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Coding is a specific use case. It's more common to see obvious shrinkage in e.g. HR and customer service departments. It didn't start with the LLM flavour of AI

Coding is a specific use case. It's more common to see obvious shrinkage in e.g. HR and customer service departments. It didn't start with the LLM flavour of AI, but it has been accelerated. In other places, look for hiring freezes and re-orgs, rather than straight and obvious message from management: "Say bye to Bob, he's been replaced with this AI agent". To everybody's point, not a new thing - automation, including what may of us have worked on for decades, by definition is simplifying, making more efficient, or reducing human effort. But to your specific question - HN seems to have a couple of excited stories a week about a person saying "I don't really know coding, but I've started my tiny niche SaaS with help of AI". Which is not necessarily a bad thing, and more along the curve of all the other advancements - perhaps the question is the speed of improvement(replacement) and change on this particular one.

thefz 2y ago
> "I don't really know coding, but I've started my tiny niche SaaS with help of AI" How are you going to debug/extend the code if you don't know how it works?
- NikolaNovak 2y ago
  I'm not the expert / one of those people who have done it, but my thoughts FWIW: The phrase "don't really know" is kind of doing the heavy lifting here - for example, I myself haven't done professional programming in 20 years, but I know the basics. Enough to be structured in my design / requirements / direction to LLM, and to read and comprehend the advice others have discovered and shared. With that in mind, extending the code seems to work fairly well - start with basic requirements and extend them through LLM. Having not done coding in 2 decades, I've asked ChatGPT to create a python script to interact with a website's API and retrieve an object; then I've extended it to retrieve and store multiple objects, then to input for parameters, etc. it was fun! Anyhoo, the use case discussed is not necessarily a complex enterprise resourcing application; but a little niche webapp with simple requirements, created by somebody who understands the domain itself more than coding, and which may be exciting to a target requirement, seems eminently doable with today's LLMs -- again, the proof is in the pudding of people who have done it, rather than my claims :)
- Ferret7446 2y ago
  If the code works (well enough), do you need to debug it? And if you can get the LLM to debug/extend it for you good enough, does it matter if you understand it?

thefz 2y ago

> "I don't really know coding, but I've started my tiny niche SaaS with help of AI" How are you going to debug/extend the code if you don't know how it works?

NikolaNovak 2y ago
I'm not the expert / one of those people who have done it, but my thoughts FWIW: The phrase "don't really know" is kind of doing the heavy lifting here - for example, I myself haven't done professional programming in 20 years, but I know the basics. Enough to be structured in my design / requirements / direction to LLM, and to read and comprehend the advice others have discovered and shared. With that in mind, extending the code seems to work fairly well - start with basic requirements and extend them through LLM. Having not done coding in 2 decades, I've asked ChatGPT to create a python script to interact with a website's API and retrieve an object; then I've extended it to retrieve and store multiple objects, then to input for parameters, etc. it was fun! Anyhoo, the use case discussed is not necessarily a complex enterprise resourcing application; but a little niche webapp with simple requirements, created by somebody who understands the domain itself more than coding, and which may be exciting to a target requirement, seems eminently doable with today's LLMs -- again, the proof is in the pudding of people who have done it, rather than my claims :)
Ferret7446 2y ago
If the code works (well enough), do you need to debug it? And if you can get the LLM to debug/extend it for you good enough, does it matter if you understand it?