Comment by sublinear
4 days ago
Yeah my point was that there's not much existing software within a business that's the equivalent of an ad jingle, unless you really split hairs and start counting excel macros or something.
Will there be new software like that? Maybe, but you'll never hear about it. Not only because it's throwaway code, but because the best interface is probably no code at all. The chatbot will instead spin up a VM behind the scenes and never even show the code it generated unless you dig for it.
On the other hand, if there is budget available, like on real movies and bigger television projects, real musicians are still used. And across the board, except for musical styles that explicitly call for electronic sounds, most people agree that using live players would be preferred if only they had the time and money.
I wonder if there’s any parallel to that in software?
I think the equivalent to "live players" are frontend app devs.
It's a deeply unpopular opinion around here, but if a human has to interact with anything that's where most of the effort and budget is going to go. They're still the "rock stars".
That skill set is not merely writing code. It's more about collaboration with all the stakeholders and making a ton of deliberate decisions and compromises. It doesn't matter how "good" an LLM is at writing code for the web. That's subjective, and that's my point. We've had all kinds of no-code solutions for a very long time.
An experienced frontend dev is necessary when the project isn't just for other devs or internal use.