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Comment by TheAceOfHearts | Hacker News Reader

At least for me, the jump in productivity has resulted in building stripped down one-off software for my highly specific use-cases.

You can use an LLM to create anything but you still need to know what it is that you're building, and you need to think through how everything should work or the LLM will just fill it with sausage. You can tell that the models are still quite jagged and limited by the mixed quality from a lot of the software that these presumed trillion dollar companies are putting out. The future is sausage.

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That's not how productivity works. Unless you're selling your one off scripts, that's not where the business sees productivity.

Can you make a connection down to the bottom line? Are your one off scripts actually impacting production speeds in a tangible way such that the product is made faster or cheaper?

Being able to crank out slicker internal tech debt for shims isn't really what the business owners are after.

its funny how long it took the managers and owners to figure this out.

They really bought into the pipe dream didnt they? hahahah.

it makes financial sense at current subscription prices, but this might not hold true when they have to raise prices eventually

Why will they have to raise prices eventually?

when they IPO, their financials will be under scrutiny, and exponential revenue growth would be required to justify their trillion dollar valuation

cash flows

reinvestment

going-concern

perpetuity

valuation

do you know finance? I believe not.

This doesn't make sense, I enjoy making bread at home but it costs 10x and tastes like dog shit I dont want to spend my time perfecting the craft of making bread for my daily needs (maybe once in a while its a soothing activity), I want someone smarter than me to spend his entire life coming up and perfecting a solution and exerting more time and effort than I can afford and I am very happy to support him so I can stop worrying about it and focus on what I want to do

> This doesn't make sense

Makes perfect sense to anyone good at using these models. What doesn't make sense is that analogy. Typing prompts isn't even close to as difficult to baking bread.

>Makes perfect sense to anyone good at using these models.

It doesn't really, because whenever I ask them what did they actually create, its always a shitty dashboard or a finance tracker or something derivative and worse than what is out there

You're missing the point that it isn't worse than what's already out there for them.

They've implemented only the parts they need, and removed all the crap that just complicates the system for them. They've made it do exactly what they need, exactly how they need it. It's something that you couldn't afford to do previously, sometimes even as a programmer. Now, it's often quick and easy, up to a certain complexity.

> They've made it do exactly what they need, exactly how they need it.

…until it breaks, or the bot goes off and does something ridiculous that you can’t understand without domain expertise. Which always happens.

I’m sympathetic to your argument, but I also strongly believe that most of these so-called “exactly what I need” projects will be abandoned within a fairly short time. That’s totally fine, but it’s not where most of the effort in professional software lies.

I'd say that's more indicative of what kind of things people in your bubble generally work on.

I vibe-coded a semantic parser for Lojban.

A friend of mine is using it to work on dev tooling.

Another friend, a mathematician, has recently used it to prove a conjecture he published 15 years ago.

> Typing prompts isn't even close to as difficult to baking bread

Depending on how good you are at this task. If typing prompts was that easy, there won't be so many tutorials, blog posts, and framework (Act as ... etc)

But there is a difference though. You can ask LLM for "how to write a prompt for ... to prompt you". You can't do that with bread.

Typing prompts isn't the equivalent of baking bread.

Typing prompts would be like measuring ingredients.

putting ingredients into the bread maker and pressing "on"

Yes. Which makes damn good bread, as it turns out. It doesn't look quite as good as handmade, but it tastes great, has good texture etc.

> I enjoy making bread at home but it costs 10x and tastes like dog shit

Eh? You enjoy making stuff at home that tastes like dog shit? That doesn't make sense at all.

BTW: I love making bread and it tastes amazing!

> I enjoy making bread at home but it costs 10x and tastes like dog shit

I am sorry but you are holding it wrong. Among all the things you can do yourself cgeaper and better, bread is probably the further most low hanging fruit.

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