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Comment by mjr00 | Hacker News Reader

Getting 80% of the way there wasn't hard to begin with. If you had an idea, you could outsource it to someone on Fiver/Upwork/etc for a few hundred bucks and get 80% of the way there. The challenge for 99% of software projects is getting the other 80% of the way there, which is maintenance and integrations.

There's definitely a small chance a simple hit app could be made by a non-technical "ideas guy" and an LLM -- something like Wordle would be a good example. But Wordle wasn't the one paying engineers 6 figure salaries to begin with.

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I'm not talking about ideas guys. I'm talking about if you spent 3 years on React, now I can just go use an LLM and start writing react as if I have 3 years experience. Same with AWS CDK deploying to Java lambda. I can just start using the LLM, and mostly get up to speed. All your hard won knowledge is just not that valuable

> I'm talking about if you spent 3 years on React, now I can just go use an LLM and start writing react as if I have 3 years experience.

er, no, you can't -- I don't know why you would think this unless you're junior and can't actually tell (which turns out to be one of the dangers of LLMs).

I disagree with both of your extreme black & white thinking.

The true answer is somewhere in the middle but now its definitely leaning further from your view.

If your job is writing small snippets of code to solve clearly defined problems, AI can replace you today. If the main challenge to overcome in your job is figuring out how to get React to render a form, AI can replace you today. This is definitely true for some software engineers, even some with senior titles. But it's so far from what my job actually looks like that I can't begin to feel threatened.

> If your job is writing small snippets of code to solve clearly defined problems, AI can replace you today.

I strongly question the existence of these jobs; even the simplest "add some forms to this page" consultancy work in an app older than a few years tends to have requirements complexity around integrating with ancient/bespoke frameworks. If these jobs did exist, you'd assume they would have already been outsourced to SEA.

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