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413 points martinald | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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simonw ◴[] No.46198601[source]
The cost of writing simple code has dropped 90%.

If you can reduce a problem to a point where it can be solved by simple code you can get the rest of the solution very quickly.

Reducing a problem to a point where it can be solved with simple code takes a lot of skill and experience and is generally still quite a time-consuming process.

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trollbridge ◴[] No.46201013[source]
Well said. The cost of building a CRUD has dropped 90%.

The open question is why people needed fancy AI tools like Claude to write CRUDs in the first place. These kind of tasks ought to be have been automated a long time ago.

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1. rsynnott ◴[] No.46203621[source]
> These kind of tasks ought to be have been automated a long time ago

They have been, repeatedly, since the 70s. See dBase, Clipper, Microsoft Access, Hypercard, Ruby on Rails, stretching Wordpress to within an inch of its life, all manner of "no-code" things...

And, honestly, Excel. People do all manner of terrifying things with Excel, and it is unquestionably the most successful, and arguably the _only_ successful, "we can do this thing instead of employing a programmer" tool.

Generally, one of two things has happened. Either (a) the products of such automation become unmaintainable nightmares (common for the more automated approaches like MS Access) or (b) they become complex enough that they tend towards 'normal' programming (common with, say, Rails, where you could get a simple CRUD with basically just DSL, but realistically eventually you're gonna be writing lots of Ruby).

I feel like LLM-produced stuff is probably going to fall into column A.

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2. trollbridge ◴[] No.46207269[source]
Excel and Google Sheets are indeed where most non-programmers frequently come the closest to programming and actually create useful apps for themselves.

So what’s interesting is that Copilot is basically useless for this task, as is Gemini. How is Microsoft messing up this badly?