Comment by jfim | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jfim | Hacker News Reader

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> I guess the big question is if experienced product management types can pick up enough coding technical literacy to work like this without programmers

I'd argue that they can't, at least on a short timeframe. Not because LLMs can't generate a program or product that works, but that there needs to be enough understanding of how the implementation works to fix any complex issues that come up.

One experience I had is that I had tried to generate a MITM HTTPS proxy that uses Netty using Claude, and while it generated a pile of code that looked good on the surface, it didn't actually work. Not knowing enough about Netty, I wasn't able to debug why it didn't work and trying to fix it with the LLM didn't help either.

Maybe PMs can pick up enough knowledge over time to be able to implement products that can scale, but by that time they'd effectively be a software engineer, minus the writing code part.

LLMs are great for learning though, you can easily ask them questions, and you can evaluate your understanding every step of the way, and gradually build the accuracy of your world model that way. It’s not uncommon for me to ask a general question, drill deeper into a concept, and then either test things manually with some toy code or end up reading the official documentation, this time with at least some exposure to the words that I’m looking for to answer my question.

This is how I use them- but I also use them to write initial UI's (usually very primitive). Because I've got an issue where the UI has to be perfect, and if I can blame somebody/something other than me I can ignore it until the UI becomes important enough.

If I wanted a confident and simple answer with no regard for veracity, I would just ask a politician.

If an LLM can get you 90% of the way there, you need fewer engineers. But the engineer you need probably needs to be a senior engineer who went through the pain of learning all of the details and can function without AI.

If all juniors are using AI, or even worse, no juniors are ever hired, I'm not sure how we can produce those seniors at the scale we currently do. Which isn't even that large a scale.

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