Although I agree they're better developers than they are engineers for similar reasons to you, and would also make a distinction on the headline* between "do you mean 'smart' as in 'learned a lot' or as in 'learns from few examples'?" (because the answer is different):
Once you can fire off "Build a hacker news clone" and you actually end up with a maintainable and properly built thing, then I'd agree they're suitable for software engineering.
I've not seen the HN source code, but superficially it seems quite bare-bones (which I appreciate!). Are you sure you wouldn't prefer a harder target?
* The body shows that Noah Smith himself is well aware of, if not this specific argument, then at least the general point
I've not seen the HN source code, but superficially it seems quite bare-bones (which I appreciate!). Are you sure you wouldn't prefer a harder target?
Yeah, I think it'd suffice. It's less about if it's possible or not (as apparently building something resembling of a browser "from scratch" isn't that hard), and more about exactly how it ends up being built, as that's the "software engineering" part that I'm arguing is still the hard part, and LLMs aren't that great at it (yet?).
A smaller test case would also be faster to execute, rather than spending 3 days of an engineers time, but I guess ultimately that's less important, just a happy side effect.
Comments
Although I agree they're better developers than they are engineers for similar reasons to you, and would also make a distinction on the headline* between "do you mean 'smart' as in 'learned a lot' or as in 'learns from few examples'?" (because the answer is different):
I've not seen the HN source code, but superficially it seems quite bare-bones (which I appreciate!). Are you sure you wouldn't prefer a harder target?
* The body shows that Noah Smith himself is well aware of, if not this specific argument, then at least the general point
Yeah, I think it'd suffice. It's less about if it's possible or not (as apparently building something resembling of a browser "from scratch" isn't that hard), and more about exactly how it ends up being built, as that's the "software engineering" part that I'm arguing is still the hard part, and LLMs aren't that great at it (yet?).
A smaller test case would also be faster to execute, rather than spending 3 days of an engineers time, but I guess ultimately that's less important, just a happy side effect.