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Comment by bigmadshoe | Hacker News Reader

Not if the architect said "make a cool design for a house" to some team and went out for the day.

and the market takes care of such things. if your app is able to absolutely kill it because your prompt was "make a cool app" then you got extraordinarily lucky, and have zero moat and will inevitably die unless you build a moat in a different area of the business. Taste/skill will always win, the end, full stop.

In my case, I come back that evening, give a few dozen feedback items, and come back in the morning to a new design incorporating them.

It's not much different from assigning a task to a more junior dev. I'm the architect, it's my goals we're working towards, but I don't need to be the one to go wire it together.

I don't think you're necessarily wrong today, but AI assisted coding has gone from autocomplete to functioning as a junior dev very quickly. The labs are obviously not happy to leave it at that. Fewer and fewer senior devs will be needed when the model can also create the architecture, derive the tradeoffs, and interpret product requirements directly. I'm really worried about the future of our field at the current pace of things.

Then the competent developers will cease being architects and start becoming city planners…

To derive the tradeoffs and interpret product requirements you need interacting with humans and understand the underlying motivations and politics of the project and the organisation behind it. The specs the customer gives you is not what is really needed to meet the underlying objectives, you have to iterate with humans that know the business in the loop. Not saying we'll not reach that, but at this point it means the AI has a deep world model and nobody has intellectual work anymore because the whole organisation is AI.

What is "building" about this? In your example you're merely delegating. And no, I don't consider managers or product managers as builders.

That’s not really how LLMs are used though, is it? I am driving the design.

LLMs have moved from fancy autocomplete to performing full hours-long tasks in the past two years. The degree to which you are driving the design is being reduced with every model release. At some point they will make almost every design decision, and all that's left is the product stuff in the human world.

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