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Comment by JeremyNT | Hacker News Reader

I feel like you could have correctly stated this a few months ago, but the way this is "solved" is by multiple agents that babysit each other and review their output - it's unreasonably effective.

You can get extremely good results assuming your spec is actually correct (and you're willing to chew through massive quantities of tokens / wait long enough).

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> You can get extremely good results assuming your spec is actually correct

Is it ever the case that the spec is entirely correct (and without underspecified parts)? I thought the reason we write code is because it's much easier to express a spec as code than it is to get a similar level of precision in prose.

I think this is basically the only SWE-type job that exists beyond the (relatively near) future: finding the right spec and feeding it to the bots. And in this way I think even complete laypeople will be able to create software using the bots, but you'd still want somebody with a deeper understanding in this role for serious projects.

The bots even now can really help you identify technical problems / mistakes / gaps / bad assumptions, but there's no replacing "I know what the business wants/needs, and I know what makes my product manager happy, and I know what 'feels' good" type stuff.

> finding the right spec and feeding it to the bots

Also known as "compiling source code".

And unreasonably expensive unless you are Big Corp. Die startups, die. Welcome to our Cyberpunk overlords.

Companies will just shift money from salaries to their Anthropic bill - what's the problem?

Best not build any products that compete with Anthropic!

Or hey, the VCs can self-deal by funding new startups that buy bot time from AI firms the same VCs already fund.

No pesky developers siphoning away equity!

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