zalzal

You probably know this, but just want to say, founder to founder: don't listen to this argument at all.

People are so fond of saying "just wait and the new model will do this." And very smart people I know say it (especially when they work for OpenAI or Anthropic!).

It might be partly true (of course it's situational). But it's a glib and irrelevant thing to say. Model capabilities do not advance like some continuous exponential across all domains and skills. Not even close.

Product design is exploring the solution to human problems in a way that you can bundle and sell. Novel solutions to human problems tend to come from humans, applying effort over time (with the help of models of course) to understand the problem and separate out what's essential and what's irrelevant to the solution.

(A related comment on the adjacent thread.)

100% agree. There is a bigger point too: People assume LLM capabilities are like FLOPs or something, as if they are a single number.

In reality, building products is an exploration of a complex state space of _human_ needs and possible solutions. This complexity doesn't go away. The hard part of being an engineer is not writing JavaScript. It is building a solution that addresses the essential complexity of a problem without adding accidental complexity.

The reason this is relevant is that it's just the same for LLMs! They are tripped up just like human engineers into adding accidental complexity when they don't understand the problem well enough and then they don't solve the real problem. So saying "just wait, LLMs will do that in the future" is not much different than saying "just wait, some smarter human engineer might come along and solve that problem better than you". It's possibly true, possibly false. And certainly not helpful.

If you work on a problem over time, sometimes you'll do much better than smarter person who has the wrong tools or doesn't understand the problem. And that's no different for LLMs.

I'm curious, if you have that philosophy (which makes a lot of sense), you must have considered building is a sort of more abstract (but extensible) UI toolkit language and library and you could code in that then compile it down to React? Or have you found the benefit of large LLMs already having detailed React training is just too high?