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Comment by a_void_sky | Hacker News Reader

"Coding was never the hard part. Typing syntax into a machine has always been the least interesting part of building a system."

and I think these people are benefitting from it the most, people with expertise, who know their way around and knew what and how to build but did not want to do the grunt work

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Slight adjustment, but I'd see "maintaining code" is the same as before, matters more the people and their experience and knowledge how to manage that. But agree that the literal typing was never the difficult part, knowing what code should and shouldn't be written was a hard part, and still remains a hard part.

Right now, "what code shouldn't be written" seems to have become an even more important part, as it's so easy to spit out huge amounts of code, but that's the lazy and easy way, not the one that let you slowly add in features across a decade, rather than getting stuck with a ball of spaghetti after a weekend of "agent go brrr".

this is where years of experience working with freshers and junior devs helps, AI is smart enough to exactly do if you clearly tell it what to do and how

unless you understand every inch of system and foresee what issues can be created by what kind of change, things will break when using AI

Hm. People that know what they are doing prefer to do it themselves. This is not a new thing, not because of llms, but it is how it was always. People that knows more, have heavier opinions. Given the option of accepting new code and new functionality, often, people that knows what they are doing would reject code that functions fine, but fails expectations.

I think who's benefiting the most are people that said that syntax was the least interesting parts but could not program for shit.

Typing into a machine is not the least interesting part. It is the only interesting part. Everything else is a fairy tale

I think that captures a lot of the LLM debate.

There are people who just want an object produced that allows for some outcome to be achieved closer to the present.

And there are other people who want to ensure that object that is produced, will be maintainable, not break other parts of the system etc.

Neither party is wrong in what they want. I think there should naturally be a split of roles - the former can prototype stuff so other individuals in the organisation can critique whether it is a thing of value / worth investing in for production.

me and my team have wasted so many hours (days) working on some product features which was "definitely going viral" only to be forgotten after a few weeks

I believe if we had something like this we could go to market early and understand the user behaviour to build a more scalable and robust system once we were sure if it was even of worth

Yeah thats a good example.

The reality is humans are really bad at knowing what is worth investing into.. until the object is there for all to see and critique.

Every idea sounds great until you spend resources getting into the subtleties and nuances.

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