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Development speed is not a bottleneck

pawelbrodzinski.substack.com

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Re: Development speed is not a bottleneck

#101

Post by cestith »

no_wizard wrote: post #29
add-sub-mul-div wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think people are largely split on LLMs based on whether they've reached a point of mastery where they can work close to as fast as they think and the tech would therefore slow them down rather than accelerate them.

The verbose LLM approach that Cursor and some others have taken really annoys me. I would prefer if it simply gave me the results (written out to files, changes to files or whatever the appropriate medium is) and only let me introspect the verbose steps it took if I request to do so. That’s what slows me down with AI tools and why I ended up sticking with GitHub Copilot, which does not do any of that unless I prompt…

I want a merge request with a short, meaningful comment and the diffs just like I’d get from a human. Then I want to be able to discuss the changes if they aren’t exactly what’s needed, just like with a human. I don’t want to have to hold its hand and I don’t want to have to pair program everything with a chatbot. It also needs to be able to show a logic diagram, a data flow diagram, and a dependency tree. If an agent can’t give me that, it’s not really ready to work as a developer for me.

Re: Development speed is not a bottleneck

#102

Post by thenanyu »

flail wrote: post #90
thenanyu wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The map is not the territory. Validating against anything other than the actual feature is a lossy proxy. It may be an acceptable tradeoff because building the feature is too costly but that’s the whole discussion at hand.

Sure. And yet, last time I checked, we've had plenty of applications for maps. I like this metaphor. Looking at a map, we may get a pretty good understanding of whether it's a place we'd like to spend time, say, on vacation. We don't physically go to a place to scrutinize it. And we don't limit ourselves to maps only. We check reviews, ask friends, and what have you. We do cheap validation before committing to a cost…

The best way to know if you would like a new restaurant or experience is to actually try it. We rely on reviews and maps and directories because trying it is too costly. If trying it wasn't costly, we would just try it instead of relying on proxies.

Re: Development speed is not a bottleneck

#103

Post by DenisM »

no_wizard wrote: post #29
add-sub-mul-div wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think people are largely split on LLMs based on whether they've reached a point of mastery where they can work close to as fast as they think and the tech would therefore slow them down rather than accelerate them.

The verbose LLM approach that Cursor and some others have taken really annoys me. I would prefer if it simply gave me the results (written out to files, changes to files or whatever the appropriate medium is) and only let me introspect the verbose steps it took if I request to do so. That’s what slows me down with AI tools and why I ended up sticking with GitHub Copilot, which does not do any of that unless I prompt…

LLM might rely on their own verbosity to carry the conversation in a stable direction.

Re: Development speed is not a bottleneck

#104

Post by thenanyu »

franktankbank wrote: post #89
thenanyu wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Get it sooner then! By getting to market faster

Its one variable in the sum of all the times. You are asserting without much evidence that the bottleneck is the dev turnaround time. I think for a lot of people there's evidence that its dev is about 10% or less of the back and forth. I've sat on my hands for months while requirements have got sorted and no this wasn't something I could just jump into which I'm sure you'd (wrongly) suggest is the right approach. Hav…

The only reason requirements need to be sorted out is because development effort is perceived to be expensive. If you reduce the development effort significantly, then you can just build it instead of talking about building it.

Re: Development speed is not a bottleneck

#105

Post by thenanyu »

cestith wrote: post #99
thenanyu wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

why doesn't it? it doesn't have to be you or me personally, it could be a representative sample of our users

So if you wait to put together a representative sample of users and gather the data long enough for the numbers to matter, you’ve gated further changes. If you’ve gated further changes for a week, why does it matter that the feature change was done in an hour or a day?

Releasing it to users does not take a long time. Randomly select 5% of your user base and give them the feature. If your development process was mature, this would be a button you could push in your deployment env.

Re: Development speed is not a bottleneck

#106

Post by flail »

scarface_74 wrote: post #75
flail wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since I haven't mentioned the context in the article, it is a small agency with a customer target of early-stage (ideally earliest-stage) product startups. We have literally one half-hour-long sync meeting a week. The rest is as lightweight as possible, typically averaging below 10 minutes daily with clients (when all the decisions happen on the fly). I've worked in the corpo world, too, and it is anything but. We do…

BigTech is “beating startups”. 99% of all startups are just acquisition plays with no real business model. Check out all of the bullshit “AI” companies that YC is funding. BigTech is not “loosing ground” all of them are reporting increasing revenues and profits.

Of course, Big Techs have leverage of their bottomless coffers. What they can't develop, they buy. What was the last successful product idea coming from, say, Facebook?

Or on a smaller scale, what's the last genuine Attlassian success?

Yet, when it comes to product innovation, the momentum is always on the side of the new players. Always has been.

Project management/work organization software? Linear. Async communication? Slack. Social Media? TikTok. One has to be curious how Zoom is doing so well, given that all the big competition actually controls the channels for setting up meetings. Self-publishing? Substack. Even with AI, everyone plays catch-up with Sam Altman, and many of the most prominent companies are newcomers.

We could go on and on.

Yes, Big Techs will survive because they have enough momentum to survive events such as the Balmer-era MS. But that doesn't mean they lead product innovation.

And it's expected. Conflicting priorities, growing bureaucracies, shareholders' expectations, old business lines (and more), all make them less flexible.

Re: Development speed is not a bottleneck

#108

Post by flail »

com2kid wrote: post #96
flail wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since I haven't mentioned the context in the article, it is a small agency with a customer target of early-stage (ideally earliest-stage) product startups. We have literally one half-hour-long sync meeting a week. The rest is as lightweight as possible, typically averaging below 10 minutes daily with clients (when all the decisions happen on the fly). I've worked in the corpo world, too, and it is anything but. We do…

I needed to make a landing page for an ad campaign to test out an idea for PMF. Claude crapped out a workable landing page in ~30 seconds of prompting. I updated the copy on the page, total time less than an hour. The odds of me spending more than an hour just picking a color theme for the page or finding the SVG icons it used is pretty much 100%. ------------ I had a bug in some async code, it hit rarely but often e…

Big Techs do have ways of rolling out new services step by step.

Paul Buchheit's stories about Gmail and AdSense are good examples. I was an early Gmail user when it was invitation-only and invitations were scarcely distributed (only as fast as the infrastructure could handle).

So, while I understand the difference in PR costs, it's not like they don't have tools to run smaller experiments.

I agree with the huge bureaucracy cost. On the other hand, they really have (relatively) infinite resources if they care to deploy them. And sometimes they do. And they still fail.

They often fail even when they try a Skunk Works-like approach. Google Wave was famously developed as a corporate Lean Startup (before there was Lean Startup). It was a disaster. Precisely because they did close to zero validation pre-release.

A side note, a huge flop it was (although Buzz and Google+ were bigger), it didn't hurt them long term in PR or reputation.

Re: Development speed is not a bottleneck

#109

Post by franktankbank »

thenanyu wrote: post #104
franktankbank wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its one variable in the sum of all the times. You are asserting without much evidence that the bottleneck is the dev turnaround time. I think for a lot of people there's evidence that its dev is about 10% or less of the back and forth. I've sat on my hands for months while requirements have got sorted and no this wasn't something I could just jump into which I'm sure you'd (wrongly) suggest is the right approach. Hav…

The only reason requirements need to be sorted out is because development effort is perceived to be expensive. If you reduce the development effort significantly, then you can just build it instead of talking about building it.

Sounds like you need a trillion monkeys on typewriters. Easy!

Re: Development speed is not a bottleneck

#110

Post by scarface_74 »

flail wrote: post #106
scarface_74 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

BigTech is “beating startups”. 99% of all startups are just acquisition plays with no real business model. Check out all of the bullshit “AI” companies that YC is funding. BigTech is not “loosing ground” all of them are reporting increasing revenues and profits.

Of course, Big Techs have leverage of their bottomless coffers. What they can't develop, they buy. What was the last successful product idea coming from, say, Facebook? Or on a smaller scale, what's the last genuine Attlassian success? Yet, when it comes to product innovation, the momentum is always on the side of the new players. Always has been. Project management/work organization software? Linear. Async communica…

Again let’s look at YC’s latest batch of companies. How many of them are doing anything “innovative”?

An innovative product is one where customers in aggregate are willing to pay more for it than it costs to create and run. Any idiot can sell a bunch of dollar bills for 95 cents.

Going back to the latest batch of YC companies, there value play can easily be duplicated by any company in their vertical either by throwing a few engineers on it or creating a statement of work for the consulting company I work for and I can pull together a few engineers and knock it out in a few months and they will already have customers to sell it to.

There was one recent YC company (of course one of the BS AI companies) that was a hiring a “founding full stack engineer” for $150K. It looks like they were two non technical “serial entrepreneurs” without even an MVP that YC threw money at.

You can’t imagine how many times some hair brain underfunded startup reached out to me to be a “CTO” that paid less than I made as a mid level employee at BigTech with the promise of Monopoly money “equity”.

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