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But actually, this principle generalizes. The most correct code is the code that doesn't run. There are no security vulnerabilities in code that doesn't exist. It fails no tests. There are no bugs hiding within it. It requires no documentation. (And doesn't get out of sync!) It incurs no maintenance burden.
The best code is no code.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The good thing is since the feature was cheap to implement, you can just say "this was a bad idea" and remove it, as long as adding that feature wasn't a one way decision. People are typically more reticent to remove things that were hard to implement, even if that's the right thing to do.
> People are typically more reticent to remove things that were hard to implement, even if that's the right thing to do. Careful. The sunk cost fallacy isn't just about time, it's also about money, and people may naturally be reluctant to remove bad features that cost them a lot of tokens, especially if the act of removal itself is going to cost even more tokens.
Everything is search. Software development is search through the space of useful/interesting automations. Business is search for product market fit (at the intersection of expertise, capital, problem, etc.) Writing is search for lossless, efficient idea transfer. AI software development is more search . If we search more, will we find a bunch of garbage? Hell yes. We'll find a TON of garbage. That's not new, though.…
Basically software was already like food with obesity being the problem not famine. LLM is like being able to create treats and other garbage with thought, imagine what that would do to obesity. The amount of quality food created would be less than 100 years ago even though you could create infinitely more food in general.
Definitely agree with this. Even without a large backlog, one of the things I find working on my personal project/product where I'm simultaneously the engineer/designer/project manager is it's really easy to ask the LLM to implement an idea I've been mulling for an hour or two, it one-shots it and I'm happy, and then a week or two later it starts to dawn on me that the feature was maybe not a great idea. Which isn't…
The good thing is since the feature was cheap to implement, you can just say "this was a bad idea" and remove it, as long as adding that feature wasn't a one way decision. People are typically more reticent to remove things that were hard to implement, even if that's the right thing to do.
Have you ever actually done that in a "serious" product, or just made it up?
In any product with actual customers, especially those from other (big) companies, features don't just go away at the snap of a finger. Otherwise, have fun discovering users moving to your competitors.
Anecdotally, a product from another company had removed or made significant changes to important features our users rely on every day multiple times with short notice, several times. We didn't hesitate to migrate to another service, which completed within about a month.
Definitely agree with this. Even without a large backlog, one of the things I find working on my personal project/product where I'm simultaneously the engineer/designer/project manager is it's really easy to ask the LLM to implement an idea I've been mulling for an hour or two, it one-shots it and I'm happy, and then a week or two later it starts to dawn on me that the feature was maybe not a great idea. Which isn't…
Sure.
Everything is search. Software development is search through the space of useful/interesting automations. Business is search for product market fit (at the intersection of expertise, capital, problem, etc.) Writing is search for lossless, efficient idea transfer. AI software development is more search . If we search more, will we find a bunch of garbage? Hell yes. We'll find a TON of garbage. That's not new, though.…
Gold nuggets among some scaterred garbage are still findable. But 10x gold nuggets burried in a massive landfill mountain created by automated garbage (slop) producing machines, would be much harder to be found. And people are more likely to give up, than to have to shift through the tons of garbage.
And that's ignoring the foul smell and health conditions arising from having to live next to all this garbage (which, in this analogy, is the social and cultural impact).
Also ignoring how living by garbage influeces your taste and numbs your smell, which ends up creating less good stuff. "Just churn more stuff to get more good art", is like losing in profit but making it up in volume.
>It's evolutionary fitness operating in the space of ideas.
More like a shoo-in nomination for civilizational Darwin Awards.
To me, it is a survivor bias. How could you know where you would have been now if you built these features of your backlog 4 years ago?
Maybe some things would have been easier and faster, maybe you would have been bigger, got more customers and money. Maybe you would have done a big breakthrough that would have transformed your project into something different and better. Or maybe it would have been exactly the same, or worst, or would have led you to bankruptcy.
Maybe there is a security hole that you did well to not spend time fixing because no one abused of it (...yet), or maybe some hackers could have leaked all your customer base to some random forum killing your company because of this missing fix.
The outcome is unsure, but you can't easily consider as a generality that you had not needed them.