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Comment by dasil003 | Hacker News Reader

Architects and engineers are not construction workers. AI can build the thing but it needs to be told exactly what to build by someone who knows how software works.

I’ve spent enough time working with cross-functional stakeholders to know that the vast majority of PM (whether of the product, program, or project variety), will not be capable of running AI towards any meaningful software development goal. At best they can build impressive prototypes and demos, at worst they will corrupt data in a company-destroying level of failure.

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Agree. I’m finding quite a lot of success with AI but i’m writing detailed prompts. In turn the LLM’s are producing 99% error free massive refactors.

No one but seniors with years and years of experience is producing like that. As evidenced how much the juniors i work with struggle to do the same

> can build the thing but it needs to be told exactly what to build by someone who knows how software works.

How do you tell a computer exactly what you want it to do, without using code?

Basically you feed it a massive volume of application code. It turns out there is a lot of commonality and latent repetition that can be teased out by LLMs, so you can get quite far with that, though it will fall down when you get into more novel terrain.

> AI can build the thing but it needs to be told exactly what to build by someone who knows how software works.

If AI was following my instructions instead of ignoring them, and after complaining telling me it is sorry, and returns some other implementation which also fails to follow my instructions ... :-(

Don't be stupid, if an AI can figure out how to arrange code, it can also figure out how to pick the right architecture choices.

Right now millions of developers are providing tons of architecture questions and answers. That's all going to be used as training data for the next model coming out in 6 months time.

This is a moat on our jobs as deep as a puddle.

If you believe LLMs will be able to do complex coding tasks, you must also concede they will be able to make the relatively simpler architecture choices easily simply by asking the right questions. Something they're already starting to be able to do.

> [...] by asking the right questions [...]

Now you've put your finger on something. Who is capable of asking the right questions?

It already asks questions in plan mode.

It's not a massive jump to go from, 'add a button above the table to the right that when clicked downloads and excel file', to 'The client's asking to dowbload an excel file".

If you believe the LLMs will graduate from junior level coding to senior in the next year, which they're clearly not capable of doing yet despite all the hype, there is no moat of going from coder to BA to PM.

And then you don't need middle management either.

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