alt Hacker NewsInteresting, but... wrong tool, wrong job. And by tool, I mean web based chat interface, not LLMs in general. (Maybe wrong delivery mechanism, if you like.)
Your friend needed an agent, not a chatbot. I use Claude within VS Code (as per many others) but I certainly wouldn't recommend that for a beginner. They needed a tool that's specifically aimed at people who want to build software but don't know the first thing about how to do it. I think there are a bunch of these now but the one I'm most aware of is Lovable, and I'm pretty surprised you didn't recommend one of these.
An HR person I know was searching for a way get something build, found Lovable, and managed to build a somewhat functional application with it on their first attempt within an hour or two. It was full of holes and far from perfect but they got something working - at least the outline of a potential solution.
As I say, you should have recommended your friend to try building with a tool like that: a tool that they're a member of the target market for. They would have got a lot further. I'm not vouching for the quality of the result, but they would have got something.
Even for experiened engineers, chatbots have always been a pretty grim experience for software development: from the mind-numbing drudgery of endlessly copying and pasting code, commands, and prompts around, to the fact that they just can't see enough of what you're doing to generate the best quality output or advice. You can do software development with a ChatBot but it seriously sucks, and better tools are (a) probably being shoved at you day in, day out via ads, and (b) only a Google search or a ChatGPT recommendation away.
(Obviously, nobody's going to search for "Lovable" without knowing about Lovable, but they might search, or ask ChatGPT or whatever, something like, "How would I build a website without knowing anything about building websites?", which might get them an advert or recommendation.)
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What makes this anecdote hard to believe is that seemingly two things happened simultaneously:
1. The layperson was able to to steer the session(-s) into full PM/PO mode ideating, refining and explaining features and ideas.
2. The user was the sycophant in this relationship, never steering the session(-s) into producing something tangible.
The premise supposes that somehow the session(-s) never even tangentially touched implementation/deployment ideas and the user has never typed something like "that's enough, how to make this appear in my browser?". While not impossible, the user must have been proactively co-operating (say sidetracked) on not achieving the stated goal.
Circular dependency detected. You must first know the thing to be able to know the thing.
Isn’t that kinda the point, though? If you already lack the required knowledge to ask a web-based chat UI (which, as an aside, is almost exclusively referring to ChatGPT Free for the average user) to build a HTML page, how could you possibly know to go search for Lovable, let alone figure out agents?
I feel as though the gap between the theoretical power of LLMs and what the average user knows of them and their capability have already widened so far that it’s irreconcilable.
You are very much mistaken.
Chatgpt can absolutely do the things here: it can give you files, it can integrate and show web pages that you develop, etc.
There is no need for an "agent", the chat version works just fine and is actually easier for novices.
The whole point is that the friend wouldn’t know what an agent is. The friend would have heard that AI is changing the world and she would have went into ChatGPT or maybe Claude or Gemini. Presuming that the ideal is that anyone should be able to use these tools for anything (which I do not agree with) the chatbot needs to say “you need to use my agent mode.”
This is not a wrong tool, wrong job issue. The issue is that people think any moron can use an LLM and get professional results.