Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by plinkplink 822 days ago
There have been many tools that were sold as developer replacements over the years. - Microsoft FrontPage - Adobe Dreamweaver - A litany of glorified WYSIWYG editors - WordPress - Wix - Power Apps/SharePoint ...and so on.

Business owners have been getting sexually aroused at the prospect of taking a developer's salary and putting it in their own pockets for decades. Each iteration of this wet dream has only locked businesses into "low code" systems that require even more, highly-specialized developers to operate. Right now, and probably for a while, Devon, et al. is on par with the drag-and-drop automagical app building snake oil stuff.

LLMs are useful to help developers be more productive, which does translate to lay-offs, but until someone creates an AI that can translate the absolute fevered gibberish that comes out of business people's heads into a profitable piece of software, this is just MS FrontPage v100.0.

Just like an entire industry sprang up around fixing WordPress websites that business owners thought they could do themselves, pretty soon we'll start seeing job postings for AI-Generated Spaghetti Unravellers.

I'm (half seriously) imagining a future were software engineers are mostly consultants that show up and talk with business folks, then talk with the local robot, and get the project to actually work. Bill $1k per hour.