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Comment by ThrowawayR2 | Hacker News Reader

Ironic that the parent poster should use the phrase "code monkey" since most would likely agree being an "LLM prompt monkey" is an even lower rung on the ladder than that. The business people can surely find a LLM prompt monkey for much less salary than what a code monkey gets so I'm not sure anyone would want to embrace that future. In fact, if the AI gets good enough, the business people won't need the LLM prompters at all; they'll talk to the AI themselves.

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Business people already talk to LLMs, and people who know how to code hate it.

I haven't written single line of code since Dec but I've been putting a lot of focus into systems design and making sure I understand how all the pieces of our system work together even if I don't know how the individual parts work.

The amount of times I hear my (fairly technical, mind you!) boss say "why can't we do X, Claude says it's simple" is pretty baffling, and my coworkers and him will have hours long debates about it.

This goes along in the hall of fame with the "how hard can it be", Turns out, if you want to do it right, more often than not, very hard.

Lol. I think a disconnect that engineers often have with product people is that product people want it to be done now (right or not) and engineers want it to be done right, which obviously takes more time. But I think a good engineer knows how to get it 80% of the way there quickly, and knows which 20% is ok to sacrifice or take on as tech debt.

Alas I'm not one of those engineers, but I'm fortunate enough to work with some.

There is a lot of that, but there is also the fact that you can get lulled into a false sense of "it is working" in general the motto is 90% of the work in 10% of the time and 90% of the time to get the 10% more done, and the devil is always in those 10% that often hinge on decisions made during the 90% phase.

It also depends on the requirements, and what the actual thing you want done. For software, sure you can probably patch it and there are some inconveniences you can live with depending on the clients requirements, for hardware... a little bit tougher... But it still depends on what is being done and what are the constraints, as long as people are reasonable, usually, it works out... Except that people rarely seem to be reasonable...

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