461–470 of 661 posts
Zuckerberg is proof you only need to get really lucky once. He's basically flailed at leading facebook ever since, going all in on monumentally dumb bets and erratically making headcount and project decisions, and still he somehow keeps getting richer.
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These two not mutually exclusive? “Wild success” and “going slower than expected”? Wake me up when words have a meaning again.
> These two not mutually exclusive? Correct, they are not. Consider: Someone who "expects" their bank account to have $100M in it before they turn 30 and "only" gets it to $10M. From the point of view of a normal sane person, they are experiencing "wild success", and yet at the same time they are definitely "going slower than [they] expected".
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Absurd. We are beset on all sides with companies declaring agentic coding a failure and here you are stating as a matter of fact some teams “thrive” with this probabilistic expensive approach to approximating working code? All the while concluding with “I have no evidence for any of this”.
Agentic coding is absolutely not a failure. It's just not the 10x that CEOs really wanted it to be. We learned that some tasks don't really benefit from AI while others do. My team went from 7 people to 2 (went to new teams, no layoffs), and we're doing the same amount if not more work than we used to. Is it more draining and lacking of focused work? Yes. Is it more money for the business? Yes.
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The thing is: I could produce 2-3 times as much code as before _without_ an LLM, if I didn't care about my colleagues' ability to review my output properly. Lines of code are a liability, not an asset. You want as few of them as you can get away with, without compromising the actual asset: the functionality. A huge part of the job of Software Engineering is producing the right amount of code at the right time.
> Lines of code are a liability, not an asset. You want as few of them as you can get away with, without compromising the actual asset: the functionality. > A huge part of the job of Software Engineering is producing the right amount of code at the right time. Absolutely true, however my experience says that the correlation between "good software engineering practices" and "positive business outcomes" is, at best, sm…
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> These two not mutually exclusive? Correct, they are not. Consider: Someone who "expects" their bank account to have $100M in it before they turn 30 and "only" gets it to $10M. From the point of view of a normal sane person, they are experiencing "wild success", and yet at the same time they are definitely "going slower than [they] expected".
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The only point here is "not as fast as expected" can still be a lot.
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> Can you just give an agent a desired outcome and let it work, unsupervised? Absolutely not. Ignoring instructions - whether in AGENTS.md or my prompt - is the worst of it, and it routinely happens. It just waives things that I explicitly told it to do as part of the design. Vibe coders (in the true sense, zero oversight) claim that you just need to prompt it carefully. That's completely untrue when faced with your…
In my limited testing Fable is far better at obeying CLAUDE.MD than Opus is.
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> Lines of code are a liability, not an asset. You want as few of them as you can get away with, without compromising the actual asset: the functionality. > A huge part of the job of Software Engineering is producing the right amount of code at the right time. Absolutely true, however my experience says that the correlation between "good software engineering practices" and "positive business outcomes" is, at best, sm…
Survivorship bias, you don’t know of all the failed projects that couldn’t get off the ground because of incompetent development team and practices that lead a product to its demise, or a product that is possible within constraints that otherwise could have been a success, but not realised by sloppy work and incompetence. Furthermore the dependencies you choose to build your product are presumably filtered for engine…
Trying to ignore the nuance is hard in your position or the following one I’ll give is difficult.. but is the opposite potentially true as well? We don’t know how many projects failed because of over optimizing, too much time spent on design and engineering decisions. It’s of getting out and MVP to market. I only say this because I have been apart of a few of these.
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The thing is: I could produce 2-3 times as much code as before _without_ an LLM, if I didn't care about my colleagues' ability to review my output properly. Lines of code are a liability, not an asset. You want as few of them as you can get away with, without compromising the actual asset: the functionality. A huge part of the job of Software Engineering is producing the right amount of code at the right time.
> Lines of code are a liability, not an asset. I have been saying this for years, I once had a heated argument about a small system of maybe 1000 lines of code that was technically superior and more scalable but was freaking 1000 lines of code to maintain compared to the quick and dirty 10 lines of code it was suppose to abstract and make generic (for future use of course). That with also countless debates over insig…
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First I know what next is. Its standard enough. Second, take this for what it is: your product may not be compelling in its current form. Building it to many different markets will not make it compelling. If you had a stronger revenue, please share it. This sounds incredibly thin. Third, dont mistake building the same thing 20 times for different verticals for bonifide software skills. When a SWE builds the thing the…
Don’t take my word for it then, ask any terminal agent to dig in and get an idea of how good these apps are. In the end, I built Openship and Openfront for my e-commerce business and then turned them into SaaS. All the revenue for these are just a cherry on top of our existing e-commerce businesses. And I worked with Next and Keystone long before AI came along. Check my GitHub commits if you need some back story. And…
Okay but, you know this isn't a quality metric right? These models are incredibly biased towards positive confirmation of the prompt. I could give them nearly any repo and they would sing the praises of the best parts, if I asked.
This sounds a bit like psychosis.
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People making decisions. Pay me 8x to get 10x, great. Pay me 8x to get 3x, nope.
I have not seen reasonable claims that people are paying 8x the salary of a SWE to get those 2-3x results.