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This is a good headline. LLMs are remarkably good at writing code. Writing code isn't the same thing as delivering working software. A human expert needs to id

• roxolotl 1y ago
  One of the interesting corollaries of the title is that this can also be true of humans. Being able to code is not the same as being a software engineer. It never has been.
  • bloppe 1y ago
    At least you can teach a human to become a software engineer.
  • echelon 1y ago
    We're also finding this true with media generation. AI video is an incredible tool, but it can't make movies. It's almost as if all of these models are an exoskeleton for people that already know what they're doing. But you still need an expert in the loop.
    • falcor84 1y ago
      > but it can't make movies. To me this appears to be a very time-dependent assertion. 5 years ago, AI couldn't generate a good movie frame. 2 years ago, AI couldn't generate a good shot, but now in 2025, AI can generate a not-too-shabby scene. If capabilities continue improving at this rate (e.g. as they have with AI being able to generate full musical albums), I wouldn't bet against AI being able to generate a decent feature film in the next decade. It might take longer until it's the sort of thing that we'd present in festivals, but I just don't a clear barrier any more. Looking at it from another perspective, if an AI driven task currently requires "an expert in the loop" to navigate things by offering the appropriate prompts, evaluating and iterating on the AI generated content, then there's nothing clear to stop us from training the next generation of AI to include that expert's competency. Taking it into full extrapolation mode, the thing that current generation AIs really don't have is the human experience that leads to a creative drive, but once we have robotic agents among us, these would arguably be able start gathering "experiences" that they could then mine to write and produce "their own" stories.
    • kujjerl7 1y ago
      >it can't make movies Humans are sharply declining in this ability at the same time. Most of what Hollywood churns out now is superhero slop, forced-diversity spin-offs, awful remakes of classics, and awkward comebacks for yesteryear's leading men. I know it's not a movie but I could've happily watched "Nothing, Forever" for the rest of my life. That was creative, chaotic, hilarious, and wildly entertaining. Meanwhile I watched the human-created War Of The Worlds (2025) last weekend... The less said, the better.
• jfim 1y ago
  > I guess the big question is if experienced product management types can pick up enough coding technical literacy to work like this without programmers I'd argue that they can't, at least on a short timeframe. Not because LLMs can't generate a program or product that works, but that there needs to be enough understanding of how the implementation works to fix any complex issues that come up. One experience I had is that I had tried to generate a MITM HTTPS proxy that uses Netty using Claude, and while it generated a pile of code that looked good on the surface, it didn't actually work. Not knowing enough about Netty, I wasn't able to debug why it didn't work and trying to fix it with the LLM didn't help either. Maybe PMs can pick up enough knowledge over time to be able to implement products that can scale, but by that time they'd effectively be a software engineer, minus the writing code part.
  • ambicapter 1y ago
    LLMs are great for learning though, you can easily ask them questions, and you can evaluate your understanding every step of the way, and gradually build the accuracy of your world model that way. It’s not uncommon for me to ask a general question, drill deeper into a concept, and then either test things manually with some toy code or end up reading the official documentation, this time with at least some exposure to the words that I’m looking for to answer my question.
    • o11c 1y ago
      If I wanted a confident and simple answer with no regard for veracity, I would just ask a politician.
    • sodaclean 1y ago
      This is how I use them- but I also use them to write initial UI's (usually very primitive). Because I've got an issue where the UI has to be perfect, and if I can blame somebody/something other than me I can ignore it until the UI becomes important enough.
  • kaashif 1y ago
    If an LLM can get you 90% of the way there, you need fewer engineers. But the engineer you need probably needs to be a senior engineer who went through the pain of learning all of the details and can function without AI. If all juniors are using AI, or even worse, no juniors are ever hired, I'm not sure how we can produce those seniors at the scale we currently do. Which isn't even that large a scale.
• prmph 1y ago
  > LLMs are remarkably good at writing code. Just this past weekend, I've designed and written code (in Typescript) that I don't think LLMs can even come close to writing in years. I have a subscription to a frontier LLM, but lately I find myself using like 25% of the time. At a certain level the software architecture problems I'm solving, drawing upon decades of understanding about maintainable, performant, and verifiable design of data structures and types and algorithms, are things LLMs cannot even begin to grasp. At that point, I find that attempting to use an LLM to even draft an initial solution is a waste of time. At best I can use it for initial brainstorming. The people saying LLMs can code are hard for me to understand. They are good for simple bash scripts and complex refactoring and drafting basic code idioms and that's about it. And even for these tasks the amount of hand-holding I need to do is substantial. At least Gemini Pro/CLI seems good at one-shot performance, before its context gets poisoned
  • airstrike 1y ago
    I find LLMs most helpful when I already have half of the answer written and need them to fill in the blanks. "Take X and Y I've written before, some documentation for Z, an example W from that repo, now smash them together and build the thing I need"
    • martin1027 1y ago
      This is so true. I've had the same experience.
  • veegee 1y ago
    [flagged]
    • avgDev 1y ago
      This is an unhinged comment. You should take a deep breath and get off the internet. You sound extremely immature calling someone on HN "script kiddie".
      • 1y ago
• colordrops 1y ago
  Once all the context that a typical human engineer has to "build software" is available to the LLM, I'm not so sure that this statement will hold true.
  • bloppe 1y ago
    But it's becoming increasingly clear that LLMs based on the transformer model will never be able to scale their context much further than the current frontier, due mainly to context rot. Taking advantage of greater context will require architectural breakthroughs.
    • colordrops 1y ago
      Will it though? The human mind can hold less context at any one time than even a mediocre LLM. The problem isn't architecture. It's capturing context. Most of it is in a bunch of people's heads and encoded in the physical world. Once it's digitized and accessible through search, RAG, or whatever, the LLM will be able to use it effectively.
      • prmph 1y ago
        Human hold a lot of implicit context, I think far beyond any LLM. Context is not just what you consciously are thinking about in your head
        • colordrops 1y ago
          Sure, but so do LLMs models. They have a huge subconscious (the model itself). Recording every conversation a single person ever had, every book or text or site ever read, everything ever seen, is not a huge amount of data. Microsoft attempted this with a digital camera lanyard but they were too early.
          • prmph 1y ago
            Yeah, but the models are all based on explicit data. I'm saying humans have prior wiring that allows them to extract and keep context that LLMs do not have access to.
• deleted 1y ago
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• Bukhmanizer 1y ago
  > the big question is if experienced product management types can pick up enough coding technical literacy to work like this without programmers I have a strong opinion that AI will boost the importance of people with “special knowledge” more than anyone else regardless of role. So engineers with deep knowledge of a system or PMs with deep knowledge of a domain.
  • simonw 1y ago
    That sounds right to me.
• samsolomon 1y ago
  I think you're right, the roles will exist for some time. But I think we'll start to see more and more overlap between engineering, product management and design. In a lot of ways I think that will lead to stronger delivery teams. As a designer—the best performing teams I've been on have individuals with a core competency, but a lot of overlap in other areas. Product managers with strong engineering instincts, engineers with strong design instincts, etc. When there is less ambiguity in communication, teams deliver better software. Longer-term I'm unsure. Maybe there is some sort of fusion into all-purpose product people able to do everything?
• IanCal 1y ago
  I disagree. Unless you’re focussed on right now, in which case case… maybe? Depends on scale. I have a few scattered thoughts here but I think you’re caught up on how things are done now. A human expert in a field is the customer. Do you think, say, gpt5 pro can’t talk to them about a problem and what’s reasonable to try and build in software? It can build a thing, with tests, run stuff and return to a user. It can take feedback (talking to people is the key major things LLMs have solved). They can iterate (see: codex) deploy and they can absolutely write copy. What do you really think in this list they can’t do? For simplicity reduce it to a relatively basic crud app. We know that they can make these over several steps. We know they can manage the ui pretty well, do incremental work etc. What’s missing? I think something huge here is that some of the software engineering roles and management become exceptionally fast and cheap. That means you don’t need to have as many users to be worthwhile writing code to solve a problem. Entirely personal software becomes economically viable. I don’t need to communicate value for the problem my app has solved because it’s solved it for me. Frankly most of the “AI can’t ever do my thing” comments come across as the same as “nobody can estimate my tasks they’re so unique” we see every time something comes up about planning. Most business relevant SE isn’t complex logically, interestingly unique or frankly hard. It’s just a different language to speak. Disclaimer: a client of mine is working on making software simpler to build and I’m looking at the AI side, but I have these views regardless.
  • simonw 1y ago
    I expect that customers who have those needs would much rather hire somebody to be the intermediary with the LLM writing the code than take on that role themselves. You'll get the occasional high agency non-technical customer who decides to learn how to get these things done with LLMs but they'll be a pretty rare breed.
    • IanCal 1y ago
      This may be a timeframe issue but I sincerely doubt anyone wants to hire someone to be an intermediary. They just want the thing done. I know that right now few want to sit in front of claude code, but it's just not that big of a leap to move this up a layer. Workflows do this even without the models getting better.
• vrc 1y ago
  I’m a PM and I’ve been able to do a lot of very interesting near production ready bits of coding recently with an LLM. I say near production ready because I specifically only build functional data processing stuff that I intentionally build with clean I/O requirements to hand to the real engineers on the team to slot in. They still have to fix some things to meet our standards, but I’m basically a “researcher” level coder. Which makes sense — I do have an undergrad and MS in CS, and did a lot of mathy algo stuff. For the last 15+ years I could never use anything in my brain to help the team solve things I was best suited to solve. I am now, and that’s nice. The one key point is that I am keenly aware of what I can and cannot do. With these new superpowers, I often catch myself doing too much, and I end up doing a lot more rewrites than a real engineer would. But I can see Dunning Kruger playing out everywhere when people say they can vibe code an entire product.
• belZaah 1y ago
  Yeah, no. Had Claude 4.5 generate a mock implementation of an OpenAPI spec. Trivial interaction, just a post of a json object. And Claude invented new fields to check for and failed to check for required ones. It is helpful in reducing the number of keys I have to press and the amount of documentation-diving I need to do. But saying that’s writing code is like saying StackOverflow is writing code along with autocomplete.
  • simonw 1y ago
    What did Claude do when you replied and said "don't add new fields, and make sure you check the required ones"?
    • Balinares 1y ago
      "You're absolutely right!"
• kakacik 1y ago
  Not happening anytime soon. Those product management types are more expensive than devs in most places, you would be literally a) increasing cost per hour worked; and b) stiffling the use of (pricey) management skills of such manager to do lower pay job. I have no doubt some broken places end up in similar mode but en masse it doesnt make any financial sense. Also when SHTF and you can't avoid going into deep debug with strong management pressure and oversight, it will become glaringly obvious which approach can maintain things running. And SHTF always happens, its only a function of time.
• shalmanese 1y ago
  It’s worthwhile reading the original Fred Brooks “No Silver Bullets” paper where they explicitly cover LLMs under their “Hopes for the Silver” AI/Expert Systems/Automatic programming section and explain why it is still not a silver bullet. https://worrydream.com/refs/Brooks_1986_-_No_Silver_Bullet.pdf https://worrydream.com/refs/Brooks_1986_-_No_Silver_Bullet.p...
• adncors 1y ago
  what if the real paradigm shift isn't about replacing engineers in building durable systems, but about making software so cheap and disposable that the concept of "technical debt" becomes irrelevant for a new class of "single-use" or ultra-short-lifespan applications?