Development speed is not a bottleneck

I don't know about Aider, I am not using it because of lack of MCP and poor GitHub Copilot support (both are important to me). Maybe in the future that will get better if that will be relevant. I am using opencode.ai with Claude Sonnet 4 usually. Sometimes I try to switch to different models, e.g. Gemini 2.5 Pro, but Sonnet is more consistent for me.

It would be good to define what's "smaller code bases". Here is what I am working one: 10 years old project full of legacy consisting of about 10 services and 10 front-end projects. As well tried it on project similar to MUI or Mantine UI. Naturally on many smaller projects. As well tried it on TypeScript codebase where it has failed for me (but it is hard to judge from one attempt). Lastly I am using it on smaller projects. Overall question is more about task than about code base size. If the task does not involve loading too much context when code base size might be irrelevant.

> The way to find the right answer isn't to think very hard and miraculously come up with the perfect answer. It's to try every goddamn thing that shows promise.

I have found that spending more time thinking generally reduces the amount of failed attempts. It's amazing what "thinking hard" beforehand can do to eliminate reprioritization scrambling.

The argument that the article uses to critique AI coding is that coding is not the bottleneck, instead the testing and validation of ideas is.

This is a first-degree smart argument. It presents a seemingly non-obvious idea that makes sense in retrospect.

However I happen to work at the experimentation team of a hyperscaler so I have a different perspective.

First, we aren't always saturating all of the potential experiments we could be running. The reasons are different, but essentially it takes time and effort to build those experimental features. If that cost trended to 0, we could make sure to have a queue of experiments deep enough.

Also in our side we need to do development work to support new features and products. We have a backlog long enough to keep us perpetually busy. If dev cost trended to 0, we could always be ready to provide our customers what they need.

Speaking of new products, each one our company comes up with comes with extra effort to support in our side, and yet more effort to produce dozens of AB test to validate new functionality.

This is not talking about ongoing maintenance effort. Bugfixes, upgrades etc. take a non-trivial amount of effort to keep up.

And this is only inside our little experimentation team. What about security, reliability, scalability, efficiency... it makes me wonder if OP has experience running products at scale.

Instead I'd like to think that dropping the cost of development by orders of magnitude changes the equation of how we create products.

YC couldn't care less how well these companies fare post-IPO. Post-IPO, their job is essentially done, and they cash their investment.

They're probably busting champagne if the peak valuation is instantly after IPO. That means they maximized the potential payoff.

You're right that one perspective to consider how well these companies are doing is to look at their continuous growth, and that includes post-IPO valuation.

At the same time, YC backed a couple of dozen unicorns. Including those that, despite having a valuation lower than at the time of their IPO, are still in the 10-digit range. Well, I'd be the last one to complain if I got to seed fund a company that ended up at $50B+ valuation.

Having said that, it's just a financial aspect of the argument, and it's only focused on post-IPO, whereas most YC-backed unicorns have not yet done so.

If you look at product innovation, you'll see Dropbox, Airbnb, Gitlab (save for Airbnb, all failures by your standards), Stripe, Deel, Zapier, all household names in my world. Why weren't these products developed by big techs?

You could easily point to one that would be especially interested in taking over that part of the pie.

Dropbox as Steve Jobs says is a feature not a product. For the price of 2TB of storage from Dropbox, you can get the entire GSuite or Office 365 or a slew of services from Apple including 2TBs of storage. In the case of O365, you get 1TB of storage for each of 6 (5?) users and Office on an unlimited number of devices for multiple users.

What BigTech company would it have made sense to get into the AirBnb market?

Gitlab has never been the industry standard for hosted Git. It was always GitHub. Even then, I guess it would have made sense for Microsoft to compete better. They did have Team Foundation Services and after many name changes Azure DevOps (unrelated to Azure. It was more of a git compatible hosted version of TFS).

Also none of the BigTech companies are in payments aside from Apple Pay/Google Pay and Amazon mostly cares about internal payments.

Deel is also a company that wouldn’t have made sense for any of the large tech companies.

I know AWS has its own orchestration service and I’m assuming GCP and Azure have it also. What motivation would they have to offer a product that works outside of their cloud platform?

I wouldn’t be surprised if AWS Step Functions get more usage than Zapier (which I had never heard of before today).