You can scaffold out a simple app pretty easily. Anything large or complex things break down. If you don’t know what you’re doing you end up leaking secrets like the dozens of examples we’ve seen so far.

You could always do this, though.

Before gen code killed the freelance business model, there were hoards of people on Upwork/Fiverr willing to fuck other freelancers over and underpay themselves to make whatever barely-working slop you wanted.

Hell, before managers got the idea of AI layoffs, they had been off-shoring to low-quality code sweatshops for years. That was supposed to kill software engineering in the States 20 years ago. And it was just as frustrating (if not moreso) to get them to actually fulfill the project requirements.

I'd say creating a project is 5% of the job and maintaining it over time 95% of it.

It's true that they can start amazing projects without guidance but then the real work begins.

Programming is the reification of decision-making processes. If you don't understand the decision-making process that you want, you get a different one, which at best approximates the one you want but couldn't articulate.

If you do this with COBOL or Python, at least you get consistent operation and errors when you're wrong. If you do this with any LLM, consistency is dropped in favor of obsequiousness.

The base problem is that people aren't equipped naturally to think about all the details of their problems.

My experience is different. I hear a lot of developers, old and young, scaling back their LLM use now that the bills are coming in. And I don't just mean the financial bills, mostly it's about them realising that there's a lot lf shit they need to fix that the model can't handle, and they no longer understand it enough to either do it or properly prompt a model to.

The most prevalent trend I see around me today is that people are going back to using the LLMs as research, review, and sketching tools, but writing most actual code themselves again. And it's not just AI skeptics doing that, it's those who went all-in and are finally seeing the downsides and limitations of this technology, now that the hype is waning.

I don't think my comment adds anything useful to this thread but thanks for sharing this, I was having a rough week and this made me burst out laughing

I am not clicking that link. I have blocked all reddit domains in my router, using AI to retrieve answers from Reddit.

You can copy paste it in reply if you want