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Comment by andrewstuart | Hacker News Reader

> The "golden" end state of coding agents is that you give it a Feature Request (EG Jira ticket), and it gives you a PR to review and give feedback on.

I see your point but in the other hand how depressing to be left only with the most soul crushing part of software entering - the Jira ticket.

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I personally find figuring out what the product should be is the fun part. There still a need for architecting a plan, but the actual act of writing code isn't what gives me personal joy, it's the building of something new.

I understand the craft of code itself is what some people love though!

Thing is, LLMs are already better than people at the "architecting a plan" and "figuring out what the product should be" in details that go beyond high-level vibes. They do that even better than raw coding.

In fact, that's the main reason I like developing quick prototypes and small projects with LLMs. I use them less to write code for me, and more to cut through the bullshit "research" phase of figuring out what code to write, which libraries to pick, what steps and auxiliary work I'm missing in my concept, etc.

They’re great if word count is your measure. But it’s hard for LLMs to know the whole current SOTA and come up with something innovative and insightful. The same as 99% of human proposals. Can LLMs come up with the 1% ideas that breakthrough? Paired with great execution

LLMs definitely know more of the current SOTA in everything than anyone alive, and that doesn't even count in the generous amount of searching capability granted to them by vendors. They may fail to utilize results fully due to limited reasoning ability, but they more than make up for it in volume.

> Can LLMs come up with the 1% ideas that breakthrough? Paired with great execution

It's more like 0.01%, and it's not the target anyway. The world doesn't run on breakthroughs and great execution, it runs on the 99.99% of the so-so work and incremental refinement.

Say what you will, but this would have the wonderful side effect of forcing people who write JIRA tickets to actually think through and clearly express what it is they want built.

In that timeline, it wouldn't matter anymore since the people complaining about the poor JIRA tickets would be gone.

Yeah, that’ll be the product-oriented engineers / engineer-oriented product folks.

We will drop the narrow-minded deadweight that can only collect naive requirements, and the coding side that can only implement unambiguous tickets.

AKA Junior engineers

Anyone working on offshoring projects already knows how fun this happens to be.

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