I see a different future. A future where software developers are approached by clients with requirements in the form of an LLM generated program. They do it because they are at a point where LLM fails to make new changes without breaking existing stuff.

Maybe it won't be a program, but just some LLM context as some data dump.

This program or context will take up the role of a PM. Developers will refer to the program, or ask context for clarifications and the developer will build the actual program with or without the help from LLMs.

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pornel 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I expect this to be automated too, and in the end boil down to paying for more tokens to fix the program.

Code too messy to be editable by an LLM is already too horrible for humans to touch. Fixing vibecoded software as a service will boil down to reverse-engineering requirements from the messed up program, and prompting a better model to design it properly and rewrite.

Eventually models will be trained to do this themselves, so it won't be a service you ask a dev for, it will be an extra charge on your AI subscription.

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qsera 4 hours ago | parent [-]

>Eventually models will be trained to do this themselves

That is what I wonder. Two things.

1. Is there enough training data in that format, to do it?

2. Is there enough incentive for the LLM companies to do it? I mean they got to charge the client for the tokens upto that point..so..

	▲	pornel 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		1. In "verifiable" domains ML is not limited by training data any more. Models can help generate the training data and/or learn the objective through reinforcement learning. 2. Yes, because the most capable model is the only one that can charge a premium. The rest is a commodity.

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lelanthran 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> I see a different future. A future where software developers are approached by clients with requirements in the form of an LLM generated program. They do it because they are at a point where LLM fails to make new changes without breaking existing stuff.

That's not gonna happen :-/ I've already had clients tell me they only want it modified, and their expectation is that it's only a days worth of work to make it work.

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bee_rider 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Did they end up getting what they wanted?

This LLM stuff is still quite new; I wouldn’t be surprised if people are still asking for your help wrong.

	▲	lelanthran 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> Did they end up getting what they wanted? Who knows. I don't take on any dev work anymore that involves modifying existing applications, anyway. Too many have been of the form "Look, we did 99% of it, we just need you to do the 1% remaining" with the expectation that finding and fixing bugs in a vibed 90kSloC application is only a few minutes to a few hours of human labour. In reality, if you bring me something that Claude Code itself can't make changes to without breaking, it's going to be at least a week of billable hours before I know where to start.

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qsera 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

That is sad. But if what I imagine is true, they will grow wiser after they have lost enough $$$ with scammers who agree to do it in a day and pocket the funds and give back an even more broken program.

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jollyllama 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

How is what you're describing technically different than the quoted section? GP was correct, they just didn't realize that they were describing something bad instead of something good.

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nextaccountic 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

the program itself is kind of useless. the client will send it anyway to demonstrate a proof of concept but hopefully the dev will build from scratch

what's important is the spec. the poc isn't a spec because the dev is being hired exactly because that software doesn't solve the problem fully - whatever it has missing is the important bits

this spec will probably be generated by a llm, but there is some noise added. if the client can send their prompt, alongside the whole llm session (maybe with sensitive tool calls redacted), the dev would have everything