I very actively work using LLMs (no “agentic” stuff) and agree with you - they are only really worth tasking out tedium to.
But a lot of - say a DM feature - is tedium. Something simple like adding reactions, adding read receipts. It’s not hard at all. The LLM easily excels at the task and yet I didn’t have to do it. There are 1000s of those tasks. Handling file uploads, filling out a W9 and emailing it to the user, cron jobs for digest emails. All very easy problems most LLMs can do. There are just countless tasks if you’re building a real SaaS and I don’t want to do them all.
The big problems LLMs can’t do are only as such because there’s no way to put it into a simple, linear instruction. Once you can though, it’s now an easy task (whether or not you use an LLM).
But yeah we’re saying the same thing - let the LLM do the 1000s of tedious tasks you normally wouldn’t be bothered to spend time on.
Build the entire SaaS (which is mostly that tedium) instead of just the MVP thing you need without any niceties. I find it opens up more opportunity, like for example, we are about to hire our first full-time employee because we’re taking on so much more business.
Yep.
Plenty of products attacked this tedium from different angles, from Ruby and Rails to Supabase. And half of NPM. Heck, more than half.
LLMs are doing it a bit better, IMO. I don't have to rewrite the app in <whatever> or install <horrible dependency> to take advantage of it.
The agents are building all these small features, up to a full SaaS; and all the code is excellent?
How much time do you spend in code review?
Ignore agentic stuff, that is marketing. Think about it anyway - why tf would it take all day, responses take seconds. There is no "leave it running" it's a fake concept
because to me this:
"Something simple like adding reactions, adding read receipts ... The LLM easily excels at the task and yet I didn’t have to do it."
Implies to me code gen.
That aside, are you a 'DidntUseIt' sockpuppet, given there are lots of green accounts responding on their behalf..
I still design the APIs, the system, the tests. But the specific implementation of functions, I am freed from. There is a large speed gain there.
I'm sure these will be much better as soon as enough data is in the training set, as always. GPT models used to be horrible at electrical stuff as well, today Astra seems pretty OK at it. It changes as they keep extending what use cases are covered by training data and what they test for and so on.
"Make me this thing there are a million examples of" vs. "make me this unique thing in this exact, particular way".
I don't think there's anything an LLM can't write given enough direction. (It's a one-sentence fuck-it one-off on one end of the spectrum, and it degenerately ends with you giving it exact code and prompting it to echo it back to you on the other.)
But the jobs of making basic apps and web pages are the new WordPress jobs in terms of pay, I'd agree.
HN should give you coldtea's rep. Just trade his and yours.
I think it's the opposite. When I'm on the edges of Real Difficult Stuff (TM), then LLMs are less of help compared to when I just need basic web applications or similar "beginner stuff". If what you're working on doesn't exists in the training data at all, the LLMs can sometimes be more in the way than helpful, as they don't seem to even "grasp" the problems correctly.
I still get tons of productivity boosts from LLMs, don't get me wrong, and I wouldn't stop working with them even though they aren't perfect for everything, they do with a lot of monotonous tasks, like all the stuff you outlined. But the moments I'm working without LLMs, that's the time I'm working very much on "not beginner stuff".