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Comment by kcplate | Hacker News Reader

> The irony is that AI, as a replacement for an even average programmer, doesn’t work.

Yet.

It's irrelevant anyway, because AI companies are not HR firms. They don't get rich by lowering the cost of labor, nobody in tech does. They get rich by implementing the IBM/Oracle/Salesforce model for enterprise B2B: selling a "platform" with plenty of "smart plugins", which will require plenty of humans to sit in on meetings, write technical requirements, do QA and the usual stuff that pushes IT costs way past budget.

AI needs to fundamentally change before this happens. We're not even close to capturing actual reasoning in AI models.

Disagree. I've been coding with o1 and o3-mini-high

If you give it a prompt which resembles a requirements document produced by a competent manager, you will get what you request and it will run first time.

And how many C suite executives will be doing this?

I think you overestimate how many people could produce this document to the degree you're talking about

Doesn't matter how many people can produce the requirements document when an AI can produce it.

No manager and coder pair can iterate on an idea 5 times per minute, even if the first attempt needs correction, the timescale disparity makes AI agents appealing for nearly all noncritical coding tasks.

Now you're talking about someone who can describe what they want in enough so that an AI can generate a strictly defined requirements document with enough detail that another AI (or the same AI) can generate working code?

It's just AI all the way down, and each step still needs to be validated because AI is not reliable

lol. The hardest part in corp programming is getting the requirements right when literally no one involved can seem to think themselves out of a paper bag.

It isn’t a matter of iterating either, it’s being able to figure out what is politically workable and actually implementable.

What about examples where [technical] management actively makes it harder for engineers to do their job by enforcing nonsensical design decisions (when explicitly warned against it)? :)

No AI can solve that one.

Not sure I agree here completely. On its own perhaps not, but if AI is able to deliver nonsensical design decisions at a faster rate than a human, you can iterate to a final better design faster.

What language?

I used to pick new languages when I started projects with AI for learning but lately I've been using ruby for everything possible and I generally prefer it's output as it writes stuff more idiomatically than I do (out of laziness)

Ah, I was curious if o1 is running code in background and doing an error loop.

Do you have a chat example you can share where you found it to work great? I feel that the performance varies a lot between domains.

Maybe. But if one founder and a couple of good devs can handle the requirements and management, and handhold the agents when needed to make a product 80% as good as a competitor with 200 employees, it's still gg for that competitor.

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