mean it will replace me? At the moment the output is so flawed for anything but the most trivial professional tasks, I simply see, as before, it has a long long way to go.

Will be put me out of a job? I highly doubt it in my career. I still love it and write stuff for home and work every day of the week. I'm planning on working until I drop dead as it seems I have never lost interest so far.

Will it replace developers as we know it? Maybe in the far future. But we'll be the ones using it anyway.

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I have a decade of experience writing web code professionally, in my experience, LLM is a true waste of time regarding web.

On the other side, I'm switching to game dev and it became a very useful companion, outputing well known algorithms. It's more like an universal API rather than a junior assistant.

Instead of me taking time to understand the algo in the details then implementing, I use GPT4o to expand the Unreal API with missing parts. It truly expands the scope I'm able to handle and it feels good to save hours that compounds in days and weeks of work.

Eg. 1. OOB and SAT https://stackoverflow.com/questions/47866571/simple-oriented...

2. Making a grid system using lat/long coordinates for a voxel planet.

Same here. Really liking it asking it Unreal C++ trivia.

> I have a decade of experience writing web code professionally, in my experience, LLM is a true waste of time regarding web.

As someone who knows web front end development only to the extent I need it for internal tools, it’s been turning day-long fights into single hour dare I say it pleasurable experiences. I tell it to make a row of widgets and it outputs all the div+css soup (or e.g. material components) that only needs some tuning instead of having to google everything.

It still takes experience to know when it doesn’t use a component when it should etc., but it’s a force multiplier, not a replacement. For now.

I can totally understand it! I would loved to have access to a LLM back in time. Especially since I started to learn just after the <table> era but we didn't have "flex" yet. It was true garbage...

Now I mostly JSX / tailwind, which is way faster than prompting, but surely because I'm fluent in that thing.

> Now I mostly JSX / tailwind, which is way faster than prompting,

Not saying that is not true, but did you measure that actually or is it a feeling or you didn't spend very much time on getting a prompt you can plop your requests in? jsx and tailwind are very verbose ; frontend is mostly very verbose, and, unless you are building LoB apps, you will have to try things a few times. Cerebras and groq with a predefined copy paste prompt will generate all that miserable useless slob (yes, I vehemently hate frontend work; I do hope it will be replaced very soon by llms completely; it's close but not quite there yet) in milliseconds so you can just tweak it a bit. I am fluent at building web frontends since the mid 90s; before I did DOS, windows and motif ones (which was vastly nicer; there you could actually write terse frontend code); I see many companies inside and I have not seen anyone faster at frontend than current llms, so I would like to see a demo. In logic I see many people faster as the llm can often simply not even figure it out even remotely.

I prompt a lot everyday for various reasons, including, but not exclusively coding. Because jsx/tw is indeed very verbose, it requires a lot of accuracy because there is sooo many places you have to be just perfect, this is something LLM are inherently incapable of.

Don't get me wrong, it will output the code faster than me. But overall, i will spend more time prompting + correcting, especially when I want to achieve special designs which are not looking like basic "bootstrap". It's also much less enjoyable to tweak a prompt than just spitting jsx/tw which doesn't require lot of effort for me.

I don't have a demo to justify my claim and I'm totally fine if you dismiss my message because of that.

I recon that I don't like front ending with LLM yet, maybe one day it will.be much better.

My website where I tried some LLM stuff and been disapointed https://ardaria.com

That's also my experience, the AI is very helpful for doing common things with languages you're not great at. Makes it easier to pick up a few extra tools to use now and then.

This I agree with. It is awesome when you don't know something. I have being doing some TypeScript recently and it's not something I have used professionally in anger before.

But, as I learn it, GPT 4o becomes less and less useful for anything but short questions to fill in gaps. I am already way better than it at anything more than a few pages long. Getting it to do something substantial is pretty much an exercise in frustration.

> it outputs all the div+css soup

Is there a difference between soup and slop? Do you clean up the "soup" it produces or leave it as is?

It’s soup in the sense you need it for the layout to work in the browser. I clean up when I know there’s a component for what I need instead of a div+span+input+button or whatever use case is being solved. I mostly tweak font sizes, paddings and margins, sometimes rearrange stuff if the layout turns out broken (usually stuff just doesn’t fit the container neatly, don’t remember an instance of broken everything).

> I tell it to make a row of widgets and it outputs all the div+css soup (or e.g. material components) that only needs some tuning instead of having to google everything.

As someone with a fairly neutral/dismissive/negative opinion on AI tools, you just pointed out a sweet silver lining. That would be a great use case for when you want to use clean html/css/js and not litter your codebase with a gazillion libraries that may or may not exist next year!

Given how bad most DOM trees look out there (div soup, thousands of not needed elements, very deep nesting, direct styling, HTML element hacks, not using semantically appropriate elements, wrong nesting of elements, and probably more), I would be surprised, if LLMs give non-div-soup and responsive HTML and CSS, the way I would write it myself. Some day I should test one such LLM as to whether it is able to output a good HTML document, with guidance, or the sheer amount of bad websites out there has forever poisoned the learned statistics.

Let's say we get an AI that can take well-written requirements and cough up an app.

I think you have to be a developer to learn how to write those requirements well. And I don't even mean the concepts of data flows and logic flows. I mean, just learning to organise thoughts in a way that they don't fatally contradict themselves or lead to dead ends or otherwise tie themselves in unresolvable knots. I mean like non-lawyers trying to write laws without any understanding of the entire suite of mental furniture.

That is exactly what I mean when I said "we'll be the ones using it".

I didn't want to expand it, for fear of sounding like an elitist, and you said it better anyway. The same things that make a programmer excellent will be in a much better position to use an even better LLM.

Concise thinking and expression. At the moment LLMs will just kinda 'shotgun' scattered ideas based on your input. I expect the better ones will be massively better when fed better input.

I have seen this happening since the 70s. My father made a tool to replace programmers. It did not and it disillusioned him greatly. Sold very well though. But this time is different though; I have often said that I thought chatgpt like AI was at least 50 years out still but it's here; it does replace programmers every day. I see many companies inside (I have a troubleshoot company; we get called to fix very urgent stuff and we only do that so we hop around a lot) and many are starting to replace outsourced teams with, for instance, our product (which was a side project for me to see if it can be done, it can). But also just shrinking teams and give them claude or gpt to replace the bad people.

It is happening just not at scale yet to really scare people; that will happen though. It is just stupidly cheaper; for the price of one junior you can do so many api requests to claude it's not even funny. Large companies are still thinking about privacy of data etc but all of that will simply not matter in the long run.

Good logical thinkers and problemsolvers won't be replaced any time soon, but mediocre or bad programmers are already gone ; a llm is faster, cheaper and doesn't get ill or tired. And there are so many of them, just try someone on upwork or fiverr and you will know.

"Large companies are still thinking about privacy of data etc but all of that will simply not matter in the long run."

Privacy is a fundamental right.

And companies should care about not leaking trade secrets, including code, but the rest as well.

US companies are known to use the cloud to spy on competitors.

Companies should have their own private LLM, not rely on cloud instances with a contract that guarantees "privacy".

I know and agree: it's strange how many companies and people just step over and on their privacy. Or export private info to other countries. But what I mean here is that, good or bad, money always wins. Unfortunately also over fundamental rights. That sucks, but still happens and will happen.

> It is just stupidly cheaper; for the price of one junior you can do so many api requests to claude it's not even funny

Idk if the cheap price is really cheap price or promotion price, where after that the enshittification and price increase happen, which is a trend for most tech companies.

And agree, llm will weed bad programmers further, though in the future, bad alternatives (like analyst or bad llm users) may emerge

"For the price of a cab you can take so many ubers it's not even funny". Yeah, until the price dumping stops and workers demand better conditions and you start comparing apples to apples.

Why do you have bad programmers on staff? Let them go, LLMs existing or not.

People hire teams from some countries because they are cheap and they are terrible. LLMs are not good but better than many of these and cheaper. It's not really changing much in code quality or process, just a lot cheaper.

Companies like that deserve to die out since the quality they bring to the market is horrendous either way.

It is by far most companies. But yes, I agree.

I agree with all remarks you made; but how old are you? As it all seems pretty naive? The world unfortunately is only about money and nothing else, it is terrible but it is. Better worlds are eradicated by this reality all the time.

Bad programmers aren't black and white situation, there's so many range of programmers quality out there, with different sector too (analysis, programming, db design, debugging, etc). And as the standard, companies need to adjust cost and requirement, while those are affected by supply and demand too. Moreover, common people cannot measure programmers quality as easy, and bad programmers have delayed effect too. So it's not as simple as not hire bad programmers.

LLM however, will change the playing field. Let's say that bottom 20 or 30% of programmers will be replaced by LLM in form of increased performance by the other 70%.

> Moreover, common people cannot measure programmers quality as easy

So you can't fire the bad apples because you don't know who they are, but you feel confident that you can pick out whom to replace by an LLM and then fire?

It's hopefully obvious to everybody that this is a hopelessly naïve take on things and is never going to play out that way.

> Large companies are still thinking about privacy of data etc but all of that will simply not matter in the long run.

That attitude is why our industry has such a bad rep and why things are going down the drain to dystopia. Devs without ethics. This world is doomed.

It definitely is doomed. But somehow we might survive.

Which tool did he make?

I do not want to dox myself but if you were in enterprise IT in the 80s in europe you will have heard of it or used it.

Yes, and if you look back on the history of the tech industry, each time programmers were supposedly on the verge of replacement was an excellent time to start programming.

The best time was 20 years ago. The second best time is now :)

It was awesome 20 years before that, and the 10s in the middle. It's great now too.

What people expect: this will replace programmers

What really happened: this is used by programmers to improve their workflow

Hey man, thanks for posting this. There's about ten years between us. I too hope that they will need to pry a keyboard from my cold dead hands.

I'm only 41 but that's long enough to have also seen this happen a few times (got my first job as a professional developer at age 18). I've also dabbled in using copilot and chatgpt and I find at most they're a boost to an experienced developer- they're not enough to make a novice a replacement for a senior.

I think the concern is that they might become good enough for a senior to not need a novice. At that point where to the seniors come from?

If developers become more productive (both juniors and seniors), there will be more demand for all of them.

Or few will be productive enough to cover everything. Compare amount of bobcat operators vs ditch diggers.

There's an almost unlimited amount of demand for people who can write software or automate things, if you can lower buck-per-bang enough.

We’re here already. Nobody wants to hire junior devs anymore. Seniors are still a couple phone calls away from new positions.

I got my first job in 2001, it was like that then as well (maybe even worse). It got better when the market picked up again. I’m confident there still won’t be “enough developers” when then happens just like there’s never “enough electricity” despite the fact the power grid keep getting expanded all the time - people fine a use for even more.

When the market heats up again companies will bite the bullet and hire juniors when they can’t get enough seniors.

That "need" is not as a helper but a cheap way to train the next gen senior which by the time they are senior know the ins and outs of your company's tech so well that they will be hard to replace by an external hire.

If your approach to juniors is that they are just cheap labour monkeys designed to churn out braindead crap and boost the ego of your seniors then you have a management problem and I'm glad I'm working somewhere else.

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