161–170 of 268 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, but not relevant. What is the point of working at a startup if you’re dealing with millions of lines of legacy code ? Isn’t the whole point of startups to create & innovate with a clean slate and modern tools?
No, actually. The point is to build a profitable business.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Man, so many people in this thread just arguing pointless semantics, making weirdo absolutist (and incorrect) statements. Accept that other people may ascribe different meanings/interpretations to words than you, and that if your reading of their statement doesn't make sense to you, perhaps you are simply reading it wrong. Trying to hold someone else to your definition of words suits what purpose exactly? Are you jus…
I agree with your larger point. Though I think it's pretty natural to wonder how the poster ended up with a multi million line codebase.
15 people is a pretty small startup, what if this is a 50-person startup?
Doesn't seem like that much to me, depending on what you're building and the size of your team.
I think there is a lot of dev cope in this thread. My workflow is very simple: 1. develop requirements for code change 2. take manual notes for implementation, maybe use LLM for some discovery/investigation 3. present notes to frontier LLM 4. develop implementation plan (bulk of work) 5. let LLM rip 6. review diff, manually fixing/refactoring code as necessary, sometimes prompting for revisions 7. get automated LLM r…
This has been my experience as well. The best model I have access to right now is Opus 4.8. It's really good at fixing bugs in an established architecture or adding a similar feature, but it's absolutely mid tier at putting together a simple effective architecture for even common software problems. I can tell that functional programming practices are not a large part of it's training material.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In our team's experience, the product of agents is generally The Homer (1). It does work, but it's vastly overengineered. When I personally want tight code, I have to spend a considerable amount of time adjusting it manually: - It needs to be trimmed down. In my experience, at least one agent I use struggles to produce minimalist designs, and it's very frustrating - I need to consider whether there are solutions base…
It took me a few seconds of deliberating if The Homer was a reference to baseball or "The Odyssey" and then realized there was a footnote > software production has become a mass-produced commodity in every sense - it's much more expensive to produce software manually, but the quality is not the same. Agreed.
Homer reunites with his long lost brother, who runs car company Powell Motors. Homer is ultimately tasked by his brother with helping to design a car for the “average man” that ultimately bankrupts the company for being wildly overengineered and costing too much ($82,000 in 1991-money).
Here’s the car: https://simpsons.fandom.com/wiki/The_Homer
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If software has become a mass-produced commodity then seems to me the software business will become a much more finance focused business You will really have to weigh the cost of making the software against the expected revenue.
Since software is still a winner-takes-all market, the mass-production property of software doesn't really matter. In such markets, what you produce is either worth nothing or worth millions of dollars. For as long as it's the case that well-constructed code (with or without LLM help) is more likely to be in the latter category, the economics of software don't really change. Even before LLMs, you could've commissione…
I remember hearing a story that in the past movies were so technically difficult to make that any movie that got made had a good chance to be a profitable hit. But as movies got cheaper to make, more movies got made. Nowadays movie studio execs have to really calculate out the audience and expected revenue for any new movie and balance that against the budget and the cost of the studio's failed movies.
I think a similar dynamic may happen in software
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How is this not true? Taking a Senior SWE @ ~$200K, even just the base salary cost / 2080 working hours is $100/hr. Fully loaded employer cost + accounting for non-coding time gets you to upper 100s easily. Even for a junior making $100K, I have a hard time believe their time is worth less than $75/hr or so. Edit: Fine, "Senior" is not "Average". But naive salary is not the true numerator.
I have a hard time believe their time is worth less than $75/hr or so. In many places in Europe it is.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"startup" and "legacy codebase" are diametrically opposed concepts. And if you're saying (based on your other comments) that a 6 month window is enough to create a legacy codebase...that indicates a serious lack of experience or understanding as to what a legacy codebase is, or why they exist.
Man, so many people in this thread just arguing pointless semantics, making weirdo absolutist (and incorrect) statements. Accept that other people may ascribe different meanings/interpretations to words than you, and that if your reading of their statement doesn't make sense to you, perhaps you are simply reading it wrong. Trying to hold someone else to your definition of words suits what purpose exactly? Are you jus…
This whole thread around loc is depressing. It speaks volumes of some peoples inexperience working on actual legacy code. Legacy code is not just age or size but that the technical foundation is dated in a fundamental way. A giant monolith running on a now defunk framework using a database only one guy in canada knows about.
Case and point in my day job. The org that owns XMM development does not know how to recover a physical bench that is bricked because everyone who knew how has left. So now they just use simulators…
Interestingly, AI figured out some of this pretty easily for me. But the org has the exact same AI as i do. At the same time another org is close to a year into a greenfield rewrite that has been developed via agentic swarms. Absolute trainwreck.
AI doesnt make bad engineers good. Anyone who says they are doing 4 eng work likely would be without ai too. Those that claim otherwise, are the bad engineers.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Man, so many people in this thread just arguing pointless semantics, making weirdo absolutist (and incorrect) statements. Accept that other people may ascribe different meanings/interpretations to words than you, and that if your reading of their statement doesn't make sense to you, perhaps you are simply reading it wrong. Trying to hold someone else to your definition of words suits what purpose exactly? Are you jus…
Yes lol. Of all things people are getting on me for it's the number of LoC x Years In Business of this startup. I don't fucking know, I didn't start the company and I wasn't here for several of those industrious years. Looking now it looks like we have slightly fewer LoC than that, I was counting some of the generated stuff. But who cares? The point is any codebase over a few years old with lots of customers and a bi…
I would be really curious to hear from devs at Databricks what the experience of development is like internally. I work at a small startup with essentially unlimited AI spend budget - the entire point is that I should be turning to it at every opportunity since our human labor is so expensive relative to tokens. So generally it's like: - Spend most time prioritizing/discussing what to do. - Once that's agreed, use Fa…
I feel like I have an advantage over big companies, if I can use the best models on a subscription and not worry about costs much, when they can't do the same as outlined in the article.