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Comment by yoyohello13 | Hacker News Reader

So like, why would I pay someone to work like this? Or why would I pay for software at all when I could just do this myself?

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Because you can't do this yourself. You don't have the decades of experience to know how to ask the questions and when to steer the tool into a different direction.

This is something I've been thinking about. What should students do? How do they build experience? Do they swear off all forms of LLM assisted coding?

Why not? As the AI people say "you can just do things". If there is little consequence to getting it wrong as a parent poster puts it why not? You can learn over time like any other skill.

I want to be wrong (it will affect me and my family personally) - but there is a reason every AI proponent talks about coding and making "coding redundant". For most jobs/industries software is a compliment (e.g. Product Owner, BA, etc) unless that is your main skill in which case it is your main service you are selling. Most roles want to turn software into a commodity or the typical business PM word "resource" that they can acquire as they need - the dream of most business roles (e.g. Project Managers, BA's, etc). It sadly also seems to be low hanging fruit of LLM's; doesn't mean there isn't other aspects to the job of course but coding is becoming "less special" with these technologies especially with common tech and use cases.

That's the real question IMO. Especially when everything that isn't deflationary with AI for the most part is getting much more expensive due to inflation globally. Save money on software, buy more blue collar goods.

If its an easy skill to learn, with little consequences if you get it wrong especially for small scale apps why pay for it? Don't know why seniors (of which I'm one) think they are immune to this.

consider it like this: you are not paying the amount of worked hours but for the expertise to judge, coach and guide the AI and its output according to your wishes. so if the result is good and within time and budget, why would you care?

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