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Comment by onion2k | Hacker News Reader

Why bother at all?

AI stops coding being about the journey, and makes it about the destination. That is the polar opposite of most people's coding experience as a professional. Most developers are not about the destination, and often don't really care about the 'product', preferring to care about the code itself. They derive satisfaction from how they got to the end product instead of the end product itself.

For those developers who just want to build a thing to drive business value, or because they want a tool that they need, or because they think the end result will be fun to have, AI coding is great. It enables them to skip over (parts of) the tedious coding bit and get straight to the result bit.

If you're coding because you love coding then obviously skipping the coding bit is going to be a bad time.

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> For those developers who just want to build a thing to drive business value, or because they want a tool that they need, or because they think the end result will be fun to have, AI coding is great. It enables them to skip over (parts of) the tedious coding bit and get straight to the result bit.

Then they aren't programmers anymore, are they? We don't call people using no-code platforms "programmers" and we wouldn't trust them one bit to review actual code.

AI is simply the new no-code platform, except that the scope of what it can do is much larger while the reliability of what it produces is much lower.

Right not coding with AI requires a lot of skill in understanding where the AI is going wrong, so it's still coding. Someone who can't code isn't going to make a good app with AI (although a 'working' app is definitely possible.)

In the future though, sure,it'll be possible to build a decent app without ever seeing or understanding the code.

> Someone who can't code isn't going to make a good app with AI (although a 'working' app is definitely possible.)

The customer/user can't tell the difference between a good working app and a poor working app.

> The customer/user can't tell the difference between a good working app and a poor working app.

Come on man, this is the whole reason Duolingo was people's favourite language learning app, or people claim they like iPhones over Android phones or Photoshop over Canva. These apps and devices all work, but which one is good or better is a debate. People have preferences; some apps in a category are easier to use than others, and some apps have branding that signals status. Now, those things become more important in differentiating your app than "It does what it is supposed to do". Until now, just getting an app to do what you wanted it to do was a competitive advantage, that's becoming a smaller advantage day by day

For me, it has been the journey. I love being able to say "do this" and just magically have it done, then looking over the result and saying, "well not exactly like that, I actually want it to be a little more like this." I am slowly vibe-iterating over what I hope is a solid platform, and it's been a lot of fun

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