alt Hacker NewsI’m working as a single solo developer of a tiny video game. I’m writing it in C with raylib. No coding assistants, no agents, not even a language server.
I only work on it for a few hours during the week. And it’s progressing at a reasonable pace that I’m happy with. I got cross-compilation from Linux to Windows going early on in a couple of hours. Wasn’t that hard.
I’ve had to rework parts of the code as I’ve progressed. I’ve had to live with decisions I made early on. It’s code. It’s fine.
I don’t really understand the, “more, better, faster,” cachet to be honest. Writing the code hasn’t been the bottle neck to developing software for a long time. It’s usually the thinking that takes most of the time and if that goes away well… I dunno, that’s weird. I will understand it even less.
Agree with writing less code though. The economics of throwing out 37k lines of code a week is… stupid in the extreme. If we get paid by the line we could’ve optimized for this long before LLM’s were invented. It’s not like more lines of code means more inventory to sell. It’s usually the opposite: the more bugs to fix, the more frustrated customers, the higher churn of exhausted developers.
Replies
Honestly I think you can tell pretty quickly if a company or person is approaching AI from the viewpoint of accelerating development and innovation or just looking to do the same amount of work with less people. The space has been flooded by mean-spirited people who love the idea of developers becoming obsolete, which is a viewpoint that isn't working out for a lot of companies right now...many are already scrambling to rehire. Approaching the situation practically, integrating AI as a tool and accelerator is the much smarter way and if done right will pay for itself anyway.
> Writing the code hasn’t been the bottle neck to developing software for a long time. It’s usually the thinking that takes most of the time
Does your coding not involve thinking? And if not, why are you not delighted to have AI take that over? Writing unthinking boilerplate is tedious garbage work.
Today I wanted to address a bug I found on a product I work on. At the intersection of platform migration and backwards compatibility I found some customers getting neither. I used an LLM to research the code paths and ensure that my understanding of the break was correct and what the potential side effects of my proposed fix would be. AI saved me stepping through code for hours to understand the side effects. I asked it for a nice description of the flow and it gave it to me, including the pieces I didn’t really know because I’d never even touched that code before. I could have done this. Would it have been a better use of my time than moving on to the next thing? Probably not. Stepping through function calls in an IDE is not my idea of good “thinking” work. Tracing through glue to understand how a magical property gets injected is a great job for a machine.
> Writing the code hasn’t been the bottle neck to developing software for a long time
It was!
pre-2022 people needed developers to build software for them, now with platforms like Replit, Lovable - people are creating their own tiny software projects, which wasn't easily accessible in the past.
If you say coding wasn't a bottleneck, then indirectly you could also say, you don't need developers. If you need developers, outcome of their other type of work (thinking, designing based on existing tools and so on) is actually CODE.
You can use LLM to write less code too. Just takes more intention. Which is kind of the whole point.
>Writing the code hasn’t been the bottle neck to developing software for a long time.
Then we're doing different things.
I didn't like GitHub so I wrote my own. 60k lines of code later... yes writing code was the bottleneck which has been eliminated. The bottleneck is now design, review, and quality assessments that can't be done trivially.
This isn't even the project I wanted to be doing, the tools that were available were holding me back so I wrote my own. It also consumes a few hours a week.
If you think writing code isn't the bottleneck then you aren't thinking big enough. If you don't WANT to think big enough, that's fine, I also do things for the joy of doing them.
[dead]
> Writing the code hasn’t been the bottle neck to developing software for a long time.
I see this on HN just so much and I am not sure what this is, almost seems like a political slogan that followers keep repeating.
I had to do some rough math in my head but in the last 5 years I have been involved with hiring roughly 40 SWEs. Every single one of them was hired because writing the code was THE bottleneck (the only one) and we needed more people to write the code
>I don’t really understand the, “more, better, faster,” cachet to be honest. Writing the code hasn’t been the bottle neck to developing software for a long time. It’s usually the thinking that takes most of the time and if that goes away well… I dunno, that’s weird. I will understand it even less.
This is what I've always found confusing as well about this push for AI. The act of typing isn't the hard part - its understanding what's going on, and why you're doing it. Using AI to generate code is only faster if you try and skip that step - which leads to an inevitable disaster