He almost got it right. It's not just the fate of small open source. It's the fate of all programmers now. Why hire a programmer when an LLM costs less, works faster and makes less mistakes (OP compliments better error handling, read the article).

Unless you are a product owner, you have paying clients that love you and your product and won't simply ditch it in favour of a new clone, you are really screwed.

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vanschelven a day ago | parent | next [-]

"when an LLM costs less, works faster and makes less mistakes"... indeed, but it doesn't follow at all that it's the fate of all programmers _now_... at least in my experience none of these things are true ATM.

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PunchyHamster 21 hours ago | parent [-]

Well, at the very least it costs less than asking intern to look for a lib doing something particular and give some examples... still about as accurate as the intern tho.

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skydhash 21 hours ago | parent [-]

How many time has it happened for a company to actually ask an intern for a library?

	▲	withinboredom 18 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Um, isn't this what an intern is for? Or do you let them try to contribute to your core project?

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dakiol a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

So far I've never seen yet a non-programmer release production-grade code using only LLMs. There's just so much to care about (from security, deployments, secret management, event-driven architectures, and a large etc.) that "just" providing a prompt to create an "app" doesn't cut it. You need infra and non-engineers just don't know shit about infra (even if it's 99% managed), you need to deploy your llm-generated code in that infra; that should happen in a ci/cd probably. And what about migrations? Git? Who's setting up the api gateway? I don't mean to say that LLMs don't know how to do that, but you need to instruct them to do so, and even there, they will make silly mistakes and you need to re-instruct them or fix it.

Prompting is just 50% of the work (and the easy part actually). Ask the Head of Product or whoever is there to deploy something valuable to production and maintain it for 6 months while not losing money. It's just not going to happen, not even with truly AGI.

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59nadir 21 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

An LLM might be able to replace the majority of the code Sindre Sorhus has put out there, but it's probably a stretch to think that it could replace someone like John Carmack.

Trivial NPM libraries were never needed, but LLMs really are the nail in the coffin for them even when it comes to the most incompetent programmers because now they can literally just ask an LLM to spit out the exact same thing.

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RhythmFox a day ago | parent | prev [-]

He also points out a pointless type check in a type checked language...

Your name is very accurate I must say.

	▲	jazzypants a day ago \| parent [-]
		That type check is honestly not pointless at all. You can never be certain of your inputs in a web app. The likelihood of that parameter being something other than an arraybuffer is non-zero, and you generally want to have code coverage for that kind of undefined behavior. TypeScript doesn't complain without a reason.