> Somewhere around 20M people (0.2%) see first-hand that large, complex projects that used to take them weeks/months can now be completed by agents with a prompt.

No, they can't, at least not any semblance of quality. The cases we're seeing where this does kinda work is in ports and translation where all the rules are already documented in the best specification language possible with a way for the LLM to verify itself: code. We saw this close to a year ago now with Cloudflare and NextJS

> The impact scales with ambition, problem size, and horizon. A question with a paragraph answer barely stresses the system. You need a reservoir of big, difficult problems that you really care about

These are operating on different capabilities - AI's ability to answer informational queries as a chatbot frankly sucks and can't be trusted without verifying it. I run up against this every day. A problem with a verifiable answer on the other hand it's very good at solving. He knows this (his next paragraph) but he's putting them on the same scale of "stressing the system" to attempt to add proof to his introductory claim

And then there's the completely unverifiable scare that there are internal frontier models way beyond anything we've seen "swarms of thousands of agents collaborating over weeks on software mega projects: minting zero days, running cyber attacks and defenses at machine speeds, discovering new science, advancing the frontier of mathematics"

I dunno. I haven't been able to set up OpenAIs remote codex connection, their shit is buggy as hell and the web UI keeps crashing and making messages disappear. Is this what their internal superhuman "Things that would have taken top professionals in the industry years of work" looks like? Granted Claude has been really smooth, but still..

This is a meaningless statistic with zero nuance. Average is also the wrong thing to look at

If he truly believed in the idea of never reading the code, he'd fire all his developers and have the designers do it all - create very high level feature descriptions and iterate on them. Put your money where your mouth is

If your mortgage payment and overall living expenses are so high that you can only get by with a high paying job then you've shackled yourself to your org and should fear being fired

If you live well below your means you'll have a large savings buffer and won't care so much

> The philosopher Diogenes was eating bread and lentils for supper. He was seen by the philosopher Aristippus, who lived comfortably by flattering the king. Said Aristippus, "If you would learn to be subservient to the king you would not have to live on lentils."

> Said Diogenes, "Learn to live on lentils and you will not have to be subservient to the king."

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50036294

Points: 5

# Comments: 0

Maybe I'm overthinking things. There were companies paying out the ass for relatively basic WordPress sites in the past (and probably still)

I've been on a vibe-coding binge to create a bespoke tool for myself over the last week. I haven't looked at the code once. Couldn't tell you how it's designed, because I never needed to look, despite having over a decade experience developing software professionally.

I struggle to see this process from a less technical person's eyes so it might not be this easy for everyone, but it really feels like we're close to the point where deeper software skills are only going to be valuable for either very large codebases or ones that require scaling, which doesn't apply to most of that bespoke internal software.

The hiring for those roles might be closer to "knows our domain well" than "knows the tech stack"

Some of those will go on to be successful and need technical people to support it

You haven't tried the latest gen of frontier models, I take it? These things aren't just hype.