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Code Is Cheap Now, and That Changes Everything

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Re: Code Is Cheap Now, and That Changes Everything

#31

Post by juancn »

Production grade code is still expensive for any non-trivial product. I think it may be getting even more expensive.

It gets even harder when there's an expectation that your products implement some sort of AI.

Not an LLM necessarily, but to succeed they need to feel easy and magical, the bar is higher, and that makes it expensive: more edge cases, harder to deploy, more expensive to run, and so on.

Someone has to babysit the security and the runtimes, PMs still run around figuring out the competitive landscape and so on.

AI just moved the pain points, for every part that's gotten easier, some other part got way harder mainly because we don't yet have the experience on how to effectively tackle the scale change of the challenges.

Re: Code Is Cheap Now, and That Changes Everything

#32

Post by kranner »

lmeyerov wrote: post #19
jubilanti wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And why are they talking about Etsy as if it doesn't bring in $2+ billon in revenue?

I'm not too familiar with etsy, but presumably most etsy sellers are closer to being lemonade stands than they are to being ikea And yes, sometimes it's nice to support a local lemonade stand. For my family's income, I know which segment I'd feel more confident to work for..

Quality indie software in a niche that Ikea is not addressing can make a decent income unlike a lemonade stand.

And unlike at (this hypothetical) Ikea, you wouldn't have to maintain the impression of 20x AI-augmented output to avoid being fired. Well, you could still use AI as much as you want, but you wouldn't have to keep proving you're not underusing it.

Re: Code Is Cheap Now, and That Changes Everything

#33

Post by bushido »

Interestingly, they landed on a conclusion which I have often argued against these days [0]. Code is absolutely cheap, and previously, it was the most important resource that we guarded.

Entire job descriptions and functions were built to guard the engineer's time. Product owners, product managers, customer success, etc., all shielded the engineers who produced code because that was the scarcest resource.

With that scarcity gone, we really need to be thinking about the entire structure differently. I'm definitely in the we still need people camp. The roles are wildly different, though. We can't continue doing the same job that we did with a slight twist.

[0] https://dheer.co/gatekeeping-on-a-different-stage/

Re: Code Is Cheap Now, and That Changes Everything

#34

Post by raviisoccupied »

kranner wrote: post #12

Towards the end this article contradicts itself so severely I don't think a human wrote this. But this isn’t really about AI enthusiasm or AI scepticism. It’s about industrialisation. It has happened over and over in every sector, and the pattern is always the same: the people who industrialise outcompete those who don’t. You can buy handmade pottery from Etsy, or you can buy it mass-produced from a store. Each propo…

'It's not X, it's Y' sentence formulations are usually indicative of LLM assisted writing.

Re: Code Is Cheap Now, and That Changes Everything

#35

Post by didgetmaster »

An important element that Willison left out of his definition of 'good code' is efficient!

Software has an amazing multiplier effect. It can be copied to millions of machines and run billions of times each day. Code that wastes resources (time, memory, disk space, electricity, etc.) can become incredibly expensive to run, even if it was vibe coded in a day for a few dollars.

Has anyone taken a serious look at all the code being spit out by AI with regards to how efficient it is?

Re: Code Is Cheap Now, and That Changes Everything

#36

Post by xienze »

croes wrote: post #23
dist-epoch wrote: post #7

> Developers who learn to specify, verify, and iterate will thrive. This will last for about one year. From next year agents will be prompting themselves. Human developers will have approximately zero economic value.

Prompting themselves to do what?

Oh, you'll still need a human to give the initial prompt, like say "Write me a Notion clone." But after that, what value is the human developer really providing? Expertise? Why can't LLMs advance sufficiently to cover that in addition to the programming?

This is a tale as old as time. Techies are so enamored with new gadgets that they eagerly develop the tools business managers will bury them with.

Re: Code Is Cheap Now, and That Changes Everything

#38

Post by kjksf »

kranner wrote: post #12

Towards the end this article contradicts itself so severely I don't think a human wrote this. But this isn’t really about AI enthusiasm or AI scepticism. It’s about industrialisation. It has happened over and over in every sector, and the pattern is always the same: the people who industrialise outcompete those who don’t. You can buy handmade pottery from Etsy, or you can buy it mass-produced from a store. Each propo…

Do you disagree with his analogy?

Hand made pottery cannot compete on price with industrially made pottery and therefore majority of pottery is made industrially.

100% human written code cannot compete on price with AI assisted code and therefore majority of code will be written with assistance of AI.

The aside about etsy handmade pottery is that because they can't compete with industrially made pottery on price so they were killed in mass market pottery products and had to find a tiny niche. Before industrialization handmade pottery was mass market pottery. It was outcompeted in mass market and had to move into a niche.

And that part of doesn't even translate into code. People are not buying lines of code, so you're not going to be buying handmade code.

Handmade pottery can offer variety (designs) not available in mass produced pottery. When you look at software, you can't tell if it was 100% handwritten or written with assistance of AI.

Re: Code Is Cheap Now, and That Changes Everything

#39

Post by datadrivenangel »

bushido wrote: post #33

Interestingly, they landed on a conclusion which I have often argued against these days [0]. Code is absolutely cheap, and previously, it was the most important resource that we guarded. Entire job descriptions and functions were built to guard the engineer's time. Product owners, product managers, customer success, etc., all shielded the engineers who produced code because that was the scarcest resource. With that s…

I partially disagree for two reasons:

1. Code is absolutely cheap, but good, correct, non-vulnerable code is much cheaper than it was a few years ago but is still not free, especially in a large application.

2. Requirements management is less important when the cost of software is lower because iteration is cheaper, but bad customer communication can absolutely result in negatively useful software, and there is a skill to understanding what people want and need that takes a lot of time to use well, so in many cases a product manager can still help do useful work... most won't though.

Re: Code Is Cheap Now, and That Changes Everything

#40

Post by kjksf »

jubilanti wrote: post #18
kranner wrote: post #12

Towards the end this article contradicts itself so severely I don't think a human wrote this. But this isn’t really about AI enthusiasm or AI scepticism. It’s about industrialisation. It has happened over and over in every sector, and the pattern is always the same: the people who industrialise outcompete those who don’t. You can buy handmade pottery from Etsy, or you can buy it mass-produced from a store. Each propo…

And why are they talking about Etsy as if it doesn't bring in $2+ billon in revenue?

The comparison valid for his example would be to compare revenues from mass produced pottery vs. revenues of handmade pottery sold on etsy.

Methinks that mass produced pottery makes more than $2 billion and etsy pottery is a tiny fraction of overall etsy sales.

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