Meanwhile, my cofounder is rewriting code we spent millions of salary on in the past by himself in a few weeks.
I myself am saving a small fortune on design and photography and getting better results while doing it.
If this is not all that well I can’t wait until we get to mediocre!
> Meanwhile, my cofounder is rewriting code we spent millions of salary on in the past by himself in a few weeks.
Code is not an asset it's a liability, and code that no one has reviewed is even more of a liability.
However, in the end, execution is all that matters so if you and your cofounder are able to execute successfully with mountains of generated code then it doesn't matter what assets and liabilities you hold in the short term.
The long term is a lot harder to predict in any case.
> Code is not an asset it's a liability, and code that no one has reviewed is even more of a liability.
Code that solves problems and makes you money is by definition an asset. Whether or not the code in question does those things remains to be seen, but code is not strictly a liability or else no one would write it.
"Code is a liability. What the code does for you is an asset." as quoted from https://wiki.c2.com/?SoftwareAsLiability with Last edit December 17, 2013.
This discussion and distinction used to be well known, but I'm happy to help some people become "one of today's lucky 10,000" as quoted from https://xkcd.com/1053/ because it is indeed much more interesting than the alternative approach.
Code requires maintenance, which grows with codebase size, minus some decay over time. (LLMs do not change this, and might actually be more sensitive to this), So increasing code size, esp with new code, implies future costs, which meets the definition of a liability on a LOC kinda-sorta-basis.
It's not right but it's not wrong either. It at least was a useful way to think about code, and we'll see if that applies in LLM era.
It’s well known and also wrong.
Delta’s airplanes also require a great deal of maintenance, and I’m sure they strive to have no more than are necessary for their objectives. But if you talk to one of Delta’s accountants, they will be happy to disabuse you of the notion that the planes are entered in the books as a liability.
Whoa whoa whoa let's not bring the accountants in!
Code isn't a liability b/c it costs money (though it does). Code is a liability like an unsafe / unproven bridge is a liability. It works fine until it doesn't - and at that point you're in trouble. Just b/c you can build lots of bridges now, doesn't mean each new bridge isn't also a risk. But if you gotta get somewhere now, conjuring bridges might be the way to go. Doesn't make each bridge not a liability (risky thing to rely on) or an asset (thing you can sell, use to build value)
Even proven code is a liability. The point of it being a liability is that it costs time and effort to maintain and update.
The same with the bridge. Even the best built and most useful bridge requires maintenance. Assuming changing traffic patterns, it might equally require upgrades and changes.
The problem with this whole “code is a liability” thing is that it’s vacuous. Your house is a liability. The bridge that gets you to work as a liability. Everything that requires any sort of maintenance or effort or upkeep or other future cost is ina sense a liability. This isn’t some deep insight though. This is like saying your bones could break so they are liability. OK, but their value drastically outweighs any liability they impose.
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If Delta was going bankrupt it would likely be able to sell individual planes for the depreciated book value or close to it.
If a software company is going bankrupt, it’s very unlikely they will be able to sell code for individual apps and services they may have written for much at all, even if they might be able to sell the whole company for something.
The other half of the quote about liability is that the capabilities of the code are an asset. I don’t know if your bankrupt company would be able to sell their code, but they sure as hell couldn’t sell their capabilities without the code.
You're hinting at the underlying problem with the quote. "Asset" in the quote reads, at least to me, in the financial or accounting meaning of the term. "Liability" reads, again to me, in the sense of potential risk rather than the financial meaning. Its apples and oranges.
Liability is also an economic term. As in, "The bank's assets (debt) are my liability, and my assets (house) are the bank's liability."
I don't think it's a wrong quote. Code's behavior is the asset, and code's source is the liability. You want to achieve maximum functionality for minimal source code investment.
Sorry, my point wasn't that liability doesn't have a meaning in finance. My read of the quote is that it uses liability in the sense of risk not debt on a balance sheet.
I could always be wrong though, that was just my interpretation of it. I don't get how code could be a liability in the financial sense, but I do get how every line of code risks bugs and other issues.
Sure, but all code is a potential future debt.
You wrote a music player that only allows one artist from list of all artists? Tech debt.
You wrote optimized assembly for x86_64? It's the year 2060, and we only support NGPU_ARM_N_LEG.
The moment your expectations change (which is all the time), your code needs to be changed, and effort isn't free.
Tech debt is not part of a financial account or disclosure though. Yes those are forms of debt, no they aren't financial debts or financial liabilities.
If we're bringing in other industries, you'd be wise to consider banking. Savings accounts are something most people would consider an asset, because it's money the bank has on hand and can use for loan purposes.
But it's the opposite, deposits are liabilities because they need interest paid out and can be withdrawn at any time.
Just because the company has a thing that could be assigned value doesn't make it automatically an asset.
It's possible for something to be both an asset and a potential liability, it isn't strictly one or the other.
Delta leases a big portion of its fleet, which makes your example pretty bad.
Not a terrible example. The planes delta owns are delta’s assets; the planes the leasing company owns are the leasing company’s assets. The point is, the code and the planes are assets despite the maintenance required to keep them in revenue-generating state.
Not a very valuable one. Never had been. That's the funny part. So many people want software but then don't know what to do once they have it.
Developers that can’t see the change are blind.
Just this week, sun-tue. I added a fully functional subscription model to an existing platform, build out a bulk async elasticjs indexing for a huge database and migrated a very large Wordpress website to NextJS. 2.5 days, would have cost me at least a month 2 years ago.
To me, this sounds like:
AI is helping me solve all the issues that using AI has caused.
Wordpress has a pretty good export and Markdown is widely supported. If you estimate 1 month of work to get that into NextJS, then maybe the latter is not a suitable choice.
it's wild that somehow with regards to AI conversations lately someone can say "I saved 3 months doing X" and someone can willfully and thoughtfully reply "No you didn't , you're wrong." without hesitation.
I feel bad for AI opponents mostly because it seems like the drive to be against the thing is stronger than the drive towards fact or even kindness.
My .02c: I am saving months of efforts using AI tools to fix old (PRE-AI, PREHISTORIC!) codebases that have literally zero AI technical debt associated to them.
I'm not going to bother with the charts & stats, you'll just have to trust me and my opinion like humans must do in lots of cases. I have lots of sharp knives in my kitchen, too -- but I don't want to have to go slice my hands on every one to prove to strangers that they are indeed sharp -- you'll just have to take my word.
Just look at the METR study. All predictions were massive time savings but all observations were massive time losses. That's why we don't believe you when you say you saved time.
You should know better than to form a opinion from one study. I could show you endless examples of a study concluding untrue things, endless…
I’ve been full time (almost solo) building an ERP system for years and my development velocity has gone roughly 2x. The new features are of equal quality, everything is code reviewed, everything is done in my style, adhering to my architectural patterns. Not to mention I’ve managed to build a mobile app alongside my normal full time work, something I wouldn’t have even had the time to attempt to learn about without the use of agents.
So do you think I’m lying or do you just think my eyes are deceiving me somehow?
I think any measurement of development velocity is shaky, especially when measured between two different workflows, and especially when measured by the person doing the development.
Such an estimate is far less reliable than your eyes are.
So if people want to do more and better studies, that sounds great. But I have a good supply of salt for self-estimates. I'm listening to your input, but it's much easier for your self-assessment to have issues than you're implying.
Not saying you're wrong, but solo developers building (relatively) greenfield projects are the best bet for increased AI productivity.
Solo dev projects are usually reasonably sized (< million LOC), style is more uniform, there's fewer silos etc. etc.
Good studies look at a broader picture.
It’s a very good point. I have full control and everything is incredibly uniform, and more recently designed with agents in mind. This must make things significantly easier for the LLM.
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Slice THEIR hands. They might say yours are rigged.
I'm a non dev and the things I'm building blow me away. I think many of these people criticizing are perhaps more on the execution side and have a legitimate craft they are protecting.
If you're more on the managerial side, and I'd say a trusting manager not a show me your work kind, then you're more likely to be open and results oriented.
From a developer POV, or at least my developer POV, less code is always better. The best code is no code at all.
I think getting results can be very easy, at first. But I force myself to not just spit out code, because I've been burned so, so, so many times by that.
As software grows, the complexity explodes. It's not linear like the growth of the software itself, it feels exponential. Adding one feature takes 100x the time it should because everything is just squished together and barely working. Poorly designed systems eventually bring velocity to a halt, and you can eventually reach a point where even the most trivial of changes are close to impossible.
That being said, there is value in throwaway code. After all, what is an Excel workbook if not throwaway code? But never let the throwaway become a product, or grow too big. Otherwise, you become a prisoner. That cheeky little Excel workbook can turn into a full-blown backend application sitting on a share drive, and it WILL take you a decade to migrate off of it.
yeah AI is perfect at refactor and cleaning things up, you just have to instruct it. I've improved my code significanlty by asking it to clean up, refactor function to pure that I can use & test over a messy application. Without creating new bugs.
Holy hell, AI is not at all perfect at refactoring. Absolutely terrified on your behalf if you believe this to be the case.
You can use AI to simplify software stacks too, only your imagination limits you. How do you see things working with many less abstraction layers?
I remember coding BASIC with POKE/PEEK assembly inside it, same with Turbo Pascal with assembly (C/C++ has similar extern abilities). Perhaps you want no more web or UI (TUI?). Once you imagine what you are looking for, you can label it and go from there.
I am a (very) senior dev with decades of experience. And I, too, am blown away by the massive productivity gains I get from the use of coding AIs.
Part of the craft of being a good developer is keeping up with current technology. I can't help thinking that those who oppose AI are not protecting legitimate craft, but are covering up their own laziness when it comes to keeping up. It seems utterly inconceivable to me that anyone who has kept up would oppose this technology.
There is a huge difference between vibe coding and responsible professional use of AI coding assistants (the principle one, of course, being that AI-generated code DOES get reviewed by a human).
But that, being said, I am enormously supportive of vibe coding by amateur developers. Vibe coding is empowering technology that puts programming power into the hands of amateur developers, allowing them to solve the problems that they face in their day-to-day work. Something that we've been working toward for decades! Will it be professional-quality code? No. Of course not. Will it do what it needs to do? Invariably, yes.
I think the issue is that most vibe coders believe it is professional quality code, or is sufficient moving forward.
It produces code (in the hands of an amateur) that is good enough for a demo or at best an MVP, but it’s not at all a stable foundation.
It is wild. I must admit I have a bit of Gell Mann amnesia when it comes to HN comments. I often check them to see what people think about an article, but then every time the article touches on something I know deeply, I realize it’s all just know-it-all puffery. Then I forget and check it when it’s on the many things I do not know much about.
My cofounder is extremely technically competent, but all these people are like good luck with your spaghetti vibe code. It’s humorous.
You are assuming a lot of things.
The work was moving the many landing pages & content elements to NextJS, so we can test, iterate and develop faster. While having a more stable system. This was a 10 year old website, with a very large custom WordPress codebase and many plugins.
The content is still in WordPress backend & will be migrated in the second phase.
To me, this sounds like:
If AI was good at a certain task then it was a bad task in the first place.
Which is just run of the mill dogmatic thinking.
There is much going on in that exchange.
I don't even know what a Wordpress site is anymore.
> then maybe the latter is not a suitable choice.
But now it only takes days which makes it suitable?
There also is the paradoxical question if it is worth the time from someone who knows what they are doing? how would you even tell?
>Code is not an asset it's a liability
This would imply companies could delete all their code and do better, which doesn't seem true?
A more accurate description of code is that it’s a depreciating asset, perhaps, or an asset that requires maintenance cost. Neither of which is a liability
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All the productivity enhancement provided by LLMs for programming is caused by circumventing the copyright restrictions of the programs on which they have been trained.
You and anyone else could have avoided spending millions for programmer salaries, had you been allowed to reuse freely any of the many existing proprietary or open-source programs that solved the same or very similar problems.
I would have no problem with everyone being able to reuse any program, without restrictions, but with these AI programming tools the rich are now permitted to ignore copyrights, while the poor remain constrained by them, as before.
The copyright for programs has caused a huge multiplication of the programming effort for many decades, with everyone rewriting again and again similar programs, in order for their employing company to own the "IP". Now LLMs are exposing what would have happened in an alternative timeline.
The LLMs have the additional advantage of fast and easy searching through a huge database of programs, but this advantage would not have been enough for a significant productivity increase over a competent programmer that would have searched the same database by traditional means, to find reusable code.
> the rich are now permitted to ignore copyrights, while the poor remain constrained by them, as before.
Claude Code is $20 a month, and I get a lot of usage out of it. I don't see how cutting edge AI tools are only for the rich. The name OpenAI is often mocked, but they did succeed at bringing the cutting edge of AI to everyone, time and time again.
Oh they will totally rent you their privilege, further enrichening themselves. Of course!
My cofounder said his plan is $100 a month and if it were $1,000 he’d still pay it.
So much of programming is tedium.
Cofounder of what?
Intellectual property law is a net loss to humanity, so by my reckoning, anything which lets us all work around that overhead gets some extra points on the credit side of the ledger.
I agree in spirit, but in actual fact this subversion of intellectual property is disproportionately beneficial to those who can afford to steal from others and those who can afford to enforce their copyright, while disproportionately disadvantageous to those who can't afford to fend off a copyright lawsuit or can't afford to sue to enforce their copyright.
The GP can free-ride uncredited on the collective work of open source at their leisure, but I'm sure Disney would string me up by my earlobes if I released a copywashed version of Toy Story 6.
Then it really proves how much the economy would be booming if we abolished copyright, doesn't it? China ignores copyright too, and look at them surpassing us in all aspects of technology, while Western economies choose to sabotage themselves to keep money flowing upwards to old guys.
Well no, because copyright != cannot use.
"Available for use" and "Automatically rewritten to work in your codebase fairly well" is very different, so copyright is probably not the blocker technically
Yeah, I love the idea that all software could just be cobbled together from other software, but none of it does anything new.
China is not surpassing the US in all aspects of technology.
There is still much for them to steal.
Can you name one area of technology where the USA has better technology than China? I'll wait.
Software
The theory behind copyright is that the enshrined monopoly guarantees profits and thus encourages r&d.
China steals our r&d (both copyrighted and non) and gets a lot of theirs from state funding.
I don’t think I’d take China’s success as proof that the copyright system doesn’t work.
It is proof that intellectual property is a transient and fickle thing, easily subverted when there is no legal framework to protect it.
Sounds like you're saying state funded R&D works much better than copyright funded R&D
> Meanwhile, my cofounder is rewriting code we spent millions of salary on in the past by himself in a few weeks.
Why?
Im not even casting shade - I think AI is quite amazing for coding and can increase productivity and quality a lot.
But I'm curious why he's doing this.
The codebase is old and really hard to work on. It’s a game that existed pre-iPhone and still has decent revenue but could use some updating. We intentionally shrank our company down to auto-pilot mode and frankly don’t even have a working development environment anymore.
It was basically cost prohibitive to change anything significant until Claude became able to do most of the work for us. My cofounder (also CTO of another startup in the interim) found himself with a lot of time on his hands unexpectedly and thought it would be a neat experiment and has been wowed by the results.
Much in the same way people on HN debate when we will have self driving cars while millions of people actually have their Teslas self-driving every day (it reminds me of when I got to bet that Joe Biden would win the election after he already did) those who think AI coding is years away are missing what’s happening now. It’s a powerful force magnifier in the hands of a skilled programmer and it’ll only get better.
I agree that code is being written in exactly the same sense that Teslas are driving themselves.
Yes, in both cases it takes someone to steer. It’s not a complete solution. Someone who can’t drive can’t just ride a Tesla around town and someone who can’t program can’t vibe code anything complex.
But if it can do 90% of the work for you, it is a serious force magnifier.
> But if it can do 90% of the work for you, it is a serious force magnifier.
Well, we could characterize a Tesla as doing 90% of the work but it's not at all a force multiplier. Your "10%" supervisory contribution takes just as long as doing 100%.
You didn't mention it was rewriting the codebase from scratch. That's the consensus, that AI is only good at scaffolding.
Oh it can't do 90% of the work for you. It CAN type 90% of the work for you, but someone still has to read the code and know what the best course of action is, supposedly...... I suppose some people never learned to use their IDEs or to touch type so as to find LLMs such a crazy productivity boost.
Do you have tests at least? Seems reckless to yolo the codebase if you don’t or can’t test easily.
He’s simply building an entirely new app. The old codebase plods on untouched.
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Millions? Of people in self driving teslas?
The actual number of such vehicles produced is two orders of magnitude less.
No it isn’t. They sold 1.6 million vehicles last year and every one of them can self drive. At least once a year they give out free access to it and I don’t know a Tesla owner who hasn’t tried it.
You’re right that it doesn’t happen every day but that doesn’t change the point, you all are debating whether something can happen after it already happened.
> you all are debating whether something can happen after it already happened
My goalposts have always been on levels 3 and 4.
Elon Musk has been promising level 4, sometimes level 5, this entire time.
It has not already happened. The cars are level 2.
Sounds like a good reason to rewrite. And sounds like a rewrite just would not happen by any other means. Thanks for sharing the details.
When I say I want a self driving car I mean one that actually drives itself so I don't have to be involved other than setting the destination.
What Tesla is selling now is the worst of both worlds. You still have to pay attention but it's way more boring so it's really hard to do so. Well until it suddenly decides to ram a barrier at highway speeds.
Wake me up when I can have a beer and watch a movie while it's driving.
It's not directly comparable. The first time writing the code is always the hardest because you might have to figure out the requirements along the way. When you have the initial system running for a while, doing a second one is easier because all the requirements kinks are figured out.
By the way, why does your co-founder have to do the rewrite at all?
I find the opposite to be true. Once you know the problem you’re trying to solve (which admittedly can be the biggest lift), writing the fist cut of the code is fun, and you can design the system and set precedent however you want. Once it’s in the wild, you have to work within the consequences of your initial decisions, including bad ones.
... And the undocumented code spaghetti that might come with a codebase that was touch by numerous hands.
You can compare it - just factor that in. And compare writing it with AI vs. writing it without AI.
We have no clue the scope of the rewrite but for anything non-trivial, 2 weeks just isn't going to be possible without AI. To the point of you probably not doing it at all.
I have no idea why they are rewriting the code. That's another matter.
G’day Matt from myself another person with a cofounder both getting insane value out of AI and astounded at the attitudes around HN.
You sound like complete clones of us :-)
We’ve been at it since July and have built what used to take 3-5 people that long.
To the haters: I use TDD and review every line of code, I’m not an animal.
There’s just 2 of us but some days it feels like we command an army.
Senior developer here, your co-founder is making a huge mistake. Their lack of knowledge about the codebase will be your undoing. PS. I work in GenAI.
lol same. I just wrote a bunch of diagrams with mermaid that would legit take me a week, also did a mock of an UI for a frontend engineer that would take me another week to do .. or some designers. All of that in between meetings...
Waiting for it to actually go well to see what else I can do !
The more I have this experience and read people maligning AI for coding, the more I think the junior developers are actually not the ones in danger.
Oh I've thought this for years. As an L7, basically my primary role is to serve as someone to bounce ideas off of, and to make recommendations based on experience. A chatbot, with its virtually infinite supply of experience, could ostensibly replace my role way sooner than it could a solid junior/mid-level coder. The main thing it needs is a consistent vision and direction that aligns with the needs of nearby teams, which frankly sounds not all that hard to write in code (I've been considering doing this).
Probably the biggest gap would be the ability to ignite, drive, and launch new initiatives. How does an AI agent "lead" an engineering team? That's not something you can code up in an agent runtime. It'd require a whole culture change that I have a hard time seeing in reality. But of course if there comes a point where AI takes all the junior and mid-level coding jobs, then at that point there's no culture to change, so staff/principal jobs would be just as at risk.
I dont think it's a replacement for that but it's definitely provides some of it. Whereas senior+ level people were required before.
I think that's sort of a theme with LLMs. It's not that it's better than "the real thing" (in this case a senior+ software engineer) or that its without flaws... but it's a fucking service. Having just a semblance of an advanced software engineer in your pocket is a game changer. It doesn't need to be perfect or better than the real thing to fundamentally change things.
I have the complete opposite impression w.r.t. architecture decisions. The LLMs can cargo cult an existing design, but they do not think through design consequences well at all. I use them as a rubber duck non-stop, but I think I respect less than one out of every six of their suggestions.
They've gotten pretty good IME so long as you guide it to think out of the box, give it the right level of background info, have it provide alternatives instead of recommendations, and do your best not to bias it in any particular direction.
That said, the thing it really struggles with is when the best approach is "do nothing". Which, given that a huge chunk of principal level work is in deciding what NOT to do, it may be a while before LLMs can viably take that role. A principal LLM based on current tech would approve every idea that comes across it, and moreover sell each of them as "the exact best thing needed by the organization right now!"
Knowing when to nudge it out of a rut (or say skip it) is probably the biggest current skill. This is why experienced people get generally much better results.
I’m not sure. I keep asking the LLMs whether I should rewrite project X in language Y and it just asks back, “what’s your problem?” And most of the times it shoots my problems down showing exactly why rewriting won’t fix that particular problem. Heck, it even quoted Joel Spolsky once!
Of course, I could just _tell_ it to rewrite, but that’s different.
Damn, I'm sure even I'd have caved at some point. Did you get to VHDL? Your project etched in pure silicon? Yes! Must!
Oh no, my job is safe no longer!
I have been able to prototype way faster. I can explain how I want a prototype reworked and it's often successful. Doesn't always work, but super useful more often than not.
That line on the chart labeled “profit” is really going to go up now!
I myself am saving a small fortune on design and photography and getting better results while doing it.
Yay! Let's put all the artists out of business and funnel all the money to the tech industry. That's how to build a vibrant society. Yay!
In this thread: people throwing shade on tech that works, comparing it to a perfect world and making weird assumptions like no tests, no E2E or manual testing just to make a case. Hot take: most SWEs produce shit code, be it by constraints of any kind or their own abilities. LLMs do the same but cost less and can move faster. If you know how to use it, code will be fine. Code is a commodity and a lot of people will be blindsided by that in the future. If your value proposition is translating requirements into code, I feel sorry for you. The output quality of the LLM depends on the abilities of the operator. And most SWEs lack the system thinking to be good here, in my experience.
As a fractional CTO and in my decade of being co-founder/CTO I saw a lot of people and codebases and most of it is just bad. You need to compare real life codebases and outputs of developers, not what people wished it would be like. And the reality is that most of it sucks and most SWEs are bad at their jobs.
Howcome you need to re-write millions of dollars in code?
Sounds like an argument for better hiring practices and planning.
Producing a lot of code isn’t proof of anything.
Yep. Let’s see the projects and more importantly the incremental returns…
When I read the blog post, the impression I get is that the author is referring to the proposed "business" of licensing or selling "generative AI" (i.e., making money for the licensor or seller), not whether generative AI is saving money for any particular user
The author's second reference, an article from The Atlantic, describing the copyright liability issues with "generative AI", has been submitted to HN four times in the last week
AI Memorization Research (theatlantic.com)
2 points by tagyro 5 hours ago | flag | past | discuss
AI's Memorization Crisis (theatlantic.com)
2 points by twalichiewicz 1 day ago | flag | past | 1 comment
AI's Memorization Crisis (theatlantic.com)
3 points by palad1n 4 days ago | flag | past | 1 comment
AI's Memorization Crisis (theatlantic.com)
4 points by casparvitch 4 days ago | flag | past | discuss
> Meanwhile, my cofounder is rewriting code we spent millions of salary on in the past by himself in a few weeks.
This is one of those statements that would horrify any halfway competent engineer. A cowboy coder going in, seeing a bunch of code and going 'I should rewrite this' is one of the biggest liabilities to any stable system.
I assume this is because they're already insanely profitable after hitting PMF and are now trying to bring down infra costs?
Right? RIGHT?!
My cofounder is an all the way competent engineer. Making this many assumptions would horrify someone halfway competent with logic though.
It's crazy how some people here will just make all the assumptions possible in order to refuse to believe you. Anyone who's used a good model with open code or equivalent will know that it's plausible. Refactoring is really cheap now when paired with someone competent.
I'm doing the same as your co-founder currently. In a few days, I've rewritten old code that took previous employees months to do. Their implementation sucked and barely worked, the new one is so much better and has tests to prove it.
HN comments are wild.
Every professional SWE is going to stare off into the middle distance, as they flashback to some PM or VP deciding to show everyone they still got it.
The "how hard could it be" fallacy claims another!
LLMs do the jobs of developers, thereby eating up countless jobs.
LLMs do the jobs of developers without telling semi-technical arrogant MBA holders “no, you’re dumb”, thereby creating all the same jobs as before but also a butt-ton more juggling expensive cleanup mixed with ego-massaging.
We’re talking a 2-10x improvement in ‘how hard could it be?’ iterations. Consultant candy.
This has become my new hell.
PM has an idea. PM vibe codes a demo of this idea. PM shows it to the VP. VP gets excited and says "when can we have this." I look at the idea and estimate it'll take two people six months. VP and PM say "what the heck, but AI built the demo in a weekend, you should be able to do this with one engineer in a month." I get one day closer to quitting.
As someone who is more involved in shaping the product direction rather than engineering what composes the product - I will readily admit many product people are utterly, utterly clueless.
Most people have no clue the craftsmanship, work etc it takes to create a great product. LLMs are not going to change this, in fact they serve as a distraction.
I’m not a SWE so I gain nothing by being bearish on the contributions of LLMs to the real economy ;)
Oh, it wasn't a bash on product people, I'm sorry if it came off that way.
It's a reference to a trope where the VP of Eng or CTO (who was an engineer decades ago) gets it in their head that they want to code again and writes something absolute dogshit terrible because their skills have degraded. Unfortunately they are your boss's boss's boss and can make you deal with it anyways.
I've actually seen it IRL once, to his credit the dude finally realized the engineer smiles were pained grimaces and it got quietly dropped lol.
Definitely been in that room multiple times.
Exactly, our venture studio that partnered with our startup collapsed. The code there team wrote was that took two years was terrible and didn't fully function. My CTO and I are rewriting 60% of the code with AI! Now everything works with bugs.....
> Meanwhile, my cofounder is rewriting code we spent millions of salary on in the past by himself in a few weeks.
If the LLM generating the code introduced a bug, who will be fixing it? The founder that does not know how to code or the LLM that made the mistake first?
>rewriting code
Key thing here. The code was already written, so rewriting it isn't exactly adding a lot of quantifiable value. If millions weren't spent in the first place, there would be no code to rewrite.
no need to wait, by using AI you already are mediocre at best (because you forego skill and quality for speed)
Is this also true of carpenters who use circular saws and airguns instead of hand saws and hammers?
these are very different tools tbh
>I myself am saving a small fortune on design and photography and getting better results while doing it.
Is this because you are improving your already existing design and photography skills and business ?
Or have you bootstrapped from the scratch with AI ?
Do you mind sharing or giving a hint ?
Thanks!
Is the cofounder "rewriting" that code providing zero of the existing code as context? Doing it in a completely green field fashion?
Or is any of the existing platform is used as an input for the rewrite?
Out of curiosity, what is your product?
- [deleted]
The problem is... you're going to deprive yourself of the talent chain in the long run, and so is everyone else who is switching over to AI, both generative like ChatGPT and transformative like the various translation, speech recognition/transcription or data wrangling models.
For now, it works out for companies - but forward to, say, ten years in the future. There won't be new intermediates or seniors any more to replace the ones that age out or quit the industry entirely in frustration of them not being there for actual creativity but to clean up AI slop, simply because there won't have been a pipeline of trainees and juniors for a decade.
But by the time that plus the demographic collapse shows its effects, the people who currently call the shots will be in pension, having long since made their money. And my generation will be left with collapse everywhere and find ways to somehow keep stuff running.
Hell, it's already bad to get qualified human support these days. Large corporations effectively rule with impunity, with the only recourse consumers have being to either shell out immense sums of money for lawyers and court fees or turning to consumer protection/regulatory authorities that are being gutted as we speak both in money and legal protections, or being swamped with AI slop like "legal assistance" AI hallucinating case law.
> There won't be new intermediates or seniors any more to replace the ones that age out or quit the industry entirely in frustration of them not being there for actual creativity but to clean up AI slop, simply because there won't have been a pipeline of trainees and juniors for a decade.
There are be plenty of self taught developers who didn't need any "traineeship". That proportion will increase even more with AI/LLMs and the fact that there are no more jobs for youngsters. And actually from looking at the purely toxic comments on this thread, I would say that's a good thing for youngsters to be not be exposed to such "seniors".
Credentialism is dead. "Either ship or shutup" should be the mantra of this age.
More like "Either slop or shut up". Classic startup culture, fuck processes and doing things right, it's all about larping and lying to investors. Damn right, your value as an engineer is all about how much slop you can churn out, I'd love (not) to be in a team filled with people like you.
>my cofounder is rewriting code we spent millions of salary on in the past by himself in a few weeks.
I was expecting a language reference (we all know which one), to get more speed, safety and dare I say it "web scale" (insert meme). :)
> and dare I say it "web scale"
Obligatory reference https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2F-DItXtZs
Good luck with fixing that future mess. This is such an incredibly short sighted approach to running a company and software dev that I think your cofounder is likely going to torpedo your company.
Doesn't this imply that you were not getting the level of efficiency out of your investment? It would be a little odd to say this publicly as this says more about you and your company. The question would be what your code does and if it is profitable.
I suspect he means as a trillion dollar corporation led endeavor.
I trained a small neural net on pics of a cat I had in the 00s (RIP George, you were a good cat).
Mounted a webcam I had gotten for free from somewhere, above the cat door, in the exterior of the house.
If the neural net recognized my cat it switched off an electromagnetic holding the pet door locked. Worked perfectly until I moved out of the rental.
Neural nets are, end of the day, pretty cool. It's the data center business that's the problem. Just more landlords, wannabe oligarchs, claiming ownership over anything they can get the politicians to give them.
On design and photography? So you’re filling your product with slop images and graphics? Users won’t like it
> I myself am saving a small fortune on design and photography and getting better results while doing it.
Tell me you have bland taste without telling me you have bland taste. But if your customers eat it up and your slop manages to stand out in sea of slop, who am I to dislike slop.