> I think when LLMs first came out people thought they could just say something like, "Make a Facebook clone". But now we're realizing we need to be more exact with our requirements and define things better.

The annoying thing is that giving an LLM vague instructions like "make a Facebook clone" does work... in certain limited cases. Those being mostly the exact things a not-very-creative "ideas person" would think to try first. Which gave the "ideas people" totally the wrong idea about what these things can do.

These same "ideas people" have been contracting human software developers to "make them a Facebook clone" (and other requests of similar quality) for decades now.

And every so often, the result of one of those requests would end up out there on the internet; most recently on Github. (Which is, once there's enough of them laying about, already enough to allow a coding-agent LLM trained on Github sources to spew out a gestalt reconstruction of these attempts. For better or worse.)

But for the most common of these harebrained ideas (both social-media-feed websites and e-commerce marketplace websites fit here), entire frameworks or "engines" have also been developed to make shipping one of these derivative projects as easy as shipping a Wordpress.org site. You don't rewrite the code; you just use the engine.

And so, if you ask an LLM to build you Facebook, it won't build you Facebook from scratch. It'll just pull in one of those frameworks.

And if you're an "ideas person", you'll think the LLM just did something magical. You won't necessarily understand what a library ecosystem even is; you won't realize the LLM didn't just generate all the code that powers the site itself, spitting out something perfectly functional after just a minute.