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Ideas are cheap, execution is cheaper

davekiss.com

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Re: Ideas are cheap, execution is cheaper

#41

Post by baq »

mikert89 wrote: post #21

When software becomes cheap to build, a lot of strange second-order effects kick in. It’s not just that products are easier to create; sales, marketing, and every other business function can iterate faster alongside them. That speed erodes moats. As this reality sinks in, I think we’re headed for a brutal shakeout in SaaS. People still argue that distribution is the real bottleneck now. But when the product itself is…

Only a third of the most is gone - development. Validation and infrastructure/operations are still alive and well, though LLMs make for decent system investigators.

Re: Ideas are cheap, execution is cheaper

#42

Post by rocqua »

I find that the LLMs are good at the 'glue code'. The "here's a rather simple CRUD like program, please tie all of the important things together in the right way". That was always a rather important and challenging bit of work, so having LLMs take it of our hands is valuable.

But for the code where the hard part isn't making things designed separately work together, but getting the actual algorithm right. That's where I find LLMs still really fail. Finding that trick to take your approach from quadratic to N log N, or even just understanding what you mean after you found the trick yourself. I've had little luck there with LLMs.

I think this is mostly great, because its the hard stuff that I have always found fun. Properly architecting these CRUD apps, and learning which out of the infinite set of ways to do this are better, was fun as a matter of craftsmanship. But that hits at a different level from implementing a cool new algorithm.

Re: Ideas are cheap, execution is cheaper

#43

Post by miroljub »

grayhatter wrote: post #27

> I’m not exaggerating. And neither is anyone else. > Stack Overflow, the site that defined a generation of software development, received 3,710 questions last month. That’s barely above the 3,749 it got in its first month of existence. The entire knowledge-sharing infrastructure we built our careers on is collapsing because people don’t need to ask anymore. "Because people don't need to ask anymore."?! Yeah, I would…

People still need to ask, and they still keep asking.

It's just they are asking there where they expect they'll reach a better answer faster than on SO.

Re: Ideas are cheap, execution is cheaper

#45

Post by anonu »

mikert89 wrote: post #21

When software becomes cheap to build, a lot of strange second-order effects kick in. It’s not just that products are easier to create; sales, marketing, and every other business function can iterate faster alongside them. That speed erodes moats. As this reality sinks in, I think we’re headed for a brutal shakeout in SaaS. People still argue that distribution is the real bottleneck now. But when the product itself is…

> Historically, sales was hard because you had to design and refine a sales motion around a product

while your statement is true - this is actually a very minor reason why sales is hard.

Re: Ideas are cheap, execution is cheaper

#46

Post by reb »

mikert89 wrote: post #34
corimaith wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The moat for artists hasn't actually gone down though. Even for those in Patreon with their styles directly trained are raking the same subscribers they have.

Really? Because UX Design, Graphic Design, and other "corporate creative" roles are essentially obsolete and these people cannot get hired.

Canva destroyed graphic design well before LLMs caught up, but UX is still (somewhat surprisingly) on the ropes.

My bet: front end devs who need mocks to build something that looks nice get crowded out by UX designers with taste as code generation moves further into "good enough" territory.

Then those designers get crowded out as taste generation moves into "good enough" territory.

Re: Ideas are cheap, execution is cheaper

#47

Post by renegade-otter »

sgt wrote: post #11

> I'm not joking and this isn't funny. We have been trying to build distributed agent orchestrators at Google since last year. There are various options, not everyone is aligned... I gave Claude Code a description of the problem, it generated what we built last year in an hour. I am sure that whatever work was put into actually trying to implement that, was crucial in order to instruct Claude what to do. System desig…

We later found out they fed it the actual work done. Multiple versions of it. This is why this "we built X in an hour" BS needs to stop.

Re: Ideas are cheap, execution is cheaper

#49

Post by raincole »

corimaith wrote: post #32
mikert89 wrote: post #21

When software becomes cheap to build, a lot of strange second-order effects kick in. It’s not just that products are easier to create; sales, marketing, and every other business function can iterate faster alongside them. That speed erodes moats. As this reality sinks in, I think we’re headed for a brutal shakeout in SaaS. People still argue that distribution is the real bottleneck now. But when the product itself is…

The moat for artists hasn't actually gone down though. Even for those in Patreon with their styles directly trained are raking the same subscribers they have.

What does 'even' here mean? Patreon artists are doing fine because they're more like influencers. Artists looking for jobs in the industry (especially graphic design, but also film and game) are the ones who are in trouble.

Re: Ideas are cheap, execution is cheaper

#50

Post by puzzlingcaptcha »

mikert89 wrote: post #34
corimaith wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The moat for artists hasn't actually gone down though. Even for those in Patreon with their styles directly trained are raking the same subscribers they have.

Really? Because UX Design, Graphic Design, and other "corporate creative" roles are essentially obsolete and these people cannot get hired.

You can easily tell UX design roles are obsolete by the recent threads about Tahoe and W11. There is going to be whiplash.
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