Comment by nprz
11 hours ago
You can basically hand it a design, one that might take a FE engineer anywhere from a day to a week to complete and Codex/Claude will basically have it coded up in 30 seconds. It might need some tweaks, but it's 80% complete with that first try. Like I remember stumbling over graphing and charting libraries, it could take weeks to become familiar with all the different components and APIs, but seemingly you can now just tell Codex to use this data and use this charting library and it'll make it. All you have to do is look at the code. Things have certainly changed.
It might be 80-95% complete but the last 5% is either going to take twice the time or be downright impossible.
That was the same thing with human products though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ninety%E2%80%93ninety_rule
Except that the either side of it is immensely cheaper now.
This is like Tesla's self-driving: 95% complete very early on, still unsuitable for real life many years later.
Not saying adding few novel ideas (perhaps working world models) to the current AI toolbox won't make a breakthrough, but LLMs have their limits.
I figure it takes me a week to turn the output of ai into acceptable code. Sure there is a lot of code in 30 seconds but it shouldn't pass code review (even the ai's own review).
For now. Claude is worse than we are at programming. But its improving much faster than I am. Opus 4.6 is incredible compared to previous models.
How long before those lines cross? Intuitively it feels like we have about 2-3 years before claude is better at writing code than most - or all - humans.
It is certainly already better than most humans, even better than most humans who occasionally code. The bar is already quite high, I'd say. You have to be decent in your niche to outcompete frontier LLM Agents in a meaningful way.
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> You can basically hand it a design
And, pray tell, how people are going to come up with such design?
Honestly you could just come up with a basic wireframe in any design software (MS paint would work) and a screen shot of a website with a design you like and tell it "apply the aesthetic from the website in this screenshot to the wireframe" and it would probably get 80% (probably more) of the way there. Something that would have taken me more than a day in the past.
I've been in web design since images were first introduced to browsers and modern designs for the majority of sites are more templated than ever. AI can already generate inspiration, prototypes and designs that go a long way to matching these, then juice them with transitions/animations or whatever else you might want.
The other day I tested an AI by giving it a folder of images, each named to describe the content/use/proportions (e.g., drone-overview-hero-landscape.jpg), told it the site it was redesigning, and it did a very serviceable job that would match at least a cheap designer. On the first run, in a few seconds and with a very basic prompt. Obviously with a different AI, it could understand the image contents and skip that step easily enough.
I have never once seen this actually work in a way that produces a product I would use. People keep claiming these one-shot (or nearly one-shot) successes, but in the mean time I ask it to modify a simple CSS rule and it rewrites the enter file, breaks the site, and then can't seem to figure out what it did wrong.
It's kind of telling that the number of apps on Apple's app store has been decreasing in recent years. Same thing on the Android store too. Where are the successful insta-apps? I really don't believe it's happening.
https://www.appbrain.com/stats/number-of-android-apps
I've recently tried using all of the popular LLMs to generate DSP code in C++ and it's utterly terrible at it, to the point that it almost never even makes it through compilation and linking.
Can you show me the library of apps you've launched in the last few years? Surely you've made at least a few million in revenue with the ease with which you are able to launch products.
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Not really. What the FE engineer will produce in a week will be vastly different from what the AI will produce. That's like saying restaurants are dead because it takes a minute to heat up a microwave meal.
There were some good and some pretty terrible FE devs though, and it's not clear which ones prevailed.
It does make the lowest common denominator easier to reach though. By which I mean your local takeaway shop can have a professional looking website for next to nothing, where before they just wouldn't have had one at all.
I think exceptional work, AI tools or not, still takes exceptional people with experience and skill. But I do feel like a certain level of access to technology has been unlocked for people smart enough, but without the time or tools to dive into the real industry's tools (figma, code, data tools etc).
The local takeaway shop could have had a professional looking website for years with Wix, Squarespace, etc. There are restaurant specific solutions as well. Any of these would be better than vibe coding for a non-tech person. No-code has existed for years and there hasn't been a flood of bespoke software coming from end users. I find it hard to believe that vibe-coding is easier or more intuitive than GUI tooling designed for non-experts...
I think the idea that LLM's will usher in some new era where everyone and their mom are building software is a fantasy.
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Wouldn’t we have more restaurants if there was no microwave ovens? But microwave oven also gave rise to many frozen food industry. Overall more industrializations.
The number of non-technical people in my orbit that could successfully pull up Claude code and one shot a basic todo app is zero. They couldn’t do it before and won’t be able to now.
They wouldn’t even know where to begin!
You don't need to draw the line between tech experts and the tech-naive. Plenty of people have the capability but not the time or discipline to execute such a thing by hand.
You go to chatGPT and say "produce a detailed prompt that will create a functioning todo app" and then put that output into Claude Code and you now have a TODO app.
This is still a stumbling block for a lot of people. Plenty of people could've found an answer to a problem they had if they had just googled it, but they never did. Or they did, but they googled something weird and gave up. AI use is absolutely going to be similar to that.
Maybe I’m biased working in insurance software, but I don’t get the feeling much programming happens where the code can be completely stochastically generated, never have its code reviewed, and that will be okay with users/customers/governments/etc.
Even if all sandboxing is done right, programs will be depended on to store data correctly and to show correct outputs.
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Step one: you have to know to ask that. Nobody in that orbit knows how to do that. And these aren’t dumb people. They just aren’t devs.