Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

>For the past 31+ years I have been making applications in generally the same way. Hand-crafted some code for the UI, API and Data store, refine and repeat. I think this age is finally coming to an end.

I find the perception about development history interesting. I don't think most people have been making applications the same way for 30+ years. GUI tooling has become increasingly better and more declarative for a long time. Just to pick one example, when I used Qt for the first time, that was a pretty big step up for me from writing UIs solely by hand. A good graphical UI building toolkit generates code just the same way a text based interface does. And I'm too young to have experienced the whole Visual Basic history and shifts in how UIs are made. Web development also has steadily seen higher levels of abstraction and tooling. I don't think many people build web-apps the same way they built websites in the early 2000s. Or just compare something like Unity to how people built games 30 years ago.

LLMs are fine but generating code and moving away from handcrafting everything isn't as novel as the post makes it out to be. Development environments have driven productivity up continuously for a long time.




Hi OP here, yes you are right, we have definately evolved the way we make apps over the years but fundamentally its just been a process of editing text, make sure its syntax is correct, make sure it compiles, run it, iterate.

I probably should have elaborated more on this in the post but I didnt want to make it drag on too much ;)




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: