[nrmitchi]

> Interested in anyone’s opinion

Okay, I'll bite. My issue w/ statements like "building something an LLM will do in the future" is a constant goal-post moving argument.

It seems to equate to "how is this getting funded when AGI is going to do it eventually anyways". That applies to literally everything. "Why bother building a social media platform, soon an LLM will be able to build an entire one in a day!", "Why bother becoming a plumber, soon an LLM will be able to control manufacturing equipment to build a robot that can do it better than any human", "Who needs architects, LLMs will soon be able to design perfect buildings for whatever use case!".

If your point is only that some companies are currently getting funded that are a weekend-project away from getting Apple-d out of existence, then I would definitely agree that some companies are like that (just like some app companies were like that 6 years ago). Some companies are just super basic wrappers around someone else's LLM, but the expectation (from investors, at least) is that there's a bigger goal and the "easy weekend project" approach is for validation and building some sort of user base now.

However, I also disagree that this is the case here. Building good UX's around LLM usage is not just "using LLMs", and figuring out the use cases people actually want is also not just "using LLMs".

[zalzal]

100% agree. There is a bigger point too: People assume LLM capabilities are like FLOPs or something, as if they are a single number.

In reality, building products is an exploration of a complex state space of _human_ needs and possible solutions. This complexity doesn't go away. The hard part of being an engineer is not writing JavaScript. It is building a solution that addresses the essential complexity of a problem without adding accidental complexity.

The reason this is relevant is that it's just the same for LLMs! They are tripped up just like human engineers into adding accidental complexity when they don't understand the problem well enough and then they don't solve the real problem. So saying "just wait, LLMs will do that in the future" is not much different than saying "just wait, some smarter human engineer might come along and solve that problem better than you". It's possibly true, possibly false. And certainly not helpful.

If you work on a problem over time, sometimes you'll do much better than smarter person who has the wrong tools or doesn't understand the problem. And that's no different for LLMs.