If your implication is that LLM-assisted coding to non-LLM-assisted coding is like motorcar to horse buggy, that is just not the case.

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ryao 7 days ago | parent [-]

I think he was referring to the ability to go from A to B within a certain amount of time. There is a threshold at which it is possible for a car, yet impossible for a horse and buggy.

That said, I recently saw a colleague use a LLM to make a non-trivial UI for electron in HTML/CSS/JS, despite knowing nothing about any of those technologies, in less time than it would have taken me to do it. We had been in the process of devising a set of requirements, he fed his version of them into the LLM, did some back and forth with the LLM, showed me the result, got feedback, fed my feedback back into the LLM and got a good solution. I had suggested that he make a mockup (a drawing in kolourpaint for example) for further discussion, but he had surprised me by using a LLM to make a functional prototype in place of the mockup. It was a huge time saver.

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roncesvalles 7 days ago | parent | next [-]

The issue is that the 'B' is not very consequential.

Consider something like Shopify - someone with zero knowledge of programming can wow you with an incredible ecommerce site built through Shopify. It's probably like a 1000x efficiency improvement versus building one from scratch (or even using the popular lowcode tools of the era like Magento and Drupal). But it won't help you build Amazon.com, or even Nike.com. It won't even get you part of the way there.

And LLMs, while more general/expressive than Shopify, are inferior to Shopify at doing what Shopify does i.e. you're still better off using Shopify instead of trying to vibe-code an e-commerce website. I would say the same line of thinking extends to general software engineering.

	▲	ryao 6 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		What was described was offloading portions of software development to a LLM to reach B faster. This works very well and is an improvement over the traditional method of implementing everything yourself. Shopify is tangential to this. I will add that having had experience with similar platforms in the past (for building websites, not e-commerce), I can say that you must be either naive or a masochist to use them. They tend to be mediocre compared to what you can get from self hosted solutions and the vendor lock-in always will be used to bite those foolish enough to use them in the end.
	▲	satyrun 6 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Or you are just not creative at all and not making anything that interesting yourself.

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7 days ago | parent | prev [-]

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