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You're right and I agree: in order to successfully use LLMs to build software products of any significant complexity, you need an experienced dev at the helm. M
by camgunz 1y ago
You're right and I agree: in order to successfully use LLMs to build software products of any significant complexity, you need an experienced dev at the helm. My guess is this is the case for another couple years max, but who knows really.
Reading your (as always, great) post, it seems like Phoenix.new did like 95% of the work? You had to coach it around FTS, but I also have to look that up every time so :shrug:. It's pretty bananas; I still maintain this is nothing like "traditional software engineering but one of your tools got way more efficient", i.e. you got a table saw. This is "I typed 'build a table' into a box, it couldn't figure out dovetailing, I taught it dovetailing, and I had a table." Regardless of whether or not you think that's good or bad, I think it's clear it's a huge change.
- simonw 1y agoYeah, it did almost all the work for that demo but that's mainly because I let it - I didn't have the time or inclination to take over and knock the code into the actual shape I wanted. I also think that even the few prompts I gave it require pretty deep knowledge and experience - many professional software engineers don't know that SQLite has good FTS baked in!
- camgunz 1y agoWow it's one of the best things about SQLite, truly tragic. Another point in your favor I think is like, the coding (deployment, etc) isn't usually the bottleneck. Like in a given 2 week sprint I'm probably spending... max 24/80 hours coding, so something like a 30% ceiling. The rest is like, reqs, design, shop around for buy in, mentoring, politicking, bug hunting, planning, etc etc. The problem is most of that stuff isn't nearly as enjoyable as the coding part. Why didn't we invent a bot that talked engineering leadership out of terrible ideas? That's where the real gains are haha.