alt Hacker News> Just five years ago, the only way to build a working project of moderate complexity was to learn the basic to intermediate concepts required to make an MVP.
> Now, if you can steer an LLM reasonably well, you can quickly build an MVP that goes well beyond your own understanding of the implementation.
Somewhat agree. Five years ago you could build an MVP without understanding how to open TCP sockets or how to parse HTTP headers. You didn't need to understand relational databases, let alone B-trees or cache locality. You didn't need to know how to install Linux.
Now you don't need to understand the details of connecting to Stripe or Auth0 or setting up a Kubernetes cluster.
> You have to intentionally build your understanding as you build your projects.
Some things you need to understand-others, not so much. Depends on what you're doing, the scale, risks, etc, but that's always been the case.
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That’s the power of abstraction when there’s a good API around something to hide the internal that doesn’t matter much at an higher level. You only need ‘open’ and ‘read’ instead of dealing with disk access and file system trasversal.
But those abstraction are deterministic in nature, so there’s a very good guarantee of their behavior. Someone using LLM and not caring about the generated code is just asking for trouble. The code may work, but there’s no guarantee about its behavior (including error handling and edge cases).
There's a pretty significant difference there, even in some of the examples you picked to make your point. TCP and HTTP are well defined standards that, for all their flaws, were designed and conceived to be useful abstractions that you didn't need to understand deeply in order to use. The things that LLMs allow novices to skip nowadays aren't designed with that in mind, and generally aren't something you can just skip over without getting yourself into hot water later. If you mess up Stripe or Auth0 setup because you don't understand the implications of the boilerplate the LLM spit out, you can very easily get your whole app compromised or end up on the hook for a lot of fraudulent credit card charges, etc. I see the point you're making and I don't entirely disagree, but I think current iterations of LLM coding tools still make it far too easy for beginners (or even fairly experienced engineers) to convince themselves that a detail falls into the former category of abstractions they can safely skip understanding, when they're very much the latter.