Live data from Hacker News

The Speed of Prototyping in the Age of AI

darylcecile.net

91–100 of 119 posts

Re: The Speed of Prototyping in the Age of AI

#91
post #33

AI makes it possible to ship a lot of junk really fast

You can argue that's the point of prototyping. Iterate fast. Getting a "junk" prototype in 2 days is better than getting the same in 2 months. Now the quality of what comes after the iteration depends on the reviewer, and that's no AI's fault.

I think creating prototypes is now so easy that people are creating them for ideas that are not even worth of prototyping.

Re: The Speed of Prototyping in the Age of AI

#95
I think there are costs beyond having to sacrifice writing code yourself. When prototyping yourself you learn a lot about the problem, see what design decisions lead to what tradeofs. While you write code your brain is always running in the background, giving you thoughts about how things could break, where the structure could be simplified, where the code could be extended. I feel this is lost or at least reduced a lot when an LLM writes code because you have a lot less contact with the software.

Re: The Speed of Prototyping in the Age of AI

#98

I'm truly hopeful that AI will open a new of prototyping. Back in the day, prototyping was how you figured out what to build, you'd very deliberately toss the entire first (or second!) version, and you'd plan to do that. High quality ensued. Usually ;)

Might be the opposite in some orgs. Higher ups in working with get visibly annoyed when you start talking about prototypes or trying something out in isolation, they don’t see why you wouldn’t just work with the real codebase and end the project with a PR.

Also seeing a lot of managerial class bypassing the PR system entirely and just committing to main “because it’s faster”.

Post reply on HN