alt Hacker News> I think when LLMs first came out people thought they could just say something like, "Make a Facebook clone". But now we're realizing we need to be more exact with our requirements and define things better. That has always been the bottle neck in software.
This was substantially predicted by Fred Brooks in 1986 in the classic No Silver Bullets [1] essay under the sections "Expert Systems" and "Automatic Programming".
In it, he lays out the core features of vibe coding and exactly the experience we are having now with it: Initial success in a few carefully chosen domains and then a reasonable but not ground breaking increase in productivity as it expands outside of those domains.
[1] https://worrydream.com/refs/Brooks_1986_-_No_Silver_Bullet.p...
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"We've invented the silver bullet from the book 'No Silver Bullets'"
It's interesting how predictable some of this is.
The LLMs turn out fully formed clones of stuff for which there exists copious amounts of code openly searchable on the web doing the exact same thing.
LLMs require developer-like specification, task/subtask breakdown and detail where such example code already exists.
As a professional prior to LLMs, how many problems that you work on have many existing free solutions but you neglected to use that code and decided to spend days doing it yourself?