Comment by mcoliver | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mcoliver | Hacker News Reader

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Code was the easy part for people who wrote code day in day out with very strictly defined requirements. But even for someone like me that's been doing it for 30 years...new frameworks, languages, architectures, wiring up 3rd party apis, banging my head because I fat fingered something, greping debug logs, late nights, early mornings and lots of coffee. There were few times where I would call it "easy". I just ideated and built an app optimized for mobile and laptop, and deployed it globally in two hours and built a Roku companion app in a couple nights after the kids went to bed. I had never built a Roku app before and am pleased with the polish for something that went from an idea to launch in two hours.

Yes I have 30 years of experience and there were still areas that were not easy but man it was fun. Writing the code, building and deploying product is easier than it was before by a huge margin.

Skicamslive.con if you're wondering what I built. Feedback welcome

Small personal projects are really not comparable to professional software development in a corporate setting.

In fact your example demonstrates what the article says. Yeah the LLM made coding easier, and probably reduced your shipping time from a few days to a few hours.

Now - since you have solved the hardest problem and have all this valuable code - how long will it take you to turn your product into a business and generate enough money to support yourself?

That's the hard part.

> Now - since you have solved the hardest problem and have all this valuable code - how long will it take you to turn your product into a business and generate enough money to support yourself?

> That's the hard part.

It's now even harder because SNR fell off a cliff. As the effort to produce a product approaches zero, the financial viability of that product goes to zero as well.

Happy for you, but GitHub has plenty of webcam feed URLs, webcam viewers, Roku code etc. You "built" it for some value of 'building' but it certainly doesn't seem the same kind of 'building' as described in the first three sentences of your post.

It's nice you got something out of it in just two hours. If the LLM companies are doing their caching right, the next person to ask for this set of apps with prompts close enough to yours can get it in five minutes.

Also there's a typo in the URL.

Well said. But, I understand what they meant, they meant from an organisation’s perspective. Either way, I’ve seen far too many people in HN who fear AI won’t write perfect code, forgetting half the code we wrote before was probably worse.

I’ve also found joy again in building things, but I never fetishised the code myself anyway, I suppose I just wasn’t built that way, which might mean I was always biased to be like this.

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