Thread · HN Continuity

Programming has five phases effectively:

1) You figure out what problem to solve.

2) You figure out HOW to solve the problem.

3) You actually implement the solution.

4) You see the solution work, for yourself.

5) You ship/deploy/publish the program. This means you see people be happy users and/or you get paid for it and so on.

If you're an entrepreneur type, you probably enjoy the first and last steps most, and you see steps 2-4 as mostly a chore. If you're a tinkerer, you don't care much for 1 and 5, and you see 2-4 as the whole point of programming. I'm a tinkerer. I'd be happy to just write code and throw it away. Coding is like solving sudokus. I could skip steps 1 and 5 forever. I don't ever need to show any code to anyone. In fact, most of the time when programming I do steps 2 and 3 and even skip 4. I don't even finish! I work weeks on something until I lose interest, and I know that in order to even run it, it would be several more weeks. A PoC is enough. Or just a half one. It's just code-to-structure-thoughts, not to create anything finished.

The 5 phases look kind of symmetric. The outermost layer (1 and 5) are the entrepreneurial steps. If you're a product owner or CEO, you might work strictly at steps 1,5. Then steps 2-4 are the managerial/architectural steps. If you're a very senior IC at a large company, you might work at this level, without actually doing much coding. Only the inner most step (3) is the manual creation of source code. Even though it's 5 different phases, it's just "3 layers" of programming.

The problem as I see it is that I enjoy step 3. And LLMs are good at step 3 almost exclusively. So they just pick the best bit of this dish, and leave me with the rest.

If you're an entrepreneurial type, the LLM appears to take the _worst_ bit of the work from you. Great.