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0 pointsidle_zealot4mo ago0 comments

> When a product manager can generate a highly detailed and working demo of what he wants in 5 minutes using gen AI, the traditional software developer loses a ton of power in tech companies.

Yeah, software devs will probably be pretty upset in the way you describe once that happens. In the present though, what's actually happened is that product managers can have an LLM generate a project template and minimally interactive mockup in five minutes or less, and then mentally devalue the work that goes into making that into an actual product. They got it to 80% in 5 minutes after all, surely the devs can just poke and prod Claude a bit more to get the details sorted!

The jury is out on how productivity is impacted by LLM use. That makes sense, considering we never really figured out how to measure baseline productivity in any case.

What we know for sure is: non-engineers still can't do engineering work, and a lot of non-engineers are now convinced that software engineering is basically fully automated so they can finally treat their engineers like interchangeable cogs in an assembly line.

The dynamic would be totally different if LLMs actually brodged the brain-computer barrier and enabled near-frictionless generation of programs that match an arbitrary specification. Software engineering would change dramatically, but ultimately it would be a revolution or evolution of the discipline. As things stand major software houses and tech companies are cutting back and regressing in quality.

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aurareturn4mo ago

Don't get me wrong, I didn't say software devs are now useless. You still need software devs to actually make it work and connect everything together. That's why I still have a job and still getting paid as a software dev.

I'd imagine it won't take too long until software engineers are just prompting the AI 99% of the time to build software without even looking at the code much. At that point, the line between the product manager and the software dev will become highly blurred.

casid4mo ago

This is happening already and it wastes so, so much time. Producing code never was the bottleneck. The bottleneck still is to produce the right amount of code and to understand what is happening. This requires experience and taste. My prediction is, in the near future there will be piles of unmaintainable bloat of AI generated code, nobody's understanding and the failure rate of software will go to the moon.

Vegenoid4mo ago

People have forgotten so many of the software engineering lessons that have been learned over the last four decades, just because now it’s a computer that can spit out large quantities of poorly-understood code instead of a person.

visarga4mo ago

> The dynamic would be totally different if LLMs actually brodged the brain-computer barrier and enabled near-frictionless generation of programs that match an arbitrary specification. Software engineering would change dramatically, but ultimately it would be a revolution or evolution of the discipline.

I believe we only need to organize AI coding around testing. Once testing takes central place in the process it acts as your guarantee for app behavior. Instead of just "vibe following" the AI with our eyes we could be automating the validation side.