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Comment by nik282000 | Hacker News Reader

nik282000

> I do expect the casual non-tech users to be making the most adaptable software because they have what they want in their head.

Those are the people who are most likely to give a monolithic prompt and then spend a week telling the machine 'I don't care about encryption or file permissions, just make it work.' Not to mention that most people can barely verbalize the problems they have with devices they use for 8hrs a day, let alone form a full, self consistant, project idea and then put it in writing.

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if they're persistent and patient enough to see the result of what they think they want and iterate enough times they'll eventually learn. non-coders aren't dumb by default after all and I suspect they'll learn much faster than us because they won't be bogged down by the minutiae like reading docs.

Imagine you could build a piece of furniture without actually needing to know how to cut wood, drive nails etc. Imagine you could do it in 3d without knowing how to actually handle wood, you just have an image you can iterate on without actually costing you anything but time.

I remember the first big app I wrote in high-school. I had to learn C++, learn Qt etc. I knew what I wanted but putting that into code when I didn't know any of the libraries / tools was a huge time investment. If I had LLMs I could've done the same thing it took me 6+ months in probably less than a month.

just because you have an idea doesn't mean it will work. kids come up with ideas all the time in their drawings, but they disobey the laws of physics and are therefore not feasible in reality. sure, the model can guide them, but eventually they would have to pick up the necessary knowledge.

The necessary knowledge needed with LLMs goes from needing to know programming languages and libraries to having a high level view of what is possible which is far easier and less boring to get

I think it is very difficult to have the latter without the former.

This is where both learning and discovery can happen.

> non-coders aren't dumb by default after all and I suspect they'll learn much faster than us because they won't be bogged down by the minutiae like reading docs.

They may have a perfectly good shot at being smart, but I still don't buy the argument. The reason they struggle to become coders (assuming they tried at all), in my experience, is a lack of problem-solving and debugging skills. There is no real shortcut here. An "image" of the chair isn't enough; when the first iteration is wrong, you have to be able to explain why it's wrong.

I think there are a lot of people out there with good problem-solving skills but for whatever reason did not get into programming or they tried and they got put off with learning the languages / libraries or got stuck and didn't find a solution easily enough and gave up etc.

With a sufficiently good LLM these people will skip the tedious part of programming that most of us had the motivation / patience to go through. All the folks saying that actually writing code wasn't the bottleneck have had a LOT of years to get to that point, years a lot of people aren't interested in going through.

I'm not saying lay people will be able to join mega projects and work at FAANG. I'm saying a sufficiently courageous lay person will be able to make an app to automate whatever tedious birocratic process their niche work hasn't seen a product yet.

> All the folks saying that actually writing code wasn't the bottleneck have had a LOT of years to get to that point, years a lot of people aren't interested in going through.

The years was not spent on learning how to code. The years was spent on learning about what needed to be coded. And that would have spanned multiple domains. Even the most basic production level software have multiple concepts that need to be integrated. And for that, they need to be learned.

Using AI without the requisite knowledge is playing Russian roulette. It’s kinda wanting to log into a file, and not thinking about disk storage being finite, and rotating the log file gives you flexibility. That’s not related to coding, it’s just hard thinking about the problem and the constraints (or finding a good book or article).

> Using AI without the requisite knowledge is playing Russian roulette

Every few months that revolver has a few more empty chambers and even if it shoots them in the foot, it can bandage them quite nicely. Will a solo lay person with an agent build a high quality high reliability software business? Doubtful. Will they be able to make a tool that helps them and 10 other people or a personal website? probably.

> Will a solo lay person with an agent build a high quality high reliability software business? Doubtful. Will they be able to make a tool that helps them and 10 other people or a personal website? probably.

Just take a quick look around to see how many daily tools and utilities are actually built by experts and industries. Yes, you can put a plank on top of two concrete blocks to make a bench, but many people don’t and prefer to have good bench made, even when it’s quite easy to DIY one.

So I don’t foresee lots of people trying to make custom tools, more so to keep a subscription active.

I can absolutely believe this, actually. Considering how the access to rapid prototyping has rejuvenated my interest in programming when I am a seasoned programmer, I definitely see the value in that kind of jump-start.

And yeah, without LLMs, writing code absolutely can be the bottleneck sometimes, if only for psychological reasons. I've definitely experienced something like "coder's block" before. An anti-flow state, if you will.

(But skydhash is also right. The "unknown unknowns" are a big deal and there's only so much an LLM can do about that, at least unless the user is actively aware of the general shape of that problem and trying to learn via the LLM and fill in those knowledge gaps.)

> if they're persistent and patient enough to see the result of what they think they want and iterate enough times they'll eventually learn

beats the point. a non-coder has no reason to learn. they know the domain (atleast some) and they will not learn anything outside of it.

without learning how the program works, youre stuck. the real world is too complex and cant model 1:1 in any programming abstraction. the domain behavior must be forced and coerced to map and reduce with artificial constraints to operate as required in code but rule out absurdity (a bank account with a burger in it).

sure everything need not be production grade and multi user and infinitely secure but nothing meaningful comes out of leaving the modeling rigor out of that exercise.

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