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Comment by baq | Hacker News Reader

Frontier LLMs write better code at CRUD tasks than 95% of developers today. They’ll get to 95% of most niche coding domains by December and likely all coding tasks sometime next year; 99% better at all tasks by December 2028.

You may be correct now and it doesn’t matter one bit.

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We’ve been hearing the drumbeat that these models are already better than $INVENT_A_NUMBER percentage of developers at $SOME_SMALL_TASK for several years. I haven’t seen that it’s actually true yet personally.

What I do see is that the frontier models can get easy stuff mostly right, but they can’t maintain a small codebase such that it behaves correctly across several mutations. When the going requires a lot of context, tests get rewritten to not do anything and features that manipulate similar data get divergent implementations. That’s fine for goofing around personally, but I see vibe coders getting their asses handed to them when they mistake that for a well maintained codebase and try to sell a product.

Please, don’t mistake an impressive technology for a miracle; there will still be people needed to make codebases healthy for a long time to come.

I hope you're right, but hope is not a process. I'm looking at the obviously exponential charts of capabilities and don't have much to add to that hope.

Vera Rubin datacenters aren't even online yet.

I'd say as long as we can clearly see the 5% are working better than an LLM, why not strive for it? Shows what humans are capable of, and it's probably achievable to most.

I'm not hanging my hat yet and can still see where LLMs struggle. I think it's the best bet you can make: keep working for the future where you'll still be needed, because you can't prepare for the future where you're not.

I agree about your general assessment, but I don't see my coding skills of, depending on how you count them two or three decades, being needed in 36 months - so I'm trying to upskill LLM piloting, but that also seems a bit of a dead end since LLMs will be perfectly capable of piloting themselves in approximately the same timeframe - we'll see what needs upskilling in by winter...

How this presents, however, I would think, is that being that top 5% and utilizing LLMs will get you further than either alone.

I think that's a reasonable view. Though I personally see LLMs more as replacers, not as tools to utilize.

> write better code at CRUD tasks

This reads like it can write a better javascript function that executes a SQL statement and maps the parameters.

> They’ll get to 95% of most niche coding domains by December and likely all coding tasks sometime next year; 99% better at all tasks by December 2028.

Basing this prediction on LLMs writing what something like an ORM would generate for you doesn't connect for me.

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