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Comment by uludag | Hacker News Reader

I 100% agree with everything in this article, though I'm confused what AI has to do with any of this. People have been doing this sort of thing long before LLMs arrived. Weekend projects doing cool things where definitely a thing long before LLMs. I'd say that cloud services (e.g. Twilio) were the real enablers to these sorts of projects so it seems wrong to be crediting LLMs with this type of work.

Cloud services get us from completely impossible to doable with a small amount of work. LLMs maybe save us the time of reading a tutorial or documentation.

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The LLMs come in as an enabler to get over "white page" paralysis, and/or overwhelming amounts of libraries to learn to use.

Earlier today, I was chatting with the folks in my computer club, discussing how I wrote a little program just to explore the nature of small neural networks. Then I decided to show them how I use Visual Studio Code with ChatGPT5 (from my GitHub subscription)

The next thing you know, I had a bare bones computerized bulletin board system accessible via telnet, up and running in Python, just as an example of what's possible.

Next was a small database to scan and catalog all the videos on a disk drive, with an SQLite backend. I added a web interface to it in a few minutes, thanks to the LLM.

All of this while I'm a barely passable Python programmer... my preferred language is Delph/Free Pascal.

Things that were previously overwhelming are now almost trivial. Sure, it's effectively instant legacy code... but I can live with less than 1000 lines of legacy code for myself, and nobody else. I might even study it, and learn some things. ;-)

> Things that were previously overwhelming are now almost trivial.

Not if you have to stake your career on them. AI takes no liability, it is all yours

There’s no accountability in software, and in the tech industry people move jobs so fast they can simply blame the previous person and say they need to refactor the code to remove tech debt for a few years. Basically the three envelope situation.

>Basically the three envelope situation.

https://kevinkruse.com/the-ceo-and-the-three-envelopes/

Thank you for putting in clear info about the language, task and results! I’m going to add that you have likely been programming forever.

I am beginning to suspect that the ability to get value out of GenAI is almost entirely dependent on the ability to recognize bad patterns at a glance.

In essence, it’s a tool for power users, not for neophytes.

Good lord, its going to be the excel problem on steroids.

My fear is that this will make the gap between newcomers and veterans so much bigger that the junior market will suffer more than ever before.

However, according to a few job openings in my area, "junior AI powered engineer" is actually a thing that some companies ask. Is it a good idea? I'd say no it's not. Do the managers who do the hiring while reading all the hype care? Definitely not the ones who ask for AI powered juniors.

Excel is the worlds most popular declarative programming language.

2 things I'd fix about it, remove default assuming certain things are dates, and adding a way to mark an area of a spreadsheet as a database table, so you can't sort only some of the columns.

Excel has tables (Insert > Table), which take care of your second point.

To be fair, some of that is the python:

https://xkcd.com/353/

I totally get the point your trying to make. I guess what I'm trying to say is that I think it's unfair/misleading that anything with a veneer of LLMs has all the credit driven to the LLM and not to the thing that provides the bulk of the value.

Like for example, clearly you are a very experienced developer with a vast amount of experience. To say that the extent and reach to which you are able to apply technologies is because LLMs seems wrong; it's your rich technical background which allow you to use LLMs in an effective manner.

> Sure, it's effectively instant legacy code

I call this ‘mass produced software’. I walk into a software shop, ask for software and get more or less what I need at barely acceptable quality just like at Walmart.

Vibe coding? Perhaps it’s just shopping.

The amount that can be prototyped is astronomically higher with LLM's, which lowers the barrier to do these things and troubleshoot libraries/architectures. Naturally the amount of hobby projects has exploded multiple OOM's beyond what was done before, regardless of any gatekeeping you wish you could do :P

I don't think they were trying to gatekeep. They were just saying that it shouldn't not be concluded to be because of llms

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