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Comment by rjh29 | Hacker News Reader

The two types of coder argument seems strong to me. Coders who love the art of programming (optimisation for the sake of it, beautiful designs, data structures...) and builders. The former are in for a rough time. The latter are massively enabled and no longer have to worry about smashing together libs by hand to make crud apps.

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Doordash has also enabled home cooks; they no longer have to worry about smashing together ingredients by hand to make dinner. They just prompt the app to make them the food they want.

Doordash is the future of home cooking.

Prepackaged pasta sauces and cake mix. Worse than making it from scratch but enables people with no time to cook more dishes.

Doordash is more like paying someone else to code for you. Luckily that will soon be a thing of the past.

I suggest you stop paying Anthropic, and see how much code gets written. You're absolutely paying someone else to do it for you.

I pay Google £15/month and have never hit the usage limit. But thanks anyway.

edit: I think you might mean vibe coding (and those infamous things that use millions of tokens with no limit) but for programmers using LLMs to code is literally just a tool like anything else and the cost is barely relevant. It's not comparable to contracting out code, and it's not even comparable to eating out in terms of cost!

There are much nore than 2 types of programers, one you forgot are the ones who just need the job and any tool that helps is welcome, also, there the ones that don't care for anything and does programming just because is the only thing that's available to jot work on sales or burger flipping, and the list goes on

"bvilders" right now its mostly people who want to build a substandard app and shill it everywhere.

That's what's visible now. Give it more time and larger, more long-term projects will come out. I'm talking about people with ambitious ideas who -could- code but lack the time or energy.

Thinking carefully about the details of implementation MATTERS. Even with crud apps. Getting something “built” fast isn’t and should not be the only consideration.

I can go to a junkyard and assemble the parts to build a car. It may run, but for a thousand tiny reasons it will be worse than a car built by a team of designers and engineers who have thought carefully about every aspect of its construction.

I agree. However manual code review and heavy refactoring is a laborious and error prone process, and even most human projects don't keep up with it successfully. Plenty of horrible code debt ridden projects in the real world. As long as you're not writing safety-critical code, use of LLM is not incompatible with what you're saying.

For now it matters, but how long ? Context window will keep increasing and soon ai will be able to take care of all our codebase

Yes this is the state of it. But just wait a few months, maybe years, the builders aren't safe either. It just won't be cost effective to let humans build in a matter of time.

Depends on what you mean by "builder."

If you mean "somebody with an idea who wants to make it real" then that person is massively enabled.

Those "idea men" I've seen are usually not capable of following through a logical product, even if they start using AI. It's not just the code that's the barrier.

The prototypes or whatever can be handy to help them explain themselves to others of course.

There are plenty of programmers who are perfectly capable of delivering products, who have ideas that are too ambitious to do on their own.

Agreed, that's not really who I was referring too.

So enabled, in fact, that there's almost no point in downloading an already-made app when you can just trivially tailor-make your own. The builder is massively enabled to quickly make anything they want, for an audience of exactly one.

For tiny apps, sure. Some people are making larger projects that take weeks or months even with AI, that they never could have done otherwise.

Strongly disagree. You think you’d be able to prompt your way through creating an app with even half the feature set of Microsoft word, for example? I would be very time consuming to be able to think through how the app should work for many use cases you care about or didn’t think about. This time isn’t free. Now consider having to do this iteration across many apps you depend on. And, count on introducing regressions when your next prompt is incompatible with existing features. If you are not retired, this is a huge ongoing time sync.

You think you were able to prompt your way through creating hello world five years ago? Models improve and they need less and less guidance.

Combined with the fact that my use cases aren't your use cases, yes, it might be cheaper for me to make my own than to slog though software that wasn't built to serve my exact needs.

I’m not saying that there’s no need for specialty apps optimized for specific use cases or that you can’t use llms to create them more cheaply than last year. Only that the time to think through how the app should work and iterate on it is still significant in the way that it was last year if you were given the worlds best team of software engineers and they’d code to your product requirements. You’d only take this path for apps where the time tradeoff is worth it vs “off the shelf” apps.

The issue is that off the shelf apps were made at a time when it was too expensive to make apps. Everyone uses 2% of Word, Photoshop, etc, it's just a different 2% for each.

You only need to reimplement that 2% for yourself for it to be worth it, not the entire app.

How would you address user requests? Tailor-make a custom app for every user?

Cars are here and you're wondering how someone could possibly make a faster horse. You wouldn't address user requests. You aren't a business. The users all make their own apps for themselves.

Cars are here and we're all choking on our own atmospheric excrement, so...

Assuming AI lives up to the marketing: Why would someone use an app instead of promoting their agent to figure out how to get something done?

Yall's blood-diamond-ass mommy bots are going to replace bullshit with bullshit and call it a win. The last datacenter will run out of coal and water and we'll be asking: "but how in the world am I going to make this Todo app?"

Imagine if your operating system or compiler were written by the sort of person that thinks "Coders who love the art of programming ... are in for a rough time."

Yeah but 99% of jobs are decidedly not that.

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