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Development speed is not a bottleneck

pawelbrodzinski.substack.com

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Re: Development speed is not a bottleneck

#111

Post by goalieca »

khazhoux wrote: post #83
goalieca wrote: post #5

Development is always a bottleneck. Writing lines of code usually isn’t. I end up pumping out more leetcode during an interview than I do during a week or two on real products. No one has meaningfully measured lines of code as a metric of productivity since my career began in the mid-2000.

On the other hand, there’s tons of people here on HN who will claim that there’s zero connection between lines of code written and developer productivity. Obviously, deleting bad/unused code is good. And obviously, some tricky bugs are fixed in one line. But you can’t build something new without some (usually, very many) lines of code. No code -> no software.

What would be the function mapping lines of code to "value" look like. Most agile teams aim to deliver "value" these days. We can't put a number of value. We most certainly can't say on average that adding a single line of code adds 0.01 units of value for a certain project.

Re: Development speed is not a bottleneck

#112

Post by m0llusk »

Many here are restricting the domain to engineering which makes the real bottlenecks disappear. A good reminder of the larger context is Ralph Grabowski's Marketing to Engineering ratio. Companies that spend less on marketing that engineering tend not to endure. Companies that do endure tend to spend over double and closer to ten times as much on marketing as engineering. So the real bottlenecks in development are not centered on engineering, but the coordination of engineering and marketing in order to solve problems that matter to customers in ways that customers can be aware of and assign value to.

Go ahead and code as much as you want. Unless you can communicate the utility of that code to a paying customer it has no value or relevance.

Re: Development speed is not a bottleneck

#113

Post by com2kid »

flail wrote: post #108
com2kid wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bure…

Google had 3,000 employees when Gmail launched. Now they have over 100,000 employees!

People criticize Microsoft's historical fiefdom model, and it had its issues, but it also allowed orgs to find what worked for them and basically run independently. Of course it also had orgs fighting with each other and killing off good products.

Xbox was also a skunk works project at Microsoft (a few good books have been written about it!) and so was Microsoft Band. Xbox succeeded, Band failed for a number of reasons not related to the product or execution itself. (Politics and some historical corporate karma).

IMHO the only company good at deploying infinite resources quickly is Apple. 1 billion developing the first Apple Watch (Microsoft spend under 50 million on two generations of Band!) and then they kept going after the market, even though the first version was kinda meh. In comparison Google wear was on again of again for years until they finally took it seriously recently. I'm sure they spent lots of $, but the end result is nowheres near what Apple pulled off.

Re: Development speed is not a bottleneck

#114

Post by thenanyu »

scarface_74 wrote: post #110
flail wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 throwi…

VCs generally expect some small single digit % of their companies to succeed and return the fund

If 90% of the companies fail or are outright fraudulent it doesn’t really matter

Re: Development speed is not a bottleneck

#116

Post by daliusd »

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…

So you want Aider, Claude Code or opencode.ai it seems. I use opencode.ai a lot nowadays and am really happy and productive.

Re: Development speed is not a bottleneck

#117

Post by scarface_74 »

thenanyu wrote: post #114
scarface_74 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 throwi…

VCs generally expect some small single digit % of their companies to succeed and return the fund If 90% of the companies fail or are outright fraudulent it doesn’t really matter

And how many of those “succeed” by creating good products compared to just being acquihires where after acquisition you soon see a blog post about “our amazing journey”?

Re: Development speed is not a bottleneck

#118

Post by thenanyu »

scarface_74 wrote: post #117
thenanyu wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

VCs generally expect some small single digit % of their companies to succeed and return the fund If 90% of the companies fail or are outright fraudulent it doesn’t really matter

And how many of those “succeed” by creating good products compared to just being acquihires where after acquisition you soon see a blog post about “our amazing journey”?

Single digit percentage, like I said. Often low single digits

Re: Development speed is not a bottleneck

#119

Post by estimator7292 »

Developers would gain a lot more speed than what LLMs offer if Microsoft would just fucking stop using >50% of the CPU watching your compiler for... something?

Nobody wants to believe it, but just try compiling C++ on Windows and again in a Linux VM. Linux in a VM on the same host compiles at least twice as fast. It's insanity. I tried a script that rsync's the project files to my server from 2013, runs the build and rsync's the artifacts back. Running the build on a Xeon 2500 is still far faster with Linux than windows on my two year old i9. Even with the overhead of sending binaries over the internet. Absolutely disgusting.

Re: Development speed is not a bottleneck

#120

Post by estimator7292 »

bob1029 wrote: post #65
thenanyu wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So give it to users?

There is often a severe opportunity cost associated with experimenting on your customer base.

We've been doing this for fifty years, please catch up with the times.
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