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Comment by tkgally | Hacker News Reader

> unless non-SWE people using LLMs become technical enough to get what they need out of them

Non-SWE person here. In the past year I've been able to use LLMs to do several tasks for which I previously would have paid a freelancer on Fiverr.

The most complex one, done last spring, involved writing a Python program that I ran on Google Colab to grab the OCR transcriptions of dozens of 19th-century books off the Internet Archive, send the transcriptions to Gemini 1.5, and collect Gemini's five-paragraph summary of each book.

If I had posted the job to Fiverr, I would have been willing to pay several hundred dollars for it. Instead, I was able to do it all myself with no knowledge of Python or previous experience with Google Colab. All it cost was my subscription to ChatGPT Plus (which I would have had anyway) and a few dollars of API usage.

I didn't put any full-time SWEs out of work, but I did take one job away from a Fiverr freelancer.

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> I didn't put any full-time SWEs out of work, but I did take one job away from a Fiverr freelancer.

I think this is the nuance most miss when they think about how AI models will displace work.

Most seem to think “if it can’t fully replace a SWE then it’s not going to happen”

When in reality, it starts by lowering the threshold for someone who’s technical but not a SWE, to jump in and do the work themselves. Or it makes the job of an existing engineer more efficient. Each hour less work needed spread across many tasks that would have otherwise gone to an engineer eventually sum up to a full time worth of an engineer. If it’s a Fiverr dev you eliminated the work of, that means the Fiverr dev will eventually go after the work that’s remaining, putting supply pressure on other devs

It’s the same mistake many had about self driving cars not happening because they couldn’t handle every road. No, they just need to start with 1 road, master that, and then keep expanding to more roads. Until they can do all of SF, and then more and more cities

Entirely possible. Have you got any numbers and real world examples? Growth? Profits? Actual quantified productivity gains?

The nuance your 'gotcha' scenario miss is that displacing fiverr, speeding up small side project, making scripts fo non-SWE, creating boilerplate, etc is not the trillions of dollars disruption that is needed by now.

This is a good anecdote but most software engineering is not scripting. It’s getting waist (or neck) deep in a large codebase and many intricacies.

That being said I’m very bullish on AI being able to handle more and more of this very soon. Cursor definitely does a great job giving us a taste of cross codebase understanding.

Seconded. Zed makes it trivial to provide entire codebases as context to Claude 3.5 Sonnet. That particular model has felt as good as a junior developer when given small, focused tasks. A year ago, I wouldn’t have imagined that my current use of LLMs was even possible.

not sure about Claude but my main problem with 03-mini is that it 'forgets' the things which are supposed to fit in the context window. This results in it using different function names, data structures. I think it's guessing them instead of fetching from the previous records.

> This is a good anecdote but most software engineering is not scripting. It’s getting waist (or neck) deep in a large codebase and many intricacies.

The agent I'm working on (RA.Aid) handles this by crawling and researching the codebase before doing any work. I ended up making the first version precisely because I was working on a larger monorepo project with lots of files, backend, api layer, app, etc.

So I think the LLMs can do it, but only if techniques are used to allow it to hone in on the specific information in a codebase that is relevant to a particular change.

If the goal is to get something to run correctly roughly once with some known data or input, then that's fine. Actual software development aims to run under 100% of circumstances, and LLMs are essentially cargo culting the development process and entrusting an automation that is unreliable to do mundane tasks. Sadly the quality of software will keep going down, perhaps even faster.

Stop with the realism, one off scripts is going to give trillions in ROI any day now. Personally could easily chip in maybe a million a month in subsbription fees be cause my bolierplate code I write once in a blue moon has speed up infinitely and I will cash out in profits any day now.

> I didn't put any full-time SWEs out of work, but I did take one job away from a Fiverr freelancer.

Who would use LLM anyway these days. Interesting when Fiverr will add non-human freelancers. Something similar to algorithmic traders. Passive income.

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