Comment by Aquitard | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Aquitard | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

This is what I've found and would likely be the consenses of the HN community.

This has lowered the barrier of entry for many non-SWEs. I'm primarily a data scientist myself in the environmental sector with limited front end development.

My partner proposed an idea to help manage her horses and over the course of several weeks we fleshed out an android app that would enable/assist her with horse care.

I spent a few days in planning mode pointing claude to the services we want to utilise and the functionality.

We now have a fully developed app that we are testing but found several features missing. For example, Claude implement X but without a level of verbosity it failed to implement the edit/deletion of X.

The app is highly tailored to her use case and I had already built the main parts as a POC but she had no user-friendly method to interact with the information she required. Claude made this possible in such a quick time frame that just seems insane. As someone time poor (as most horse people are), it would have taken me a year+ to produce something unpolished when compared to what Claude produced.

Question if you don't mind. Would you have considered outsourcing the application you mentioned? As in, paying someone else to do it?

To me it is great that LLMs are allowing more people to use computers and software the way they were meant to. But the people that are using them this way, in my opinion, wouldn't have commissioned anybody to do it anyway. They'd just live with whatever process/pain they have. So jumping from "I can now produce a prototype in a weekend" to "software development is dead" has always felt strange to me. Just something I've been thinking about lately.

To answer your question probably not unless I knew the person. I could argue the case that I would have outsourced the android UI scope if I was motivated enough to develop it and kept the backend to myself. I could then tinker with the front end and build upon it. However I wouldn't outsource now if I knew the person would just use LLM anyway. I'm the type that would rather build something myself than purchase off the shelf that does a similar job. It provides a huge learning opportunity that I don't want to miss.

I understand what you're saying. My opinion is I see agentic workflow similar to the star trek universe where they ask the computer questions and get a response while they continue with their work. But that doesn't mean not learning how to do things from first principles. This is what I tell juniors in my field when I pass jobs to them. They can use LLM but to ensure they know and understand what's going on and most do from their university degree. I think this is where we need to pivot towards when discussing LLM.

Thank you for answering. I agree with you that, if used well, LLMs can be useful tools and increase efficiency. Unfortunately, what I am increasingly seeing is an increase in confidence but no increase in knowledge or understanding. I hope this is just a side-effect of the hype and corresponding bubble and not the future trajectory of knowledge work.

Foundational knowledge can be pretty far upstream of functional knowledge.

Whether you can't describe the analog circuits that correspond to the opcodes of the major mobile architectures running the platform of the app you're designing a UI for, or you couldn't have built any of the services you're hosting on from scratch, no one is going to be disappointed.

There are more people making more money off whatever we're currently calling making computers do things than ever before in history. The rest is largely business as usual.

But it does increase knowledge and understanding.

Not in a deep deep level like "this is the optimal way to manage low level memory access in an Android application" but on a higher level of "It's possible to do a custom Android app in a week that's of decent quality for a small userbase".

Every piece of software doesn't need to be targeted for billion user hockey stick growth and an IPO as a target. It's perfectly fine to build something that's just right for 10 or 20 people. Or just for your immediate family.

For example I have a quiz tool I built with LLM assistance for Christmas that mine and my siblings kids use every December, they get clues appropriate for their level and rewards when they solve the daily task.

It's fine, has custom handling for every user etc. But also something I'd never bothered to build by hand from scratch nor something I'd pay someone to build for me. It was a fun "hmm, I wonder if..." project I started a few years ago on a late evening in November.

A practical issue is that a lot of big software is used to solve small problems. For instance with his example, in the past perhaps instead of creating a little custom app it would have been a series of excel sheets with some other third parties tool as needed. And I think this is a very common use case. At most/all companies there tend to be convoluted processes to do relatively simple things, often enriching the big generalist companies in the process. As people become capable of creating competent ad-hoc solutions to problems, the utility of big high-utility software goes down.

Like a quote I've read on here multiple times about replacing e.g. excel or whatever, people often mention that users only use 5% of a software's functionality, but it's a different 5% for each person. The argument being that to replace excel you'd then need to mimic every esoteric thing it does, but when users can now achieve that 5% in a highly customized way with no real knowledge needed, it's going to have a major impact on big software.

This is _exactly_ it.

The people who were twisting Excel+VBA into massive "applications" in-house should be getting Claude licenses and guidance how to do that with a custom application instead.

We've done that internally already with a few very successful use-cases and a bunch of "this is nice" -level things. I think one case saved us 4 figures a month when we built a bespoke service that does just the things we need and could replace a SaaS that had 420 features - of which we used 2.

If the choices are: Use excel/sheets or something massive in a janky way, pay someone to build it for me (massive cost) or DIY with LLM

The "pay someone to build it" is definitely the one I wouldn't touch, or even consider.

If it's a good idea, they'll already have the code and will run away and make their own business with it. If it's a bad idea, I've wasted a bunch of money.

And in both cases I'd need to spend an inordinate amount of time explaining the terminology and use-cases to the contractor, book meetings with them during office hours to talk about requirements and get demos etc.

With an LLM I can be walking the dog late at night, get an idea, and within 2 minutes I'll have Claude working on it via my phone.

Then I come back home and maybe test whether it worked while watching TV.

If I had fuck you money, I might have a contractor on call that would agree to workflows like that, but I'm just a middle class software dev so I don't :D

> We now have a fully developed app that we are testing but found several features missing.

So not fully developed then.

> We now have a fully developed app that we are testing but found several features missing.

This is my experience with using AI to generate tailored apps too. The first 80% makes me really excited but then it either only kind of works, has bugs, or has missing features. Even when I do eventually get it working I feel dirty using it because I just know it's badly implemented. Of the dozens I've created I don't think I still use any of them. I have a few glue scripts still in use.

this is why i think LLMs is a foundational technology like the Internet. there is no other technology on the horizon that have this much impact.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com