I think about those conversations a lot. I’m in the high power rocketry hobby and wrote my own flight controller using micropython and parts from Adafruit. Worked just fine and did everything I wanted it to do yet the others in the hobby just couldn’t stand that it wasn’t in C. They were genuinely impressed then I said micropython and all of a sudden it was trash. People just have these weird obsessions that blind them to anything different.
Well I think that’s kind of the point or value in these tools. Let the AI do the tedious stuff saving your energy for the hard stuff. At least that’s how I use them, just save me from all the typing and tedium. I’d rather describe something like auth0 integration to an LLM than do it all myself. Same goes for like the typical list of records, clock one, view the details and then a list of related records and all the operations that go with that. Like it’s so boring let the LLM do that stuff for you.
It’s protected by requiring many hours (years) of apprenticeship. These kinds of heavily unionized jobs only reward seniority. Gotta pay your dues buddy!
even in the 90s there was the phrase "the Internet, where the men are men, the women are men, and the teen girls are FBI agents". It was always the case you never really knew who/what you were dealing with on the Internet.
i can't remember who said it but a long time ago i remember reading "Linux is free if your time is worthless". Now we all use Linux one way or the other.
That's still very much true, but at least in the case of Linux the cost is getting lower and lower all the time. The time investment for many has reached about the same as the cost needed for Windows and as a result we see more and more people using linux. At this point it's a perfectly viable gaming platform!
Maybe one day LLMs will eventually make good code at a low cost, and that will allow non-programmers to write programs with few problems but the cost will never be zero, and I think we're a long long way from making human programers obsolete.
All of the intelligence that LLMs mimic came directly from the work of human minds which got fed into them, but what LLMs output is a lossy conversion filled with error and hallucination.
My guess is that the LLMs producing code will improve for a
short time, but as they start to slurp up more and more of their own slop they'll start performing worse.
>> How do you clone the important parts of Okta, Jira, Slack and more? With coding agents!
> This is what's going to gut-punch most SaaS companies repeatedly over the next decade
but there's already clones of the important parts of those systems and yet the SaaS world survives. The code used isn't the secret sauce and people in SaaS know writing the code is 10% of the effort in keeping those businesses on their feet.
I don't think the SaaS industry is on the ropes until coding agents can do things like create a recommendation algorithm better than Spotify and YouTube. In those cases the code/algorithm is indeed the secret sauce and if a coding agent can do better than those companies will be left behind.
it's an exciting time, things are changing and changing beyond "here's my new javascript framework". It's definitely an industry shakeup kind of deal and no one knows what lies 6 months, 1 year, 5 years from now. It makes me anxious seeing as i have a wife+2 kids to care for and my income is tied to this industry but it's exciting too.
reply