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Comment by a2ff6eeb0 | Hacker News Reader

It really isn't that hard. The LLM needs a few iterations of self review, and you need to ask it for an architecture up front, but from there, it's mostly manual testing to make sure the LLM didn't fuck up.

I don't think it'd take more than a few weeks for a high schooler to learn how to prompt well.

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Your hypothetical high schooler would have to learn what architecture is, and then what self review is, and iteration, and manual testing... and what "code" and "software" is first.

If it takes them more than a few weeks to figure out "Review your own output with a clean context. Check it for bugs, performance, and places where it doesn't do what the user wants", I don't know what to say. And where are you finding high schoolers that don't know what software is?

Note, people don't typically need to understand the architecture documents that the LLMs generate, and will certainly be filling in the rest of the gaps as new models come out. The function of design docs is to make the LLM ask clarifying questions and fill in the constraints.

This is something devs don’t give enough credit. You may think you’re just promoting, but ask someone outside the field to prompt their way to a feature and you will see very clearly what your experience is bringing to the table.

Yeah, but train them for a month on how to get the AI to help them prompt, and they'll do fine. AIs are extremely effective at letting you offload skill, you just need to know how to ask. This should surprise nobody, since this is what they were and built for.

I genuinely don't think you need much training for creating code any more. The skill can be offloaded.

I had a conversation with someone about this the other day where they asked what AI was useful for, and I said programming, and they asked what programming was, and I eventually stumbled into "it's how you make apps".

I'm not worried for my career.

Fascinating. What an extreme outlier. Where did you find them? Did you also have to explain what an app was?

Anyways, if being more capable than them is the bar you think you need to clear, I suppose you'll be fine.

I still stand by my statement: there's no deep knowledge needed to deliver most of the software we need today, just some iteration on prompts. And the AI is getting better pretty quickly. You need to be able to explain what you want, why the AI got it wrong, and paste the error you see. It takes some focused training, but so does being a line chef at a restaurant.

I don't disagree in principle, but there's got to be a ceiling at some complexity. Teach them to prompt their way into a Twitter clone in a month (or less), sure. Teach them to prompt their way into a Bun rewrite in Rust in a month...well, there are apparently some people who need your help right now ;)

> I don't think it'd take more than a few weeks for a high schooler to learn how to prompt well.

Devs are notoriously bad at estimating tasks.

I have a non-technical cousin that figured it out on their own just fine.

Maybe - but I would argue that the skill comes in knowing if the architecture is appropriate and knowing that LLM is not screwing it up.

You can get more confidence by asking the LLM about when the architecture would be appropriate than by trying to intuit it yourself. The LLM is trained on so many more architectures and stories of how they panned out than you are.

The skill is really in manually testing before handoff.

I still get occasional hallucinations, wrong answers, and entirely unnecessary change proposals from LLMs. An LLM being confident in its own work does not make me confident in it.

You get that from humans too.

No shit, that's why we review code...

You're not making a point

And LLMs are already better code reviewers than humans are; take a look at the bugs found in the Linux kernel.

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