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Senior Developer Skills in the AI Age

(manuel.kiessling.net)
421 points briankelly | 1 comments | 03 Apr 25 18:47 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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conductr ◴[03 Apr 25 22:59 UTC] No.43576495[source]▶
As a long time hobby coder, like 25 years and I think I’m pretty good(?), this whole LLM /vibecoding thing has zapped my creativity the past year or so. I like the craft of making things. I used tools I enjoy working with and learn new ones all the time (never got on the JS/react train). Sometimes I have an entrepreneur bug and want to create a marketable solution, but I often just like to build. Im also the kind of guy that has a shop he built, builds his own patio deck, home remodeling, Tinker with robotics, etc. Kind of just like to be a maker following my own creative pursuit.

All said, it’s hard on me knowing it’s possible to use llm to spit out a crappy but functional version of whatever I’ve dreamt up with out satisfaction of building it. Yet, it also seems to now be demotivating to spend the time crafting it when I know I could use llm to do a majority of it. So, I’m in a mental quagmire, this past year has been the first year since at least 2000 that I haven’t built anything significant in scale. It’s indirectly ruining the fun for me for some reason. Kind of just venting but curious if anyone else feels this way too?

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fragmede ◴[03 Apr 25 23:03 UTC] No.43576520[source]▶
Fascinating. it's gone the other way for me. because I can now whip up a serious contender to any SaaS business in a week, it's made everything more fun, not less.
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cglace ◴[03 Apr 25 23:08 UTC] No.43576553[source]▶
So you can create a serious contender to Salesforce or Zapier in a week?
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fragmede ◴[03 Apr 25 23:09 UTC] No.43576562[source]▶
like an Eventbrite or a shopmonkey. but yeah, you don't think you could? Salesforce is a whole morass. not every customer uses every corner of it, and Salesforce will nickel and dime you with their consultants and add ons and plugins. if you can be more specific as to which bit of Salesforce you want to provide to a client we can go deep.
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caseyohara ◴[03 Apr 25 23:55 UTC] No.43576875[source]▶
But you said "I can now whip up a serious contender to any SaaS business in a week".

Any SaaS business. In a week. And to be a "serious contender", you have to have feature parity. Yet now you're shifting the goalposts.

What's stopping you? There are 38 weeks left in 2025. Please build "serious contenders" for each of the top 38 most popular SaaS products before the end of the year. Surely you will be the most successful programmer to have ever lived.

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fragmede ◴[04 Apr 25 00:15 UTC] No.43576982[source]▶
The rest of the business is the issue. I can whitelabel a Spotify clone but licensing rights and all that business stuff is outside my wheelhouse. An app that serves mp3s and has a bunch of other buttons? yeah, done. "shifting goalposts?" no, we're having a conversation, I'm not being deposed under a subpoena.

My claim is that in a week you could build a thing that people want to use, as long as you can sell it, that's competitive with existing options for a given client. Salesforce is a CRM with walled gardens after walled garden. access to each of which costs extra, of course. they happened to be in the right place at the right time, with the right bunch of assholes.

A serious contender doesn’t have to start with everything. It starts by doing the core thing better—cleaner UX, clearer value, easier to extend. That’s enough to matter. That’s enough to grow.

I’m not claiming to replace decades overnight. But momentum, clarity, and intent go a long way. Especially when you’re not trying to be everything to everyone—just the right thing for the right people.

as for Spotify: https://bit.ly/samson_music

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caseyohara ◴[04 Apr 25 02:16 UTC] No.43577654[source]▶
Sure, yeah, go ahead, do it. Seriously! Build a SaaS business in a week and displace an existing business. Please report back with your findings.
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1. fragmede ◴[04 Apr 25 14:15 UTC] No.43582749{3}[source]▶
As much as I'd like to pretend otherwise, I'm just a programmer. Say I build, I dunno, an Eventbrite clone. Okay, cool I've got some code running on Vercel. What do I do next? I'm not about to quit my day job to try and pay my mortgage on hopes and dreams, and while I'm working my day job and having a life outside of that. There's just not enough hours left in the day to also work on this hypothetical EventBrite clone. And there are already so many competitors of them out there, what's one more? What's my "in" to the events industry that would have me succeed over any of their numerous existing competitors? Sure, Thants to LLMs I can vibe code some CRUD app, but my point is there's so much I don't know that I don't even know what I don't know about business in order to be successful. So realistically it's just a fun hobby, like how some people sew sweaters.