[steve_adams_86]

Such a good example of this I encountered recently:

I was on a fishing trip. I asked the charter if he’d want to check out a free app I work on (https://oceanconnect.ca) in case it might be useful for his work.

I don’t know how people on the ocean use ocean data. I don’t really know what they want to know, or why. I wasn’t totally prepared for the incredible onslaught of questions and information pertaining to how people use the data or what we can do with the data, and it was so cool and exciting to get that perspective.

It was a good reminder that models are not the same as the systems they abstract, and knowledge to develop them has almost nothing to do with using them. This guy was a wealth of knowledge about how they use weather data on the water. In a sense, he knows more about the data than I do (even if he doesn’t realize it, or doesn’t understand it in its digital representation), and would be far better equipped to make a useful application for people like him if he could program.

I found myself thinking people like him could actually do amazing stuff with LLMs if they sat down and got their ideas out on a screen. I’d really like to interview people on the water daily some day to refine the product if we ever have the funding. That domain knowledge is highly, highly specialized and people know things you’d never guess after living in a complex domain for decades.

[RussianCow]

Product management is its own skill, and few true domain expects have it. Without some form of PM, the resulting software will end up a mess due to poor UX, too much bloat, etc.

I think AI is going to force most software engineers to pick up this skill in some form. Building is easy; knowing what to build is the hard part.

[enraged_camel]

>> I found myself thinking people like him could actually do amazing stuff with LLMs if they sat down and got their ideas out on a screen.

They can, and they are. You just don’t hear about it on places like HN because those people are not on this website. Which is why some people here make smug statements like “if LLMs are so good at programming how come we haven’t seen any useful apps made with LLMs???”

[steve_adams_86]

You’re right. I have a friend who works in landscape architecture and he’s getting up to really cool things involving parametric modelling tools. Stuff he couldn’t easily do with off-the-shelf software is now attainable and he’s going wild with it. You’ll never hear about it here (though it totally belongs here)

[AndrewKemendo]

I’ve posted about it a lot, it’s posted all the time. It’s pretty much the main topic

The issue isn’t that it’s not happening, it’s that people on HN have their identities tied to typing code and can’t deal with the fact that amateurs are trying to compete

[steve_adams_86]

I think the competition will be incredible for bringing new idea and new challenges into the field. I’m all for it. I’ve never had to think harder about what’s worth doing and what’s possible, and I love it.

[AndrewKemendo]

> I found myself thinking people like him could actually do amazing stuff with LLMs if they sat down and got their ideas out on a screen.

It’s not theoretical I literally teach this and people who are shipping their own tools and products that are in their 40s and 50s have never thought about coding ever.

[tevli]

Related thinking: https://www.lesswrong.com/w/the-map-is-not-the-territory