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Comment by cheema33 | Hacker News Reader

> I code with multiple LLMs every day and build products that use LLM tech under the hood. I dont think we're anywhere near LLMs being good at code design.

I too use multiple LLMs every day to help with my development work. And I agree with this statement. But, I also recognize that just when we think that LLMs are hitting a ceiling, they turn around and surprise us. A lot of progress is being made on the LLMs, but also on tools like code editors. A very large number of very smart people are focused on this front and a lot of resources are being directed here.

If the question is:

Will the LLMs get good at code design in 5 years?

I think the answer is:

Very likely.

I think we will still need software devs, but not as many as we do today.

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> I think we will still need software devs, but not as many as we do today.

There is already another reply referencing Jevons Paradox, so I won't belabor that point. Instead, let me give an analogy. Imagine programmers today are like scribes and monks of 1000 years ago, and are considering the impact of the printing press. Only 5% of the population knew how to read & write, so the scribes and monks felt like they were going to be replaced. What happened is the "job" of writing language will mostly go away, but every job will require writing as a core skill. I believe the same will happen with programming. A thousand years from now, people will have a hard time imagining jobs that don't involve instructing computers in some form (just like today it's hard for us to imagine jobs that don't involve reading/writing).

> I think we will still need software devs, but not as many as we do today.

I'm more of an optimist in that regard. Yes, if you're looking at a very specific feature set/product that needs to be maintained/develop, you'll need less devs for that.

But we're going to see the Jevons Paradox with AI generated code, just as we've seen that in the field of web development where few people are writing raw HTML anymore.

It's going to be fun when nontechnical people who'd maybe know a bit of excel start vibe coding a large amount of software, some of which will succeed and require maintenance. This maintenance might not involve a lot of direct coding either, but a good understanding of how software actually works.

Nah man, I work with them daily. For me, the ceiling was reached a while ago. At least for my use case, these new models don’t bring any real improvements.

I’m not even talking about large codebases. It struggles to generate a valid ~400 LOC TypeScript file when that requires above-average type system knowledge. Try asking it to write a new-style decorator (added in 2023), and it mostly just hallucinates or falls back to the old syntax.

Good code design requires good input. And frankly humans suck at coding, so it will never get good input.

You can’t just train a model on the 1000 github repos that are very well coded.

Smart people or not, LLM require input. Or it’s garbage in garbage out.

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