alt Hacker NewsThis mirrors insights from Andrew Ng's recent AI startup talk [1].
I recall he mentions in this video that the new advice they are giving to founders is to throw away prototypes when they pivot instead of building onto a core foundation. This is because of the effects described in the article.
He also gives some provisional numbers (see the section "Rapid Prototyping and Engineering" and slides ~10:30) where he suggests prototype development sees a 10x boost compared to a 30-50% improvement for existing production codebases.
This feels vaguely analogous to the switch from "pets" to "livestock" when the industry switched from VMs to containers. Except, the new view is that your codebase is more like livestock and less like a pet. If true (and no doubt this will be a contentious topic to programmers who are excellent "pet" owners) then there may be some advantage in this new coding agent world to getting in on the ground floor and adopting practices that make LLMs productive.
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Thanks for pointing this out. I think this is an insightful analogy. We will likely manage generated code in the same way we manage large cloud computing complexes.
This probably does not apply to legacy code that has been in use for several years where the production deployment gives you a higher level of confidence (and a higher risk of regression errors with changes).
Have you blogged about your insights, the https://stillpointlab.com site is very sparse as is @stillpointlab
IMO the problem with this pets vs. livestock analogy is that it focuses on the code when the value is really in the writers head. Their understanding and mental model of the code is what matters. AI tools can help with managing the code, helping the writer build their models and express their thoughts, but it has zero impact on where the true value is located.
Oo, the "pets vs. livestock" analogy really works better than the "craftsmen vs. slop-slinger" arguments.
Because using an LLM doesn't mean you devalue well-crafted or understandable results. But it does indicate a significant shift in how you view the code itself. It is more about the emotional attachment to code vs. code as a means to an end.
Great point, but just mentioning (nitpicking?) that I never heard about machines/containers referred to as "livestock", but rather in my milieu it's always "pets" vs "cattle". I now wonder if it's a geographical thing.