> its quality and adherence to the spec (the single sentence) is and will always be probabilistic...

Isn’t the same true for a lot of individual programmers and even teams?

Especially so if they were provided just a short one-sentence vision instead of proper documentation.

Oh, I was not comparing it with out-sourced development and was instead comparing it with developing it oneself.

Sure, outsourcing is similar, but the difference is one uses a process that is inherently probabilistic and will show up in every result, while other just depends on the probability of you getting a good team.

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drdaeman an hour ago | parent [-]

I suspect the unspoken premise was that it was all in context of people who - just like those who hire contractors - don’t have the capacity to do it themselves.

In this context I suspect a SotA LLM could sometimes beat some cost-comparable UpWork professionals in both quality and spec adherence. In other words, if you need an app and can’t do it yourself and have a tight budget, LLMs are quickly becoming a viable option for more and more complex apps (still only simple ones before it produces junk, but progress is pretty appalling)

	▲	qsera 3 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		>beat some cost-comparable UpWork professionals in both quality and spec adherence... I am not sure I want to keep paying for something that needs some amount of luck on my side, to be useful. Writing elaborate plans for LLMs also feels a bit pointless when there is no hard and fast rule about how much of it will be followed .. Apparently some people appear to be doing it, but I am afraid it is not something that will have a universal appeal..