> LLMs are regression-to-the-mean machines--they pull junior developers up, and drag senior developers down. Taming them requires trading the romance of 'code as craft' for the physics of manufacturing.

The thing I don't know is: how do we decide which direction is most valuable? I can see arguments in both directions--quality vs quantity, essentially. I think there's a strong argument for the value of both:

- we need more quantity of software: for a long time, the ability to write software has been locked up, confined to a closed cabal of specialists

- we need more quality in software: we depend more and more on software in every aspect of our lives, mistakes are intolerable and should be avoided

https://halecraft.org/software-engineering-is-the-new-manufa...

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48414426

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Examples:

- Before going on a trip, pre-visiting the destination in Google Earth with VR is very spatially informative & makes directional intuition memorable upon arrival at the real world destination.

- Virtual role-play with environmental cues that cause make-believe to be ever more real.

But most people don't need this very often. Picking up a book or throwing on some earbuds to listen to a book are far more frequent and compatible with simultaneous other activities. VR feels the same--a high-demand focused experience that is infrequently worth the effort.

To you. I find the debate quite valuable, as there is a wide open future and we're in the midst of figuring out where "here" is.

/me up and continues search for good people and good projects.

Maybe it's like the transformation of local-to-global that traveling musicians felt in the early 1900s: now what they do can be experienced for free, over the radio waves, by anyone with a radio.

YouTube showed us that video needn't be produced only by those with $10M+ budgets. But we still appreciate Hollywood.

There are new possibilities in this transformation, where we need to adapt. But there are also existing constraints that don't just disappear.

To me, the "Why" is that people want positive experiences. If the only way to get them is to pay experts, then they will. But if they have alternatives, that's fine too.

This differs from closed-form calculations where a calculator is normally constrained to operate--there is one correct answer. In other words "a random calculation mistake" would be undesirable in a domain of functions (same input yields same output), but would be acceptable and even desirable in a domain of uncertainty.

We are surprised and delighted that LLMs can produce code, but they are more akin to natural language outputs than code outputs--and we're disappointed when they create syntax errors, or worse, intention errors.