HumanLayer: Production Hardening for LLM-Generated Apps

> an entire app ready to be used today. That is exactly where the disagreement stems from. That app is a draft version that might work for a couple people. It won't scale. It won't be secure. It won't handle edge cases. It won't be flexible enough to iterate based on customer feedback. That doesn't mean LLM-assisted code has no value. It does mean the guidance needed to go from "v000.1" to something you could actually build a business upon is still significant. Will LLMs bridge that gap more in the future? Maybe. But honestly, hopefully not. Instead, I hope they stop just churning out the same CRUD apps and wrappers that we did a few years ago and do something new. Because if all they do is: What humans do, just faster... cool, useful, but not worth all the hype. LLMs are useful tools. I use them. But just like the hammer that sits on my shelf and also gets used, they are just a tool. They won't be truly interesting (to me, at least) unless they are doing things that humans cannot do.

Actually writing code was never the difficult part for the majority of software created. It required skill yes, but the really hard part was figuring out what to implement in the first place. Which features should the software have, how should they function and interact, which tradeoffs to make given the limitations. Stuff like that. People who were good at those things but lacked training or capabilities to actually write functioning code can now make viable software. People who were essentially code monkeys who wrote code based off detailed descriptions of what should be done, without much thought of or influence on the higher level issues have to step up or face tough times I think.

> software development becomes a commodity and the job becomes something like a fast food job where practically any adult who wants it can do it That will never happen. Sure, anyone can program something, but to make it professionally there is bar of quality and competition will push most people out. Similarly anyone can write, draw or sing but only a few do it well enough to be paid for it. And I am old enough to see many tools that allow "anyone to program". They pop up whenever certain standards (like web) become popular, then programming goes in different direction and they vanish in irrelevance. Soon there will be a large set of skill on top of "using AI" and "chat, make me an app" will go out of the window as viable way to make something others want to use and pay for.