Does writing table schemas count as writing code? Is that architecting? Both?
I personally don’t trust coding agents to have enough context to write domain-specific table schemas, and I don’t have the patience to transcribe all of the context into a natural language prompt. If I ask it to, it’ll write something for sure, and maybe that can be a jumping point for me, but at some point I have to physically write what the columns will be.
You should definitely try it if you haven't already. Most of the models are deeply familiar with domain specific areas in ways that most of us aren't. In fact, I would say the problem is generally the opposite. If model size and effort is is high, it will over architect what an app needs. I find myself reigning in a giant email notification system with subscriptions and "channels" and other such nonsense when sometimes you just want a simple one off.
Yes, the LLM knows the definitions of the words in my domain, that’s clear and obvious.
No, the LLM doesn’t know our product strategy and why certain things matter and certain things don’t. That’s very much what I get paid to do. There’s not even agreement within our team about what path we should take through the domain-product space, there’s no chance in hell that the LLM will choose a profitable random walk through that domain-product space.
If it were able to do that, then AGI would have already been achieved and we’re only compute power away from OpenAI or Anthropic making the marginal utility of any piece of code $0.
Yeah, it's not just over-engineering, it is just that generic systems that look like everything else usually don't solve a business problem, but I think I would be less dismissive of its world model in general.
LLMs are not a "random walk", they take in information and they explore the space according to the way they've been instructed.
I personally don’t trust coding agents to have enough context to write domain-specific table schemas, and I don’t have the patience to transcribe all of the context into a natural language prompt. If I ask it to, it’ll write something for sure, and maybe that can be a jumping point for me, but at some point I have to physically write what the columns will be.