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Comment by sinuhe69 | Hacker News Reader

If it works for you, great! Just keep going. I only have the nagging question that if it’s so easy, why would the clients not do it by themselves? Certainly they understand their problems better than you and they can adapt to rising issues faster if their in-house team does it themselves. And certainly what kind of AI you can access, they can too and perhaps even more. So what will remain your value propositions?

I’m a critical user, not a categorical denier. But there are certain categories where I see the current AI face a wall: fitting new ideas, or existing code into an existing architecture particularly. Or work on the backend when constraints are not strictly enforced (for various historical reasons). Schematic understanding is still an issue.

Sometimes additional chunkings and detailed planning/instructions suffice. But other time, humans are still the best vehicles to code.

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> nagging question that if it’s so easy, why would the clients not do it by themselves?

It's easy if you're already an expert at software engineering and know how to leverage AI. For people like that, it's a phenomenal upgrade (this is true for me and several co-workers I chat with, all of whom are chasing cool ideas on side projects). But if you're non-technical, or not use to thinking about requirements, or think that using AI is "give me the prompt", it's a pretty big moat to cross.

> I only have the nagging question that if it’s so easy, why would the clients not do it by themselves?

Plenty of reasons, including:

1. They don't (yet) know how to use AI to accomplish what they need.

2. The ROI is still meaningfully positive and they don't want to have to do it themselves.

3. Having a third-party do the work provides protection for decision-makers. If the project fails, the third-party takes the blame and "nobody gets fired for buying IBM".

4. The vendor does bring valuable insight to the table and pairs it with the use of AI to deliver a result that wouldn't have been possible in-house.

This doesn't mean that everyone will be able to get work and maintain their rates in AI world but some people will.

I mean they've boasted[1] about their generated code being so good that they add basically zero value and that they're riding out the rentseeking for as long as possible.

Meanwhile they've apparently played with LLM porting of Postgres (or Postgres features?) and "would not put it in production"[2], so we can also guess the kind and scope of features being discussed here.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49594498

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48855951

The second was just for fun; it is fun. This is very far from the code we roll out at customers though. We build LoB apps which are basically crud apps (they are not but most here would call it that).

We can have fun and make money right? Possibly at the same time but not in that case.

> The second was just for fun; it is fun. This is very far from the code we roll out at customers though.

Which is fine, great even (I do the same thing!), but in trying different things outside your day job, it seems like you do understand why people working on different things than you might be "reporting all these negative AI experiences"?

They're not "adding no value", the SLA is the value. I have a business problem, and I pay you to solve it and support your solution for me, is a completely different proposition than standing up your own solution as a non-technical org and maintaining it.

> They're not "adding no value", the SLA is the value

The code their Astra+Fable setup, automatically generated from requests customers leave in voicemails, is apparently so good they never correct it. If the stories being woven are true, the SLA is literally just a middleman's 100k cut.

At the very least there might be some particulars here that aren't universally applicable.

>"the SLA is literally just a middleman's 100k cut"

Indeed, welcome to enterprise software.

It's a pretty bad sign when you need to resort to this kind of comment stalking to try to find ammunition for a general argument. This user could be a complete con man, and it still wouldn't invalidate the core thesis of LLMs providing business value.

> you need to resort to this kind of comment stalking to try to find ammunition for a general argument

It's not a general argument, they made specific claims, but vague posted (and implying everyone else must be crazy) to the point that the conversation is derailed by a bunch of people trying to figure out what they meant.

> it still wouldn't invalidate the core thesis of LLMs providing business value.

lol, no, "providing business value" is not what was claimed:

>> What are people here doing exactly that they are not riding the gravy train and even reporting all these negative AI experiences?

Hard disagree. It adds context to what they said.

I recently tried to encourage my smart, technical, but not-programmer friend to build an app using LLMs and he was just like, "I still have no idea where to even start."

People talk a lot about how "real programmers" used to have to clean up or actually deploy everyone's half-baked MS Access app, and that sort of thing will probably still be the case for a while.

> to clean up or actually deploy everyone's half-baked MS Access app

So we are switching to LLMs to be fucking miserable in our jobs?

The whole point of the MS Access reference is that similar situations have been tropes since at least the 1990s. Bad code generated by someone who doesn't know how to program well -- whether that person is supposed to be a professional programmer but is incompetent, or has a different job -- is nothing new, and neither is having competent programmers clean it up. LLMs probably generate more of it, but can also fix a lot of it, or at least patch it up.

A year ago, LLMs were not useful for me as a programmer. Now they are: the models are better, they can use long contexts more effectively, and the harnesses are better at helping the models. Nowadays my job is mostly not programming, but LLMs let me organize and prepare tools in spare time rather than needing days or weeks of attention. I would not trust them on a 200k+ line project -- and Claude Opus 5 has issues even on 50k LOC projects -- but they absolutely can help given good direction and a narrow enough scope.

> The whole point of the MS Access reference is that similar situations have been tropes since at least the 1990s.

I do actually understand that.

I have done this very put the Access database on the web job myself. (FWIW I was well-paid for it and the firm I worked for earned a fortune, but this was in 1997)

Then I don't understand at all what point you were trying to make about being miserable in our jobs. Cleaning up after bad code has always been part of the job for decades; so has balancing the creation of new technical debt against resource availability.

Yes but it's cheaper?

Of course they will do it by themselves.

Because it's cheaper.

I mean it's weird that we all imagine reasons why we're still relevant when we have set fire to the thing that made us indispensable.

It's cheaper.

> I mean it's weird that we all imagine reasons why we're still relevant when we have set fire to the thing that made us indispensable.

Very few things in this world are all-or-nothing, and not every purchasing decision is based on price alone.

Do you always buy the cheapest meal? Car? When you renovate your house, do you always choose the cheapest contractor?

Tons of developers will lose their jobs, and many more will find it hard to maintain the salaries/rates the industry has been accustomed to. This is already happening. The days where an average graduate from a run-of-the-mill CompSci program or even a coding bootcamp could sleepwalk into a $150,000+/year entry-level job are largely gone. The days where you have job security simply because you're a competent developer with 10 years of experience are in the process of going away.

This does not mean that there is no subset of developers who cannot be successful in this market. There are people who are doing just fine because they know how to articulate their value and sell themselves to employers or clients.

> If it works for you, great! Just keep going. I only have the nagging question that if it’s so easy, why would the clients not do it by themselves?

Because it's not (yet) that easy, especially if we're talking a complex and genuinely useful app. Agentic coding is fast, but it's not magic.

> I’m a critical user, not a categorical denier. But there are certain categories where I see the current AI face a wall: fitting new ideas, or existing code into an existing architecture particularly.

Exactly. Which is why Joe Average still will have little to no luck vibe coding anything serious or novel. You still (IME) need a lot of active guidance, still need to push away from dead ends and propose alternative algorithms, and it takes hundreds of prompts to go from concept to what I would consider beta. (But, this is just my own experience, and it's possible I'm doing it wrong?)

I don't think that really matters. I have already seen companies generating their own code and just QA testing it, with no software engineers in sight. Or they ask us to "review" their 10k loc PR in 2 hours.

The spirit of the parent comment is true. People feel like it's productive and even if they make something worse, they are going to use it.

Clients are starting to, that’s exactly why I am not sure why AI doom deniers here think this will think it will go well for them. But it will still take awhile and we are enjoying that time. If we see new markets, we will move into them.

> I only have the nagging question that if it’s so easy, why would the clients not do it by themselves?

They can do it. What's the issue?

> I only have the nagging question that if it’s so easy, why would the clients not do it by themselves?

I mean, that's exactly what's starting to happen, we have more and more clients to whom we propose a quote and their answer is "guess i'll just vibe code it" or come to use with an app that they vibe-coded and does the job, and they're content with it. So far it seems to work out just fine for them.

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