181–190 of 522 posts
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It wasn't the hard or valuable part of software engineering, but it was a very time-consuming part. That's what's interesting about this new era - the time-consuming-but-easy bit has suddenly stopped being time-consuming.
Agreed, often see cope from managers along the line of “writing the code was never the bottleneck”. Well, sure felt like it.
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Then why did most software fail to do that even before the advent of LLMs?
Because coding bootcamps and CS programs were churning out squillions of people who could type the code but had poor design and analytical skills, because there was a time where being able to implement Dijkstra on a whiteboard would get you 400k at a FAANG.
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Raising $100M doesn’t even mean you have a good idea or an idea people like or an idea you can even make money on.
It’s probably a better indicator of a good business idea than if you get slapped in the face…
1. The time spent to think and iteratively understand what you want to build 2. The time spent to spell out how you want to build it
The cost for #2 is nearly zero now. The cost for #1 too is slashed substantially because instead of thinking in abstract terms or writing tests you can build a version of the thing and then ground your reasoning in that implementation and iterate until you attain the right functionality.
However, once that thing is complex enough you still need to burn time on identifying the boundaries of the various components and their interplay. There is no gain from building "a browser" and then iterating on the whole thing until it becomes "the browser". You'll be up against combinatorial complexity. You can perhaps deal with that complexity if you have a way to validate every tiny detail, which some are doing very well in porting software for example.
Code is cheap is the same as saying "Buying on credit is easy". Code is a liability, not an asset.
I would normally agree, but I think the "code is a liability" quote assumes that humans are reading and modifying the code. If AI tools are also reading and modifying their own code, is that still true?
Also, I do want to note that these little "Here is how I see the world of SWE given current model capabilities and tooling" posts are MUCH appreciated, given how much you follow the landscape. When a major hype wave is happening and I feel like I am getting drowned on twitter, I tend to wonder "What would Simon say about this?"
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I find that implementing a sound solution from scratch is generally lower effort than taking something that already exists and making it sound. The former: 1) understand the problem, 2) solve the problem. The latter: 1) understand the problem, 2) solve the problem, 3) understand how somebody or something else understood & solved the problem, 4) diff those two, 5) plan a transition from that solution to this solution,…
> This is also why I’m not a fan of code reviews. That's specious reasoning. Code reviews are a safeguard against cowboy coding, and a tool to enforce shared code ownership. You might believe you know better than most of your team members, but odds are a fresh pair of eyes can easily catch issues you snuck in your code that you couldn't catch due to things like PR tunnel vision. And if your PR is sound, you certainly…
[0] Reviews are OK if I enjoy working with the person whose work I’m reviewing and I feel like I’m helping them grow.
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I used to think this was a sign that AI code isn't really useful, but I've changed my tune (also I believe these numbers have changed in the last few months). As an example: One of my most promising projects I was discussing with a friend and we realized together we could potentially use these tools to build a two person agency with no need to hire anyone ever. If this were to work, could theoretically make nice reve…
> If this were to work, could theoretically make nice revenue and it shouldn't show up in any metric anywhere. Except production GDP, the standard measure of economic activity.
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It's funny that so many people are using AI and still hasn't really shown up in productivity numbers or product quality yet. I'm going to be really confused if this is still the case at the end of the year. A whole year of access to these latest agentic models has to produce visible economic changes or something is wrong.
I wouldn't say it hasn't shown up. The number of ShowHN's per weekend has definitely gone up, and while that isn't rigorous scientific proof, I'd consider is a leading edge indicator of something . Unfortunately, we as an industry have yet to agree on anything approaching a scientific measure of productivity, other than to collectively agree that Lines of Code is universally agree that LoC is terrible. Thus even if s…