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MyFirstSass | 2 months ago

I highly doubt "pumping out bespoke apps all day" is possible yet besides 100% boilerplate, and when possible then no good for any other purpose than enshittifiying the web, and at that point not profitable because everyone can do it.

I use AI daily as a senior coder for search and docs, and when used for prototyping you still need to be a senior coder to go from say 60% boilerplate to 100% finished app/site/whatever unless it's incredibly simple.

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alwillis|2 months ago

> I use AI daily as a senior coder for search and docs, and when used for prototyping you still need to be a senior coder to go from say 60% boilerplate to 100% finished app/site/whatever unless it's incredibly simple.

I know you would like to believe that, but with the tools available NOW, that's not necessarily the case. For example, by using the Playwright or Chrome DevTools MCPs, models can see the web app are it's being created and it's pretty easy to prompt them to fix something they can see.

These models know the current frameworks and coding practices but they do need some guidance; they're not mindreaders.

MyFirstSass|2 months ago

I still don't believe that. Again yes a boilerplate calculator or recipe app probably, but anything advanced real world with latency issues, scaling, race conditions, css quirks, design weirdness, optimisation - in other words the things that actually require domain knowledge i still don't get much help with, even with Claude Code, pointers yes but they completely fumble actual production code in real world scenarios.

Again it's the last 5% that takes 95% of the time, and those 5% i haven't seen fixed with Claude or Gemini, because it's essentially quirks, browser errors, race conditions, visual alignment, etc etc. All stuff that completely goes way above any LLM's head atm from what i've seen.

They can definitely bullshit a 95% working app though, but that's 95% from being done ;)

Workaccount2|2 months ago

Often the problem with tech people is they think software only exists for tech or for being sold to others from tech.

Nothing I do is in the tech industry. It's all manufacturing and all the software is for in-house processes.

Believe it or not, software is useful to everyone and no longer needs to originate from someone who only knows software.

MyFirstSass|2 months ago

I'm saying you can't do what you're saying without knowing code at the moment.

You didn't give any examples of the valuable bespoke apps that you are creating by the hour.

I simply don't believe you, and the arrogant salesy tone doesn't help.

vjvjvjvjghv|2 months ago

This is the same as the discussion about using Excel. Excel has its limitations, but it has enabled millions of people to do pretty sophisticated stuff without the help of “professionals”. Most of the stuff us tech people do is also basically some repetitive boilerplate. We just like to make things more complex than they need to be. I am always a little baffled why seemingly every little CRUD site that has at most 100 users needs to be run on Kubernetes with several microservices, CI/CD pipelines, and whatever.

As far as enshittification goes, this was happening long before AI. It probably started with SEO and just kept going from there.

almosthere|2 months ago

The reality is too, that even if "what is acceptable" has not yet caught up to that guy working at Atlassian, polishing off a new field in Jira, people are using AI + Excel to manage their tasks EXACTLY the way their head works, not the way Jira works.

Yet we fail to see AI as a good thing but just as a jobs destroyer. Are we "better than" the people that used to fill toothpaste tubes manually until a machine was invented to replace them? They were just as mad when they got the pink slip.