I think there are still lots of code “artisans” who are completely dogmatic about what code should look like, once the tunnel vision goes and you realise the code just enables the business it all of a sudden becomes a velocity God send.
Two years in and we are waiting to see all you people (who are free of our tunnel vision) fly high with your velocity. I don't see anyone, am I doing something wrong?
Your words predict an explosion of unimaginary magnitude for new code and for new buisnesses. Where is it? Nowhere.
Edit: And dont start about how you vibed a SaaS service, show income numbers from paying customers (not buyouts)
The author of the library (kentonv) comments in the HN thread that he said it took him a few days to write the library with AI help, while he thinks it would have taken weeks or months to write manually.
Also, while it may be technically true we're "two years in", I don't think this is a fair assessment. I've been trying AI tools for a while, and the first time I felt "OK, now this is really starting to enhance my velocity" was with the release of Claude 4 in May of this year.
But that example is of writing a green field library that deals with an extremely well documented spec. While impressive, this isn’t what 99% of software engineering is. I’m generally a believer/user but this is a poor example to point at and say “look, gains”.
I have insight into enough code bases to know its a non zero number. Your logic is bizarre, if you’ve never seen a kangaroo would you just believe they don’t exist?
Show us the numbers, stop wasting our time. NUMBERS.
Also, why would I ever believe kangaroos exist if I haven't seen any evidence of them? this is a fallacy. You are portraying the healthy skepticism as stupid because you already know kangaroos exist.
What numbers? It doesn’t matter if it’s one or a million, it’s had a positive impact on the velocity of a non zero number of projects.
You wrote:
> Two years in and we are waiting to see all you people (who are free of our tunnel vision) fly high with your velocity. I don't see anyone, am I doing something wrong?
Yes is the answer. I could probably put it in front of your face and you’d reject it. You do you. All the best.
Perhaps I'm misreading the person to whom you're replying, but usefullness, while subjective, isn't typically based on one person's opinion. If enough people agree on the usefullness of something, we as a collective call it "useful".
Perhaps we take the example of a blender. There's enough need to blend/puree/chop food-like-items, that a large group of people agree on the usefullness of a blender. A salad-shooter, while a novel idea, might not be seen as "useful".
Creating software that most folks wouldn't find useful still might be considered "neat" or "cool". But it may not be adding anything to the industry. The fact that someone shipped something quickly doesn't make it any better.
Ultimately, or at least in this discussion, we should decouple the software’s end use from the question of whether it satisfies the creator’s requirements and vision in a safe and robust way. How you get there and what happens after are two different problems.
It's not for nothing. When a profitable product can be created in a fraction of the time and effort previously required, the tool to create it will attract scammers and grifters like bees to honey. It doesn't matter if the "business" around it fails, if a new one can be created quickly and cheaply.
This is the same idea behind brands with random letters selling garbage physical products, only applied to software.
The issue is not with how code looks. It's with what it does, and how it does it. You don't have to be an "artisan" to notice the issues moi2388 mentioned.
The actual difference is between people who care about the quality of the end result, and the experience of users of the software, and those who care about "shipping quickly" no matter the state of what they're producing.
This difference has always existed, but ML tools empower the latter group much more than the former. The inevitable outcome of this will be a stark decline of average software quality, and broad user dissatisfaction. While also making scammers and grifters much more productive, and their scams more lucrative.
There are very good reason that code should look a certain way and it comes from years of experience and the fact that code is written once but read and modified much more.
When the first bugs come up you see that the velocity was not god sent and you end up hiring one of the many "LLM code fixer" companies that are poping up like mushrooms.
No, they're not. It's critically important if you're part of an engineering team.
If everyone does their own thing, the codebase rapidly turns to mush and is unreadable.
And you need humans to be able to read it the moment the code actually matters and needs to stand up to adversaries. If you work with money or personal information, someone will want to steal that. Or you may have legal requirements you have to meet.
You’ve made a sweeping statement there, there are swathes of teams working in startups still trying to find product market fit. Focusing on quality in these situations is folly, but that’s not even the point. My point is you can ship quality to any standard using an llm, even your standards. If you can’t that’s a skill issue on your part.
