No, it sounds like the work of a product manager, you’re just working with agents rather than with developers.

sarchertech 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Product managers never get that right though. In practice it always falls back on the developer to understand the problem and fill in the missing pieces.

In many cases it falls on the developer to talk the PM out of the bad idea and then into a better solution. Agents aren’t equipped to do any of that.

For any non trivial problem, a PM with the same problem and 2 different dev teams will produce a drastically different solutions 99 times out of 100.

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ako 3 days ago | parent [-]

Agree with the last bit, dev teams are even more non-deterministic than LLMs.

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sarchertech 3 days ago | parent [-]

Dev teams are much less non-deterministic than LLMs. If you ask the same dev team to build the same product multiple times they’ll eventually converge on the producing the same product.

The 2nd time it will likely be pretty different because they’ll use what they learned to build it better. The 3rd time will be better still, but each time after that it will essentially be the same product.

An LLM will never converge. It definitely won’t learn from each subsequent iteration.

Human devs are also a lot more resilient to slight changes in requirements and wording. A slight change in language that wouldn’t impact a human at all will cause an LLM to produce completely different output.

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ako 3 days ago | parent [-]

An LLM within the right context/environment can also converge: just like with humans you need to provide guidelines, rules, and protocols to instruct how to implement something. Just like with humans I’ve used the approach you describe: generate something one until it works the way you want it, then ask it so document insights, patterns and rules, and for the next project instruct it to follow the rules you persisted. Will result in more or less the same project.

Humans are very non deterministic: if you ask me to solve a problem today, the solution will be different from last week, last year or 10 years ago. We’ve learnt to deal with it, and we can also control the non-determinism of LLMs.

And humans are also very prone to hallucinations: remember those 3000+ gods that we’ve created to explain the world, or those many religions that are completely incompatible? Even if some are true, most of them must be hallucinations just by being incompatible to the others.

	▲	sarchertech 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		That only works with very small projects to the point where the specification document is a very large percentage of the total code. If you are very experienced, you won’t solve the problem differently day to day. You probably would with a 10 year difference, but you won’t ever be running the next model 10 years out (even if the technology matures), so there’s no point in doing that comparison. Solving the same problem with the same constraints in radically different ways day to day comes from inexperience (unless you’re exploring and doing it on purpose). Calling what LLMs do hallucinations and comparing it to human mythology is stretching the analogy into absurdity.

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didibus 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

If you work at "product manager" level, that would be vibe coding, as you prompt for functional and non-functional changes and you review the behavior and characteristics of the program, not the code generated.

I believe the author was trying to specifically distinguish their workflow from that, in that they are prompting for changes to the code in terms of the code itself, and reviewing the code that is generated (maybe along with also mentioning the functionality and testing it).

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sevensor 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

What I described is precisely the reception of early compilers. How is the LLM different? It’s slower? Its input looks more like natural language? Its output is less reliable? It runs on somebody else’s computer? What’s the essential difference between these two technologies that transform one text into another?

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skydhash 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Is it the work of a product manager? I believe the latter only specify features and business rules (and maybe some other specifications like UX and performance). But no technical details at all. That would be like an architect reviewing the brand of nails used in an house framing.

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Graphon1 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Tech Lead, not PM. (in my experience)