I went from using ChatGPT 3.5 for functions and occasional scripts…
… to one of the models in Jan 2024 being able to repeatedly add features to the same single-page web app without corrupting its own work or hallucinating the APIs it had itself previously generated…
… to last month using a gifted free week of Claude Code to finish one project and then also have enough tokens left over to start another fresh project which, on that free left-over credit, reached a state that, while definitely not well engineered, was still better than some of the human-made pre-GenAI nonsense I've had to work with.
Wasn't 3 hours, and I won't be working on that thing more this month either because I am going to be doing intensive German language study with the goal of getting the language certificate I need for dual citizenship, but from the speed of work? 3 weeks to make a startup is already plausible.
I won't say that "software engineering" is dead. In a lot of cases however "writing code" is dead, and the job of the engineer should now be to do code review and to know what refactors to ask for.
So you did some basic web development and built a "not well engineered" greenfield app that you didn't ship, and from that your conclusion is that "writing code is dead"?
What do you think the first half of the credit was spent on?
In addition to the other projects it finished off for me, the reason I say "coding is dead" is that even this
mediocre quality code is already shippable. Customers do not give a toss if it has clean code or nicely refactored python backend, that kind of thing is a pain point purely for developers, and when the LLM is the developer then the LLM is the one who gets to be ordered to pay down the technical debt.
The other project (and a third one I might have done on a previous free trial) are as complete as I care to make them. They're "done" in a way I'm not used to being possible with manual coding, because LLMs can finish features faster than I can think of new useful features to add. The limiting factor is my ability to do code review, or would be if I got the more expensive option, as I was on a free trial I could do code review about twice as fast as I burned through tokens (given what others say about the more expensive option that either means I need to learn to code review faster, or my risk tolerance is lower than theirs).
Now, is my new 3-day web app a viable business idea? It would've been shippable as-is 5-6 years ago, I saw worse live around then. Today? Hard to say, if markets were efficient then everyone would know LLMs can create this kind of thing so easily and nobody could charge for them, but people like yourself who disbelieve are an example of markets not being efficient, people like you can have apps like these sold to them.
That said, I try not to look at where the ball is but where it is going. For business ideas, I have to figure out what *doesn't* scale, and do that. Coding *does* scale now, that's why coding is dead.
I expect to return to this project in a month. Have one of the LLMs expand it and develop it for more than 3 the days spent so far, turn it into something I'd actually be happy to sell. Like I said, it seems like we're at "3 weeks" not "3 hours" for a decent MVP by current standards, but the floor is rising fast.
… to one of the models in Jan 2024 being able to repeatedly add features to the same single-page web app without corrupting its own work or hallucinating the APIs it had itself previously generated…
… to last month using a gifted free week of Claude Code to finish one project and then also have enough tokens left over to start another fresh project which, on that free left-over credit, reached a state that, while definitely not well engineered, was still better than some of the human-made pre-GenAI nonsense I've had to work with.
Wasn't 3 hours, and I won't be working on that thing more this month either because I am going to be doing intensive German language study with the goal of getting the language certificate I need for dual citizenship, but from the speed of work? 3 weeks to make a startup is already plausible.
I won't say that "software engineering" is dead. In a lot of cases however "writing code" is dead, and the job of the engineer should now be to do code review and to know what refactors to ask for.