Hacker News Reader

Comment by WithinReason | Hacker News Reader

Which means that as long as you can specify the requirements, constraints, and success criteria you can automate the coding part.

View on HN

So you’re saying you can automate the coding part by… writing the code (in an inferior language)

> So you’re saying you can automate the coding part by… writing the code (in an inferior language)

Not OP, but yes. But that means you don't need a dev, just someone who knows how to spec correctly in English/Jira, right? Is that likely a dev who moved on to PM? Very likely in 2025.

For better or worse, the future I imagine is a Jira plugin or MCP server that can read a project, the LLM IDE client then asks questions to fill in the blanks... and out comes the app.

For many years this will require a human in the loop. But will that human need to know the intricacies of the latest frontend framework? Less and less as time goes on.

Disclaimer: predicting the future is hard.

Trying to provide a programming tool for non-programmers has been a wet dream of some for a while. See SQL, 4GL, DRAKON (lol), VBA, no-code platforms (btw what happend with the hype? How are we not all replaced already) and the most recent but certainly not the last is LLMs. All while sometimes yielding something useful past attempts have consistently and spectacularly failed this objective. Fundamentally because non-programmers don't want to deal with this, otherwise they would have learned some damn proper PL long time ago, it's not THAT hard. And LLMs adds quite some special spice to that. How a vibe coder going to fix LLM output that fails? Without understanding the code, that is.

Regarding "the latest frontend framework" the whole situation is a bit mysterious to me, because somehow everyone keep spending millions of man-hours on yet another react contraption where a static HTML would be enough. From the user perspective all this stuff brings no value, 80% of frontend stuff could have been automated long time ago or just not done at all, yet we keep reinventing the wheel. I don't see how LLMs can change the situation because there was clearly no demand for improved productivity there before.

If we have the luxury of assuming the hardest parts of the problem are already solved, then sure! The rest is trivial.

Sure, but writing those is just coding in a fuzzier and more verbose language.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com