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by kristianc5 hours ago |
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upvoteby vjvjvjvjghv4 hours ago|
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Using AI is really not different from hiring a bunch of people to do your project. You can tell them to do the minimum it takes to make it work or you can tell them or do it according to a long term vision you have and set high standards.

I agree that with AI it's very tempting to throw together a bunch of code without any thought of the longer term. But a lot of people are acting as if all programmers are artisans that produce well written code following the highest standards. That is just not true.

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upvoteby kristianc3 hours ago|
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The opposite actually. I suspect some programmers may come to realise what some of the people in product, design, marketing, who they suspected didn't do very much at all actually do. Finding programmers especially those who self-define as programmers with good product instincts is hard.
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upvoteby caaqil2 hours ago|
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It's funny how AI has suddenly caused this great awakening in developers/mathematicians: that building stuff or working on purely technical stuff wasn't their actual value, but rather "taste", "understanding", "deciding what to or not to build" etc. It's like the parts of the field that were janitor-adjacent have suddenly being elevated and they now define the field. This transition happened so fast that it'd make your head spin if you're paying attention.
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upvoteby skydhash1 hours ago|
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> It's funny how AI has suddenly caused this great awakening in developers/mathematicians: that building stuff or working on purely technical stuff wasn't their actual value, but rather "taste", "understanding", "deciding what to or not to build" etc

Anyone that has worked in an enterprise context knows this. You spend more time saying no and finding justifications than in the editor.

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upvoteby kristianc1 hours ago|
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The problem with smart people is that they are able to construct ever more elaborate justifications for their own mental gymnastics.

That said, if you think developers have never enjoyed telling other people what to or not to build, I recommend checking out Stack Overflow.

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upvoteby skybrian5 hours ago|
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Based on my experience using AI to build software for myself, I think this mostly depends on what you ask for, not whether you use AI to implement it.
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upvoteby kristianc4 hours ago|
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In so far as "unless you specify precisely how the user interaction should work, you will get bad design" that's true, but that takes you far from the vision of "give AI a prompt, it will provide you with usable output with minimal human intervention".

Claude is better because it validates its work visually and seems to have a more intuitive sense of what makes an interface pleasant to use.

Codex manages to be both rigidly literal about the spec but also prone to adding unnecessary explanatory text, helper elements and visual clutter, oddly like a 1990s ERP system.

The role of product manager/product design is literally to turn whatever is being asked for into the optimal solution someone would actually want to use - it's this translation instinct that is missing from AI.

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upvoteby skybrian3 hours ago|
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For me, the visual design usually has problems the first time, and then I ask it to fix it. But the edits are still done by the AI.
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