The ironic thing is that half a year ago, after trying factory.ai I thought chat-first interface was a stupid idea that will never work.

But yeah, this is not a "one shot" project, none of it is. One shot doesn't work even with humans - after all, this is exactly what killed waterfall as a methodology.

That said - I seldom need people to be hardcore algorithm solvers What I typically did was a variation of fizzbuzz (can the candidate code very basic logic?) and then finding a bug or minor requirements extension in their online screening test/"homework" and asking them to solve that on the spot (did they write the code themselves/can they modify it). It's typically enough, there's diminishing returns to test more in-depth the programming skills - the rest you can discuss domain knowledge, general experience, working style etc.

> Impactful software tends to be written by many humans that need to collaborate.

This was definitely true. Is it still true to the same extent/ in the same way? Not obvious...

Now Wizzair is "mostly not an airline" for me, because they have all the negative traits I hinted above. E.g. they'll happily advertise flights they have no intention of flying, make refunds hard, are as misleading as they can be about pricing, make it impossible to checkin online a few hours before the flight so that you have to pay their high fees, etc.

I wouldn't want the Ryanair experience for long-haul flights; but for short 2-3h ones within Europe, they're fine, I'm always considering them. Not for the perceived cheapness, but for the "I expect them to actually fly AND be on time" part.

The problem with "AI zealots" is seldom that they spend too much time planning ahead. If anything, it's the opposite.

LLMs just take this to the extreme. You can no longer rely on human code reviews (well you can but you give away all the LLM advantages) so then if you take out "human judgement" *from validation*[1], you have to resort to very sophisticated automated validation. This is it - it's not about "inventing a new language", it's about being much more thorough (and innovative, and efficient) in the validation process.

[1] never from design, or specification - you shouldn't outsource that to AI, I don't think we're close to an AI that can do that even moderately effective without human help.

The idea of "guardrails outside the model" is definitely appealing but I wonder if you can make it generalize well.

You iterate, yes - sometimes because the AI gets it wrong; and sometimes because you got it wrong (or didn't say exactly what you wanted, and AI assumed you wanted something else). But the less specific and clear you are in your requirements, the less likely it is you'll actually get what you want. With you not being specific in the requirements, it only really works if you want something that lots of people are building/have built before, because that will allow the AI to make correct assumptions about what to build.

Specification is worth writing (and spending a lot more time on than implementation) because it's the part that you can still control, fully read, understand etc. Once it gets into the code, reviewing it will be a lot harder, and if you insist on reviewing everything it'll slow things down to your speed.

> If the cost of writing code is approaching zero, there's no point investing resources to perfect a system in one shot.

THe AI won't get the perfect system in one shot, far from it! And especially not from sloppy initial requirements that leave a lot of edge (or not-so-edge) cases unadressed. But if you have a good requirement to start with, you have a chance to correct the AI, keep it on track; you have something to go back to and ask other AI, "is this implementation conforming to the spec or did it miss things?"

> five different versions of the thing you're building and simply pick the best one.

Problem is, what if the best one is still not good enough? Then what? You do 50? They might all be bad. You need a way to iterate to convergence

Does that mean that if I exit claude code and then later resume the session, the database is already lost? When exactly does the session end?

That's another 20 years mate.

That was my point, really - that you probably don't need to know "materials science" to declare yourself competent enough in cooking so that you can make your own food. Even if you only cooked eggs in teflon pans, you will likely be able to improvise if need arises. But once you become so ignorant that you don't even know what food is unless you see it on a plate in a restaurant, already prepared - then you're in a lot poorer position to survive, should your access to restaurants be suddenly restricted. But perhaps more importantly - you lose the ability to evaluate food by anything other than aspect & taste, and have to completely rely on others to understand what food might be good or bad for you(*).

(*) even now, you can't really "do your own research", that's not how the world works. We stand on shoulders of giants - the reason we have so much is because we trust/take for granted a lot of knowledge that ancestors built up for us. But it's one thing to know /prove everything in detail up until the basic axioms/atoms/etc; nobody does that. And it's a completely different different thing to have your "thoughts" and "conclusions" already delivered to you in final form by something (be it Fox News, ChatGPT, New York Times or anything really) and just take them for granted, without having a framework that allows to do some minimal "understanding" and "critical thinking" of your own.