logoalt Hacker News

fslothyesterday at 11:55 AM1 replyview on HN

I am sorry you feel that way but I feel professionally strongly insulted by your statement.

Specifically the implication high LLM affinity implies low professional competence.

"My experience is that people who weren't very good at writing software are the ones now "most excited" to "create" with a LLM."

Strong disagree.

I've earned my wings. 5 years realtime rendering in world class teams. 13 years in AEC CAD developing software to build the world around us. In the past two years I designed and architected a complex modeling component, plus led the initial productization and rendering efforts, to my employers map offering.

Now I've managed to build in my freetime the easy-to-use consumer/hobbyist CAD application I always wanted - in two years[0].

The hard parts, that are novel and value adding are specific, complex and hand written. But the amount on ungodly boilerplate needed to implement the vision would have taken either a) team and funding or b) 10 years.

It's still raw and alpha and it's coming together. Would have been totally impossible without Claude, Codex and Cursor.

I do agree I'm not an expert in several of the non-core technologies used - webview2 for .net for example, or xaml. But I don't have to be. They are commodity components, architected to their specific slot, replaceable and rewritable as needed.

As an example of component I _had_ professional competence 15 years ago - OpenGL - I don't need to re-learn. I can just spec quickly the renderpasses, stencil states, shader techniques etc etc and have the LLM generate most of that code in place. If you select old, decades old technlogies and techniques and know what you want the output is very usable most of the time (20 year old realtime rendering is practically already timeless and good enough for many, many things).

[0] https://www.adashape.com/


Replies

dccoolgaiyesterday at 12:29 PM

Why would I need this tool if I can just say "Claude, make me a CAD drawing of XYZ"?

Not trying to be rude, just generating some empathy for the OP's situation, which I think was missed: Like them, there is something you are passionate about that there is no longer really a point to. You could argue "but people will need to use my tool to generate really _good_ CAD drawings" but how much marginal value does that create over getting a "good enough" one in 2 minutes from Claude?

I feel sorry for bringing this up, but I think you might have missed how the thing that makes this possible makes it unnecessary.

show 1 reply