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Comment by bsaul | Hacker News Reader

i'm quite surprised by the level of skepticism in this thread. I've been developping my website + webservice + db only using cursor "composer" mode, not typing a single line of code, and i'm already with something fully functional. I am voluntarely refraining from fixing the bugs myself by digging into the code, just to see how far someone with 0 coding skill can go. And this answer is : as far as a junior / midlevel software developer can.

Obviously, not on its own. I still needed to give it guidelines and feedback on what to do next. But i could improve my site while watching TV. This was science-fiction just 2 years ago.

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Could someone with "0 coding skill" really compose the prompts in the first place? You need to understand the problem space, the right terminology and visualise a general architecture/structure for the solution. These things might be obvious to you and me but take someone from a different field and it would be the same as handing me the controls to a medical robot and telling me to start pushing buttons.

this seems like a very very minor thing compared to correctly understanding how a bug in a screen showing "unauthorized access" on the react frontend project, is in fact triggered by a wrong configuration in a "authorization service" in a file located completely elsewhere, due to a serialization issue, etc..

"visualizing a general architecture" is piece of cake compared to the mental model one need to understand a full stack react / express / sqlite / typescript stack with sufficient details to be able to debug obscure error code.

Do you realize most enterprise coders are writing just simple CRUD applications?

At Meta? I can't say but I doubt it. At the large company I work at - definitely not.

Please, show us the website and the source code - every time I read statement like this, there is no proof.

No, you missed the memo. You're supposed to say they're toy webpages and it doesn't count as "real" programming.

Simonw has plenty of examples on his blog, including full transcripts if you've honestly not seen them before though. https://simonwillison.net/tags/ai-assisted-programming/

A fun one that he didn't bother to post to his blog tho - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42505772

I see no such example, just some blog full of useless posts.

oh you won't need it : the code is probably horrible, the website design is vaguely Ok for an admin backend but clearly not suitable to customer facing, etc.

But the point is : it works.It is functional and handles complex realistic scenarios.

And only two years ago, this was pure fantasy. Now give the tech two more years, and see where this is going ?

Now for those who are curious, i'm done with my first experiment and i am planning on starting a full redesign of that project, this time providing the AI with a lot more guidance on software best practices. I'll decompose more, make it write more unit tests, etc. And make sure to keep everything in check regularly regarding code quality (still writing nothing myself though).

In fact, i'll be doing exactly what i would do with a junior/midlevel developer. Except AI work probably 100x times faster.

My first iteration of that project lasted about 3 days from start to finish, reaching a point where i left so much cruft accumulating that it couldn't refactor it properly without breaking absolutely everything in an impossible to recover manner... But before you say anything, i've personally seen the same thing happen at least 5 times in my career, with professional humans developing the code.

That's because most of the engineers or coders in this thread are in fear their job won't exist in a few years and they will have to go learn a completely different skill to make a wage. It's hard to admit you may not have a job in x years time because a computer took it.

But let's be real here, 90% of software and coding is taking x performing an action on it so the user can consume y. It's basic stuff. Much like how we don't write machine code these days and we use a compiler, your bonkers if you think your going to be writing python or c in the future and not just saying give me x and y from z.

You will still get folks writing code in some obscure areas, but most of us will switch to describing system and app flows and have the code written by ai and in areas utilize ai's to get tasks done. The theory of software construction from a high level will become more important than actual language mastery on the low level.

The folks saying it won't are much like the horse riders of yesteryear who said cars would never replace horses.

I bet your code is full of exploits.

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