> but you can already get 80% of the way there, and with a senior engineer guiding a junior using genai
Getting to a demo, an MVP, or an early-stage company are probably all doable with a skeleton crew of software engineers plus LLMs. But it is difficult to imagine scenarios where 1) customers are paying you real amounts of money and 2) the technical problems the company faces remain solvable "with a senior engineer guiding a junior using genai."
It feels like a recipe for disaster--when (not if) things go awry, there is no slack in the system, nothing to absorb the shock. It's brittle. Maybe we will see lots of companies in the next few years with successful exits who are using a model like this! But I doubt many are durable businesses.
honestly, highly highly doubt this. there is nothing revolutionary in most engineering, and its even easier when the product is already robust and just needs to be maintained
This has been the argument for every CMS and no-code solution ever. 80% of apps are just crud. 90% maybe! We can just anticipate all the needs and have plugins and drag and drop builders. Coding will be restricted to just a small set of senior engineers working on core framework development. Just watch! Any moment now..
And they were right, in a way. Frameworks excel in the early stages of application development. Drag and drop, click to create a database, it all works. But ask even small sized companies if they keep using it after 1 year, and the answer is often no. If it is yes, it’s usually all building custom things to work around the limitations of the framework. Or, it is a simple product/site with no further needs (but they are rare).
Anyway, AI for the full development cycle! Any moment now..
Sure it’s different. But the point is early stage development is not the hard part. LLMs so far perform well within training data, which there is a ton for crud. We can’t say how it performs maintaining projects yet, it’s not clear it can be pattern matched in the same way.
Getting to a demo, an MVP, or an early-stage company are probably all doable with a skeleton crew of software engineers plus LLMs. But it is difficult to imagine scenarios where 1) customers are paying you real amounts of money and 2) the technical problems the company faces remain solvable "with a senior engineer guiding a junior using genai."
It feels like a recipe for disaster--when (not if) things go awry, there is no slack in the system, nothing to absorb the shock. It's brittle. Maybe we will see lots of companies in the next few years with successful exits who are using a model like this! But I doubt many are durable businesses.