| > This is a 30KLOC 6 platform flutter app […] It's a real system, not kindergarten "look at the React Claude Artifacts did, the button makes a POST request!" This is powerful and significant but I think we need to ground ourselves on what a skilled programmer means when he talks about solving problems. That is, honestly ask: What is the level of skill a programmer requires to build what you've described? Mostly, imo, the difficulties in building it are in platform and API details not in any fundamental engineering problem that has to be solved. What makes web and Android programming so annoying is all the abstractions and frameworks and cruft that you end up having to navigate. Once you've navigated it, you haven't really solved anything, you've just dealt with obstacles other programmers have put in your way. The solutions are mostly boilerplate-like and the code I write is glue. I think the definition of "junior engineer" or "simple app" will be defined by what LLMs can produce and so, in a way, unfortunately, the goal posts and skill ceiling will keep shifting. On the other, hand, say we watch a presentation by the Lead Programmer at Naughty Dog, "Parallelizing the Naughty Dog Engine Using Fibers"[^0] and ask the same questions: what level of skill is required to solve the problems he's describing (solutions worth millions of dollars because his product has to sell that much to have good ROI): "I have a million LOC game engine for which I need to make a scheduler with no memory management for multithreaded job synchronization for the PS4." A lot of these guys, if you've talked to them, are often frustrated that LLMs simply can't help them make headway with, or debug, these hard problems where novel hardware-constrained solutions are needed. --- [^0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HIVBhKj7gQU |
...I guess the first?...
...But not really?
I'm not writing GPU kernels or operating system task schedulers, but I am going to some pretty significant lengths to be running ex. local LLM, embedding model, Whisper, model for voice activity detection, model for speaker counting, syncing state with 3 web sockets. Simultaneously. In this case, Android and iOS are no valhalla of vapid-stackoverflow-copy-pasta-with-no-hardware-constraints, as you might imagine.
And the novelty is, 6 years ago, I would have targeted iOS and prayed. Now I'm on every platform at top-tier speeds. All that boring tedious scribe-like stuff that 90% of us spend 80% of our time on, is gone.
I'm not sure there's very many people at all who get to solve novel hardware-constrained problems these days, I'm quite pleased to brush shoulders with someone who brushes shoulders with them :)
Thus, smacks more of no-true-scotsman than something I can chew on. Productivity gains are productivity gains, and these are no small productivity gain in a highly demanding situation.