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The bottleneck was never the code

thetypicalset.com

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Re: The bottleneck was never the code

#411

Post by bombcar »

corysama wrote: post #221
TheLudd wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Should the paradox not be that we PAY more for it? Or, if some process is made more effective, i.e. takes shorter time, we spend more time in that process.

The paradox is usually presented as: The People: Hey local government! The roads are so packed with cars they are useless. Fix it! The Government: We hear you and just finished a huge road expansion project. The roads now have 2x the capacity! Enjoy the new fast roads! The People: The roads are just as slow as before because they are packed with 2X as many cars now! So, the paradox is that greatly increasing the capa…

The road thing is usually tied to “induced demand” (which is a bad way of looking at it imo). Jevrons is more directly related to the cost of something dropping increasing the usage because new things that weren’t worthwhile are now doable - related, but more directly tied to things like “smartphones are cheaper now so more people have them”.

You do hit limits eventually (most people get to one smartphone and stop except for replacements) but the surprising paradox is when you don’t even see the possible demand (think: worldwide market for maybe six computers type things) - you have to think of something and then think of what would happen if it was (effectively) cheap as free.

Water in the USA might be an example, it went from something difficult and valuable and precious to we flush our toilets with drinking water - unthinkable wealth to parts of the world even today.

If a smartphone was fifty cents what new uses could be found? If the small shell script that replaces you is now $19 for anyone to develop, what happens?

Re: The bottleneck was never the code

#412

Post by bombcar »

marcosdumay wrote: post #238
TheLudd wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Should the paradox not be that we PAY more for it? Or, if some process is made more effective, i.e. takes shorter time, we spend more time in that process.

Yes. Jevon's paradox is that if we need less X to do a single Y, we end up using more X doing Y. Anyway, it's an specific observation about a single X, Y pair. It some times happens with other things, but anybody claiming it's a universal rule don't know what they are talking about.

It’s cheaper to get married now, so I’ve gotten married fifty times!

Re: The bottleneck was never the code

#413

Post by bombcar »

neogodless wrote: post #130
nilirl wrote: post #11

Bottleneck for what? More features? I don't think amount of software is what determines whether a company does well. I don't think capturing quantity of context is that important either. Now, quality of context. How well do the humans reason? Then, attitude. How well do the humans respond to bad situations? Then, resource management. How well does the company treat people and money? Finally, luck. How much of the unc…

For business, software applications are tools that facilitate "the thing" that generates money. (We in the software world think that _thing_ is software and software _features_, but outside that world, there's usually a different _thing_.) The bottleneck for making software applications better at being used by (non-software) businesses is making sure the software does all the software things that actually benefit the…

Software solves problems, not problems like "What is beauty?" Because that would fall within the purview of your conundrums of philosophy. Software solves practical problems, for instance: how am I going to stop some mean mother Hubbard from coding me a structurally superfluous backend? The answer, use an LLM, and if that don't work... Use more LLM.

Re: The bottleneck was never the code

#414

Post by bombcar »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #152

> Software is what’s left over after a group of humans finishes negotiating with each other about what the system should do. Love that. I agree, in particular, about the context. That’s where long-retention, experienced, teams pay off. I managed one of those for decades. When they finally rolled up our department, the engineer with the least seniority, had ten years. When a team is together for that long, the communi…

That’s the secret behind the “mystery” of startups - once you stop looking at what they’re doing you realize it’s all about the team - a good team will become a serial startup group doing all sorts of different things - but since they’re a well-oiled team they execute at an impossibly high level.

Re: The bottleneck was never the code

#415

Post by virgilp »

One thing that is worth pondering is what parts of the "old wisdom" (if any) are no longer true. Because the set of "common sense knowledge" has a tendency to mutate in time. Take the first statement:

> Impactful software tends to be written by many humans that need to collaborate.

This was definitely true. Is it still true to the same extent/ in the same way? Not obvious...

Re: The bottleneck was never the code

#416

Post by moralestapia »

martin- wrote: post #389
moralestapia wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. Does it matter if one member of that class does not follow the trend?

No, but no-one said that. It's far more likely that this "group" of people doesn't even exist, and it's yet another case of treating "strangers on the internet" or "other people" as one person and being upset when that "person" is being inconsistent.

robertlagrant 2026-05-06T13:44:40 1778075080

"I doubt the GP has gone back through their career and checked on each person who thought there were too many meetings have now all made the switched they're being accused of, though."

Anyway, I'm stopping this now as it's not a constructive conversation anymore. Let's agree to disagree.

Re: The bottleneck was never the code

#418

Post by theptip »

apsurd wrote: post #187
theptip wrote: post #176

> They are waiting on the next well-formed spec Is this actually true? Maybe in a widget factory. I think it’s an anti-pattern for the new world. When you look at places that are shipping at insane pace (like Anthropic) the secret is not accelerating the writing down of a roadmap and we’ll groomed backlog, it’s empowering smart individuals to run their own end-to-end product improvement loops. You can slightly refram…

The problem with this is that everybody thinks they have better ideas than they do. And engineers are probably the worst offenders in that they're smart enough to make a case that deludes themselves. The insane billion dollar companies ship straight to production because they have PMF so anything and everything gets signal. The same happened with Facebook and Google. And it was always cautionary advice to mimic these…

Well, if you actually build the feedback loop then you solve this by weeding out the bad ideas.

This is like going to a startup as a senior bigtech engineer - if you can’t ship it becomes clear quite quickly.

Regarding the talent dysmorphia issue - the best way I know of getting people to step up is to give them more agency and more accountability. The new world will require that IMO.

I think Google etc are more a story of how much you can get away with when you have a strong monopoly. Their orgs are not shipping fast, nor good at shipping products. (Google in particular is incredible at infra but laughably bad at consumer products.)

Re: The bottleneck was never the code

#419

Post by fmbb »

janalsncm wrote: post #291
fmbb wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Obviously usage of something goes up when it gets cheaper. Sure. But is it not also obvious that when usage of a resource becomes more efficient, the price of that ”usage” becomes cheaper? So usage goes up obviously because efficiency increases. It is called a paradox because some people naively think that increasing efficiency is a good way to decrease consumption. Almost everything that is called a ”paradox” is t…

It’s surprising (not using the term paradox) in situations where demand was seen as inelastic. An example of probably inelastic demand is the cost of diamonds which has fallen as synthetic diamonds enter the market. But people typically don’t buy more engagement rings than before. With code it could be different. People might think that the amount of code that needs to be written is fixed, so the ability for a person…

Synthetic diamonds and natural diamonds are not the same product for jewelery. The price of natural diamonds has not decreased much as a function of synthetic diamonds being cheaper to make.

> People might think that the amount of code that needs to be written is fixed

Only people who never worked in a software company could believe that.

You don’t even have to unlock new use cases. Our backlogs are all full of old ideas.

Re: The bottleneck was never the code

#420

Post by loeg »

avereveard wrote: post #338
loeg wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can it? You prompt it, then wait minutes+ for it to come back. It's the opposite of flow state.

You don't wait. You run multiple independent incremental feature in parallel, while also running a code review, which will create the next set of tasks while you or the llm think up the feature to add after.

Context switching back and forth between a dozen different things is sort of the opposite of flow state, IMO.
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