Discussion

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bob1029: I think there are many moats that non-experts won't attempt to cross even with AI assistance.For example, we've built in a lot of complexity to areas like authentication. And for good reason. It's like electrical code. I'd pay good money to watch a muggle attempt to configure OIDC infrastructure. Even with the AI explaining everything to you, it's too much information to digest at once. You'd need an entire afternoon just to wrap your head around the idea of asymmetric cryptography. That's a lot of time not spent doing the thing your business is actually about.

mrweasel: I absolutely love this, because to me, this is what software development should be about, solving actual problems and providing faster calculations, improving the workflow for people.It does strike me as a little odd that they didn't hire a developer earlier and got the code written. Sitting back and waiting for someone to drop by and present a solution is a little naive, but it's also the world we built in the IT industry over the past 20 years. When I started my first job, we frequently had customers ask for bespoke solution, most of which was small one week to a few months of work. Multiple co-workers in the mid 2000s has side businesses, where they did contract development, most of which was these types of small one off solutions. Most of the software companies, in my area, that did these types of jobs are all gone now.If AI accidentally created an environment where people can once again solve small programming problems on their own and massively improve the workflows I'm all for it. Serves the industry right for abandoning these customers.

steve_adams_86: I've more or less accepted this, and I think my future is in making software more resilient, secure, and fault tolerant. These people will likely want to scale these solutions up, tie different solutions together, and generally make their lives increasingly difficult. Often without realizing it.My experience is that Claude starts to make quite a mess in this context, and it'll often cause as many problems as it solves unless you have the technical and domain knowledge to redirect and correct it frequently. Perhaps training will solve this, and it'll certainly get better, but I'm not sure how far it'll go and how fast.My gut feeling is that software will only become more ambitious and interface with hardware and other systems in increasingly sophisticated ways. Things that seemed infeasible due to time and cost constraints will be on the table. It'll reveal new challenges, I think. I have a feeling it'll be humans with deep technical skills who are at the forefront of solving those challenges for a while yet.Not claiming I have the skills and to be one of those people, just that it's where I'm pushing my career at the moment.I'm stoked that people like this have the resources and newfound capabilities to create solutions like this. The reality is that previously, many people have been underserved due to the economics of software and inherent risks of trying things like this as a smaller business owner. So this is great. We can find more ways that software can be valuable, and people can do their jobs better in ways they've literally only imagined before. It's great.

edg5000: What could happen is a reduction in the amount of programs used, with a smaller set of more sophisticated programs doing more work. This maps to what we saw pre-industrial revolution: lots of small family operations doing menial manufacturing work (woodworking, textiles, cooking). This got replaced by large factories. A smaller amount of companies producing the a larger volume of goods. With AI, a smaller group of engineers could handle more local complexity, thus allowing more sophisticated, general purpose software to be created, deleting the sea of small pieces of software we have today.Will this means many will be jobless? No, they would do other things. They'd be using this software to support society, operating at a high level. Think low-code, but incredibly complex stuff; just not raw code anymore. Instead of making circuit boards out of descrete components, you now slap a few ICs on a board with some supporting passives and the work is then all done in software. Engineers use more high-level components rather then welding and machinijng things from scratch; you buy T-slot profiles and bolts rather than casting and milling steel from billets.So the job of programmer may disappear simmilar to how we don't have bakers anymore, baking is done in factories, operated by a small staff. Current-day programmers will then increasingly shift to whatever high-level constructs we'll come up with, this high level work will be supported by the base infrastructure that those who still touch raw code will build.

f-serif: >10 minutes per drawing now takes 60 seconds. It can do 100 drawings in five minutesbullshit story always leave something like this.

thr0w: I love Claude and think it’s amazing, but yeah I’ve heard hyperventilating stories like this from a million different places in the past 6 months. And it’s twitter, so of course it’s exaggerated if not completely fabricated. The only thing missing from this story is the guy using a mic + whisper setup to “tell the computer what he wants”.I can’t tell you how badly non-programmers have looked at the tech industry with envy for the past few decades. Claude does seriously open things up, but on the flip side so many people desperately want this to be a Prometheus moment.

phil21: Yeah the whole tech world did a weird side quest over the past 20 or so years huffing its own farts due to how the internet/adtech/etc sucked all the air out of everything else tech related. And the economy as a whole.It also coincided with the hollowing out and offshoring of practically all US industrial and manufacturing capability.I will be very happy if the result of AI means we go back to how things should actually be - where technology/IT is used to support real world things and acts as a backstage enabler to get shit done. Not the main event.I often said since the early 00’s my dream would be to have made enough money in the insanely stupid “tech for tech sake” world to go back to just being one of a few “IT guys” supporting a factory and keeping the machines running. These jobs of course exist, but due to tech salaries very few small manufacturing businesses could support hiring such a person.There is now a generation or two of technologists who don’t understand that the job isn’t to learn the latest hot web framework or yammer on about best practices or whatever. It’s to support a business in shipping actual products to customers.

i_cannot_hack: It's a really interesting case study, but the summary seems to lean into the AI hype to an extent that borders on lying.> His fabrication shop uses it daily, and he built the entire thing in 8 weeks. During those 8 weeks he also had to learn everything about Claude Code, the terminal, VS Code, everything.And don't see how he can give this summary with a straight face after posting the interview that CLEARLY contradicts it.In the interview the engineer says "When Claud Code came out almost a year ago, I started dabbling with web based tools ..." and "When it first came out I had so many ideas and tried all these different things", so he had clearly already used extensively it for a year. I would also guess the engineer was somewhat technically minded from the get-go, since he claims he was "really good with excel" before starting with Claude Code, but that is beside the point.The interviewer later asks "How much of those 8 weeks was learning Claude Code versus actually building the thing?", and the interviewee answers "Well, I started Claude Code when it first came out so the learning curve has really gone down for me now..." and then trails off to a different subject. Which further confirms that the summary in the post is false.It really seems like the engineer has spent the year prior learning Claude Code and then spent 8 weeks on solely building this specific application.The interviewer also claims "This would normally have taken a developer a year to build", which seems really unsubstantiated. It's of course hard to judge without all the details, but looking at the short demo in the video, 8 weeks of regular development time from a somewhat experienced developer doesn't seem too far fetched if the objective is "don't make it pretty, just make it work".As I said, it's a really interesting case study about a paradigm shift in how software is developed, and it's clear this app would never have existed without Claude Code. So I don't really see the need for the blatant lying.

slopinthebag: I don't get it - it's an app that uses an image model to parse a pdf file and structure the data with a csv export?

mirsadm: I've noticed even experienced engineers have started overestimating how long things would take to build without AI. Believe it or not we coded before AI and not everything took years all the time.