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Comment by schnebbau | Hacker News Reader

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Sure. You can come gloat about how you're unemployed because nobody needs a prompt monkey when they can just prompt the LLM to produce dogshit code themselves.

I climbed out of the code trenches years ago - I have multiple small companies, I'll be fine.

And yes, they both have moats that will take AI at least 5 years to erode, at which point I'll just retire.

Regarding the dog shit code comment: this is the problem with your whole line of thinking. Customers don't care if the code is dog shit. They care if they get value from the product.

As I mentioned, there will still be some demand for devs who code by hand, similar to how theres still demand for blacksmiths who make ornamental weapons.

Dogshit code doesn't give customers value from the product. You can get away with enshittifying your code/product if you already have an iron grip on the market and network effects make it impossible to escape, eg. Windows/appleOS/Android, Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, Discord, etc. At that point, you're relying on the inertia of community lock-in to replace product quality. However, this strategy does not work if you aren't a FAANG-scale monopolist. If your code and product is dogshit, you will never get off the ground. You need not only a better product but an overwhelmingly superior product to the competition to defeat inertia. And we see this playing out in reality: there are no vibecoded software disrupting the market. At most vibecoded software is carving out a new MLM-style pyramid of vibecoding tools, but it is not replacing hand-crafted software.

This is just wishful thinking.

Building the product was never the hard part. Getting it in front of people is. That will continue to be true, except the build stage will be even easier.

> Building the product was never the hard part

this is an absolutely insane take

Is it? A lot of software is really just a pile of context-specific database front-ends. There is virtually nothing difficult in the implementation itself. Most businesses in this space survive because they know how to dress up their pile of CRUD for their customers. And it gets worse: a less reliable, buggier product may still be the better fit for a customer if it works well enough for what they use it the most.

I worked in an early startup that came from 5+ years of initial academic research and selling the product was far more arduous of a process.

Prove it?

You sound exactly like the cryptobros of yore. Just stop.

If you're right, the evidence will bear that out. Stop evangelizing. It's insufferable. And it's paradoxical that so many who believe this technology to be absolutely world-changing also feel that the technology needs to be pushed onto people actively. It reminds me of religious people ("my god is all-powerful, but if you meaningless mortal insult him he'll be mightily upset").

I also hate preachy sermons about new tech with a deep passion and that transfers somewhat to the tech they preach about.

Despite this, there is a reality that LLMs for coding can create pretty decent results fast. There is something real and usable hidden in all that mess. It's like the dot com bubble in some ways: the bubble died with all the overhyped "x on the web" BS that had no real substance, but the web itself stayed. This time around, LLMs and agents will stick around as tools, but the hype will likely die a loud, messy death.

Nobody here is saying otherwise. The Codeberg policy in question does not forbid LLM-assistance outright; their policy is targeted towards unmitigated slop. Even myself, as I argue heatedly against the religious adherents, not only use LLMs daily but work for a very successful LLM startup developing and selling LLMs-as-tools. That does not make the zealots who won't shut the fuck up about LLMs-as-gods any less infuriating.

Sure. But HN these days is the epitome of "x but on the web" for the AI era. It's insufferable!

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