Software development in the time of strange new angels

I've spent the bulk of my 30+ career in various in-house dev/management roles, and small to medium sizes digital agencies or IT consulting places.

I that time I have worked on many hundreds of project, probably thousands.

There are maybe a few dozen that were still in production use without major rewrites on the way for more than 5 years.

I think for a huge amount of commercial projects, "maintainability" is something that developers are passional about, but that is of very little actual value to the client.

Back in the day when I spent a lot of time on comp.lang.perl.misc, there was a well know piece of advice "alway throw away the first version". My career-long takeaway from that has been to always race to a production ready proof of concept quickly enough to get it in front of people - ideally the people who are then spending the money that generates the business profits. Then if it turns successful, re write it from scratch incorporating everything you've learned from the first version - do not be tempted to continually tweak the hastily written code. These days people call something very like that "finding product market fit", and a common startup plan is to prove a business model, and them sell or be acquired before you need to spend the time/money on that rewrite.

All I see from “excited” developers is denial that there is a problem. But why would it be a problem that you have to review code generated by a program with the same fine-tooth comb that you use for human review?

[1] Some things change fast, some things never change at all.

I wrote JavaScript in the corporate world for 15 years. Here is the reality:

* Almost nobody wants to do it. The people that get paid for it don't want to do it. They just want to get paid. The result is that everybody who does get paid for it completely sucks. Complete garbage, at least at work. There a lot of amazing people writing JavaScript, just not at work, and why would they try harder. Delivering quality at work far outside the bell curve just results in hostility aside for some very rare exceptions. My exception was when I was doing A/B testing for a major .com.

* Since everybody in the corporate JavaScript world completely sucks every major project eventually fails from a business perspective or stalls into lifeless maintenance mode. It just gets too expensive to maintain 5+ years later or too fragile to pivot to the next business demand. So, it has to get refactored or rebuilt. Sometime that means hoping the next generation framework is ready, and the business is willing to train people on it, and willing to go through growing pains. More often this means calling in outside parties who can do it correctly the first time. Its not about scale. Its about the ability to actually build something original and justify every hour productively. I was on both sides of that fence.

* The reason why the corporate overlords hire outside parties to fix problems from internal teams isn't just about talent. Keep in mind it's tremendously expensive. Yes, those people are capable of producing something that doesn't suck and do so faster. The bigger issue is that they will always deliver reliably, because they are executing under a contract with a work performance statement. The internal teams do not have a contract performance definition that will kill their careers or terminates their incomes. They just have to hope the business remains financial solvent so they don't get caught in a mass layoff. This breeds a lot of entitlement and false expectations that seem to grow on each other.

So, yes, in this case it really is about the ability to write code physically. Yes, you need to juggle client nonsense and have soft skills too, but those are layered on top of just being able to write the code. When your options are limited to a bunch of 0s that depend on copy/paste from predefined framework templates you need somebody who can actually justify their existence in a very practical solutions delivery way.

gpt-oss-120b fits on a $4000 NVIDIA Spark and can be used by Codex - it's OK but still nowhere near the bigger ones: https://til.simonwillison.net/llms/codex-spark-gpt-oss

But... MiniMax M2 benchmarks close to Sonnet 4 and is 230B - too big for one Spark but can run on a $10,000 Mac Studio.

And Kimi K2 runs on two Mac Studios ($20,000).

So we are getting closer.