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Comment by lotu | Hacker News Reader

You say that like someone that has been coding for so long you have forgotten what it's like to not know how to code. The customer will have little idea what is even possible and will ask for a product that doesn't solve their actual problem. AI is amazing at producing answers you previously would have looked up on stack overflow, which is very useful. It often can type faster that than I can which is also useful. However, if we are going to see the exponential improvements towards AGI AI boosters talk about we would have already seen the start of it.

When LLMs first showed up publicly it was a huge leap forward, and people assumed it would continue improving at the rate they had seen but it hasn't.

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Exactly. The customer doesn't know what's possible, but increasingly neither do we unless we're staying current at frontier speed. AI can type faster and answer Stack Overflow questions. But understanding what's newly possible, what competitors just shipped, what research just dropped... that requires continuous monitoring across arXiv, HN, Reddit, Discord, Twitter. The gap isn't coding ability anymore. It's information asymmetry. Teams with better intelligence infrastructure will outpace teams with better coding skills. That's the shift people are missing.

Hey, welcome to HN. I see that you have a few LLM generated comments going here, please don’t do it as it is mostly a place for humans to interact. Thank you.

>The customer will have little idea what is even possible and will ask for a product that doesn't solve their actual problem.

How do you know that? For tech products most of the users are also technically literate and can easily use Claude Code or whatever tool we are using. They easily tell CC specifically what they need. Unless you create social media apps or bank apps, the customers are pretty tech savvy.

One example is programmers who would code physics simulations that run in massive data. You need a decent amount of software engineering skills to maintain software like that but the programmer maybe has a BS in Physics but doesn’t really know the nuances of the actual algorithm being implemented.

With AI, probably you don’t need 95% of the programmers who do that job anyway. Physicists who know the algorithm much better can use AI to implement a majority of the system and maybe you can have a software engineer orchestrate the program in the cloud or supercomputer or something but probably not even that.

Okay, the idea I was trying to get across before I rambled was that many times the customer knows what they want very well and much better than the software engineer.

Yes, I made the same point. Customers are not as dumb as our PMs and Execs think they are. They know their needs more than us, unless its about social media and banks.

I agree. People forget that people know how to use computers and have a good intuition on what they are capable of. Its the programming task that many people cant do. Its unlocking users to solve their own problems again

No, I’m pretty sure the models are still improving or the harnesses are, and I don’t think that distinction is all that important for users. Where were coding agents at 2025? 2024? I’m pretty amazed by the improvements in the last few months.

I'm both amazed by the improvements, and also think they are fundamentally incremental at this point.

But I'm happy about this. I'm not that interested in or optimistic about AGI, but having increasingly great tools to do useful work with computers is incredible!

My only concern is that it won't be sustainable, and it's only as great as it is right now because the cost to end users is being heavily subsidized by investment.

We talk about things like S curves for AGI, and how it's slowing down.

But where is the S curves for programmers at?

Actual socialization is my bet.

> However, if we are going to see the exponential improvements towards AGI AI boosters talk about we would have already seen the start of it.

Maybe you already understood this, but many of the "AI boosters" you refer to genuinely believe we have "seen the start of it".

Or at least they appear to believe it.

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