alt Hacker News> My experience is that people who weren't very good at writing software are the ones now "most excited" to "create" with a LLM.
I've been a tech lead for years and have written business critical code many times. I don't ever want to go back to writing code. I am feeling supremely empowered to go 100x faster. My contribution is still judgement, taste, architecture, etc. And the models will keep getting better. And as a result, I'll want to (and be able to) do even more.
I also absolutely LOVE that non-programmers have access to this stuff now too. I am always in favor of tools that democratize abilities.
Any "idiot" can build their own software tailored to how their brains think, without having to assemble gobs of money to hire expensive software people. Most of them were never going to hire a programmer anyway. Those ideas would've died in their heads.
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What you bring to the table night be fine, but how long do you think you'll find emoloyers willing to still pay for this?
One thing is for sure LLMs will bring down down the cost of software per some unit and increase the volume.
But..cost = revenue. What is a cost to one party is a revenue to another party. The revenue is what pays salaries.
So when software costs go down the revenues will go down too. When revenues go down lay offs will happen, salary cuts will happen.
This is not fictional. Markets already reacted to this and many software service companies took a hit.
The models will not keep betting better. We have pased "peak LLM" already, by my estimate. Some of the parlour tricks that are wrapped around the models will make some incremental improvements, but the underlying models are done. More data, more parameters, are no longer doing to do anything.
AI will have to take a different direction.
> I also absolutely LOVE that non-programmers have access to this stuff now too. I am always in favor of tools that democratize abilities.
Here's the other edge of that sword. A couple back-end devs in my department vibe-coded up a standard AI-tailwind front-end of their vision of revamping our entire platform at once, which is completely at odds with the modular approach that most of the team wants to take, and would involve building out a whole system based around one concrete app and 4 vaporware future maybe apps.
And of course the higher-ups are like “But this is halfway done! With AI we can build things in 2 weeks that used to six months! Let’s just build everything now!” Nevermind that we don’t even have the requirements now, and nailing those down is the hardest part of the whole project. But the higher-ups never live through that grind.