logoalt Hacker News

HeWhoLurksLatelast Wednesday at 7:52 PM5 repliesview on HN

I have watched artists thoughtfully integrate digital lighting and the like at a scale I'd never seen before the LLMs rolled up and made it possible to get programs to work without knowing how to program.

The fundamental ceiling of what an LLM can do when connected to an IDE is incredible, and orders of magnitude higher than the limits of any no-code / low-code platform conceived thus far. "Democratizing" software - where now the only limits are your imagination, tenacity, and ability to keep the bots aligned with your vision, is allowing incredible things that wouldn't have happened otherwise because you now don't strictly need to learn to program for a programming-involved art project to work out.

Should you learn how to code if you're doing stuff like that? Absolutely. But is it letting people who have no idea about computing dabble their feet in and do extremely impressive stuff for the low cost of $20/month? Also yes.


Replies

mikestorrentlast Wednesday at 8:32 PM

Now this is the right take. It's one thing for us to do navel-gazing into the recursive autononomous future; it's another to step back and see what Normal People can do, now that the walls are coming down around our profession. Creating new walls is probably not the answer! From the Cathedral and Bazaar, we now have an entire metaphorical city of development happening, by people who would not have thought it possible a few years ago.

I don't know what the future of my job holds other than what it always had: helping people who have good ideas to get them done properly.

show 1 reply
jimbokunyesterday at 1:59 AM

Sure but maybe we’re all better off spending more time going for walks, learning to cook, playing sports , talking to friends and family, participating in spiritual communities, and making love (to other people!)

emporaslast Wednesday at 8:00 PM

Emacs can be configured with no code written by the user and Linux can be controlled with minimal user knowledge of the command line. Still some knowledge is necessary in most cases, but nowhere near what was required a handful of years back.

mingyeowyesterday at 12:07 AM

“ The fundamental ceiling of what an LLM can do when connected to an IDE is incredible, and orders of magnitude higher than the limits of any no-code / low-code platform conceived thus far.”

Curious on this - why?

show 1 reply
foobarchuyesterday at 12:03 AM

> the low cost of $20/month?

At what threshold does this stop being true? AI firms are famously hemorrhaging money and it will not last.

show 1 reply