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The bottleneck was never the code

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Re: The bottleneck was never the code

#351

Post by readgrounded »

Oh my god, I literally say this every day now. People think that just because its fast to generate a demo app using claude code that every production system can be built in a week. Generating code was never the bottleneck. It was deciding what to build. When you build an app using claude code, you are equal parts coder, designer, product owner, client, CEO of the universe. You make decisions lighting speed, iterate, and destroy anything you don't like at will. You can make strategic and tactical decisions at any frequency and point that you want to, without needing a bi-weekly board meeting to do it.

The bottleneck is always decision making and human review when multiple humans are involved. This is especially true when we are all trying to build agentic / llm based systems where the outcomes are highly varied and its impossible to write easy tests to automatically check quality or benchmark progress.

Re: The bottleneck was never the code

#353

Post by ytoawwhra92 »

solatic wrote: post #258
jmilloy wrote: post #188

Code is a liability. I think it can be easy to look at code as an asset, but fundamentally it is a liability. Some of the "bottlenecks" to new code are in place to make sure that the yield outweighs the increased liability. Agents that produce more code faster are producing more liability faster. Much of the excitement and much of the skepticism about coding agents is about whether the immediate increased productivit…

> Code is a liability You're over-simplifying. Code in and of itself is neither an asset nor a liability. The minimal amount of code needed to solve business needs with no additional complexity is an asset with some maintenance liabilities attached (same as how a farmer's tractor is an asset that needs to be maintained), with depreciation if unmaintained (bitrot). Any code used to build unnecessary complexity is pure…

A liability isn't an inherently bad thing.

A loan is a liability, but you might take one out regardless because you know you can use it to make more money than you'll have to pay back in interest.

That said, I think it's more correct to characterise code as a depreciating asset, as another commenter did.

Re: The bottleneck was never the code

#354

Post by advael »

serf wrote: post #345
advael wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't know if I'm a smart writer, but I see little value in writing with a model if that's what you're asking. Language models are good for searching, getting alright at structured outputs like code, and trash at meaningfully expressing my thoughts in prose. Frankly, it concerns me that people think vomiting their thoughts onto the internet could possibly benefit from computational assistance

>Frankly, it concerns me that people think vomiting their thoughts onto the internet could possibly benefit from computational assistance it concerns you because you have a good authority over your spoken language, and like most people with those skills I presume the language flows easily from you. that ability isn't guaranteed, for a lot of people expression is tough , and those people felt equally alienated when co…

Sure, it's a tool that I think that's not a particularly compelling use of. Like I can at least see an endpoint of slop code where the right guardrails and model improvements create a means by which people can ask their computers to do things in natural language, and semantic search is genuinely a novel and powerful capability. Maybe we even get other nice translation protocols to structured forms of language. But in a context where the premise is that we're trying to communicate with other humans, using a model that generates plausible prose is a mechanism that obfuscates rather than clarifies. I don't think it's fit to purpose for that thing any more than a hammer makes a good screwdriver. If it helps you to bounce your ideas off an LLM, by all means do so, but this will mostly just serve to homogenize the writing of everyone doing that. Possibly of value to some people, but not to me

Re: The bottleneck was never the code

#355

Post by anamexis »

datsci_est_2015 wrote: post #281
quikoa wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, if code is only a liability then just delete the code and poof liability is gone.

Would it be fair to say that complexity is a liability, and LOC is an (approximate) measure of complexity?

That’s just the same statement with an extra step.

Re: The bottleneck was never the code

#356

Post by fao_ »

Aurornis wrote: post #335
dmm wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you referring to the author specifically? Or a specific hypocritical person you know? If you're making a general statement about groups of online people you might be falling for the group attribution error[1], where the characteristics of an individual are assumed to be reflective of the whole group. In any case, two things can be simultaneously true: 1. Writing code is not the bottleneck, as in we can develop fe…

I think it's obvious that they're not referring to the author or a specific person at all. They're talking about how the zeitgeist has changed. Look at Hacker News archives 3 or more years ago and it would be really hard to find anyone arguing that coding speed is not a bottleneck or that engineers need to spend more time in collaboration. You would find a lot of arguments that leaving engineers alone to code is the…

I don't think that this is very hypocritical on the part of the developer holding such views. Typing code has never been the bottleneck, building the mental model has. You need the mental model so you know how the domain and the actual model will interact, which is needed for pre-empting what tests you need, what QA you need to do, etc etc. and the limitations of the system. You can demo this out with a specification but all specifications eventually meet the domain head on, and often with catastrophic consequences, and you still need to do this sort of work anyway when writing the specification.

Fundamentally, LLM do not construct a consistent mental model of the codebase (this can be seen if you, uh, read LLM code,), and this is Bad for a lot of reasons. It's bad for long-term maintainability, it's bad for modelling this code accurately and it's behaviour as a system, it's bad for testing and verifying it, etc. Pretty much all of the tasks around program design require you to have that mental model.

You can absolutely get an LLM to show you a mental model of the code, but there is absolutely nothing that can 100% guarantee you that that's the thing it's using. Proof of this is to look at how they summarise documents, to look at how inaccurate a lot of documentation they generate is, and to look at how inaccurate a lot of their code summaries are. Those would be accurate if the LLM was forming a mental model while it worked. It's a program to statistically generate plausible text, the fact that we got the program to do more than that in the first place is very interesting and can imply a lot of things, but at the end of the day, whatever you ask for it, it will generate text. There is absolutely no guarantee around accuracy of that text and there effectively can never be.

Re: The bottleneck was never the code

#357

Post by jimbokun »

Aurornis wrote: post #335
dmm wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you referring to the author specifically? Or a specific hypocritical person you know? If you're making a general statement about groups of online people you might be falling for the group attribution error[1], where the characteristics of an individual are assumed to be reflective of the whole group. In any case, two things can be simultaneously true: 1. Writing code is not the bottleneck, as in we can develop fe…

I think it's obvious that they're not referring to the author or a specific person at all. They're talking about how the zeitgeist has changed. Look at Hacker News archives 3 or more years ago and it would be really hard to find anyone arguing that coding speed is not a bottleneck or that engineers need to spend more time in collaboration. You would find a lot of arguments that leaving engineers alone to code is the…

Maybe some have changed their views because circumstances radically changed?

Re: The bottleneck was never the code

#358

Post by physPop »

coldtea wrote: post #320
dmm wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you referring to the author specifically? Or a specific hypocritical person you know? If you're making a general statement about groups of online people you might be falling for the group attribution error[1], where the characteristics of an individual are assumed to be reflective of the whole group. In any case, two things can be simultaneously true: 1. Writing code is not the bottleneck, as in we can develop fe…

> Writing code is not the bottleneck, as in we can develop features faster than they can be deployed. That's an organizational issue due to over-regulation, bureucracy, too many stakeholders each with their own irrelevant opinion, etc. Startups or FOSS projects without the above absolutely can't "develop features faster than they can be deployed", and usually have a huge backlog of bugs and features they'd like to ha…

If you don't have stakeholders I contend you probably don't have a product, or you're building the bare minimum MVP which upon becoming a product will be woefully inadequate, generating the aforementioned bottleneck.

Re: The bottleneck was never the code

#359

Post by jimbokun »

ryandrake wrote: post #160
xquce wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not a false dichotomy. I agree with OP and I can say for certain that if you are one of the few developers that is "fond of meetings with customers" you are not the the type of person OP is talking about, and you are more rare than you think. I am a former Dev turned PO/PM and now CEO, I can tell you many a developers are not fond of those meetings you are fond of and people like myself don't insert our selves where…

> I simply have never seen a Dev Team work as the way HN tries to make the role sound "Dev/Eng and the customer is the only thing needed". Would love for this to be the case! I think a lot of HN truly believes that Software Developer is the only important role at their company. Software goes straight from the developer's brain, through his fingertips into the computer, and then on to the online store (run by nobody)…

Very small startups with only people selling the product or building the product can often deliver functionality much faster than corporations with all those other roles.

Re: The bottleneck was never the code

#360

Post by jimbokun »

tikhonj wrote: post #114
nayroclade wrote: post #15

It's hilarious to me to see the same kind of engineer, who throughout my career have constantly bitched and moaned about team meetings, agile ceremonies, issue trackers, backlogs, slack, emails, design reviews, and anything else that disrupted the hours of coding "flow state" they claimed as their most essential and sacred activity to be protected at all costs, suddenly, and with no hint of shame, start preaching abo…

Ceremonies and tickets aren't especially effective for actual collaboration. They're primarily tools for making work legible and controllable to management. There is a reason (well, many reasons) that, if I'm working on a creative project with somebody outside a company, we would never think of reaching for Scrum ceremonies or Jira. It is more than perfectly consistent to complain about that while valuing collaborati…

Tickets become the correct tool once the organization exceeds a certain size.

It might be easier to collaborate with one other person through email or text message history. Or even two or three people. But beyond a certain point having tickets to track all the conversations about a task becomes invaluable.

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