Ask HN: How can AI replace coders if specifying behavior can be difficult?
Sometimes, it is easier to just code something yourself than to try to specify its behavior precisely for an AI.
Given a specification, an AI may write a program that resolves ambiguities in ways you may not like.
It would probably also be difficult to identify these undesirable behaviors by reviewing the generated code or testing it.
Therefore, it’s not clear to me that using an AI to generate code for novel apps or games would save time.
Where is the solo founder startup thats up and running today where the non-technical founder used AI to generate all code and infrastructure?
You are precisely correct. However I use AI regularly to write what Ive come to call Nuisance Code, which is for example: I need a function to find the highest peak and lowest valley in this example stream of data points.
Can I do that? Sure I can do that. Will I have to think about it for a minute and fire up the debugger here and there, drop a few log print statements to get it running? You bet I will. Will I have to dig around in my memory for the last time I did a thing like this, oh yeah.
Can I tell AI what my stream of data looks like, tell it I want a list of peaks and valleys in the data, get some code and run it the first time, today? Yes I can.
Someone is always going to have to break the ask down into discrete logical units for implementation then precisely describe that work. This person is always going to be a developer.
but there are people who can only give specifications. some of them are PMs, managers and bosses who currently hire programmers.
It can do the 80% of common stuff. You need to do the 20% novel stuff. And if you don't have that, you probably don't have a decent idea anyway.