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bluegatty • yesterday at 7:18 PM • 1 reply • view on HN

"With LLMs you take an idea and it will drive the whole thing from the beginning all the way to the end."

Well if you think that's what it's doing - that's on you.

For gosh sakes, start with Claude Shannon's 'noisy channel problem' and consider why the notion of idea -> program is a fallacy.

That's for the Wix, Lovable and Shopify - wherein AI is only a component, and where the conditions are highly constrained.

To manage the output in detail, we need abstractions ... which do not exist.

Code -> Machine Instructions is not a noisy channel - it's deterministic.

Idea -> Code is theoretically not possible at any scale in a stable scenario because it's not deterministic, it won't make 'what you want' - then you have to spend a Million Mythical Man Hours to get it to do what you want.

Given that only a small portion of a developers job was ever 'writing code' in the first place - and that we write on average a fairly small number of 'usable lines of code' per day, the 'coding' was never it.

Research, prototypes, corners cases, help, bug fixes, ideation - so many ways it's powerful ... but not like a compiler.

Ignoring AI is like ignoring the industrial revolution, but AI is something very different than.

Also while some jobs are going to go - software hiring is up, not down - that should be a clue.


Replies

john_strinlai • yesterday at 7:21 PM

>For gosh sakes, start with Claude Shannon's 'noisy channel problem' and consider why the notion of idea -> program is a fallacy.

start with opening up codex or whatever you use. type "make me a calculator app". get your calculator app in an hour or whatever.

it's fair to describe this process as taking an idea and getting a program.

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