alt Hacker NewsIn our team's experience, the product of agents is generally The Homer (1). It does work, but it's vastly overengineered.
When I personally want tight code, I have to spend a considerable amount of time adjusting it manually:
- It needs to be trimmed down. In my experience, at least one agent I use struggles to produce minimalist designs, and it's very frustrating
- I need to consider whether there are solutions based on higher-level assumptions, that AIs typically miss
- I need to check whether there are off-the-shelf solutions - AIs like to reinvent the wheel
IMO, software production has become a mass-produced commodity in every sense - it's much more expensive to produce software manually, but the quality is not the same.
Replies
If software has become a mass-produced commodity then seems to me the software business will become a much more finance focused business
You will really have to weigh the cost of making the software against the expected revenue.
> software production has become a mass-produced commodity
For who?
The public? The public has never liked buying software at any price.
Businesses? Businesses need higher quality software when it's relevant to their core competencies, so they hire people instead. Buying competing SaaS or depending too much on AI is throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
As a business user, the same thing is true for non-code documents. The biggest exertion is reducing the excessive slop down to concise, clear points.
No surprise, LLM companies optimize for waste. More tokens, and more prompts means more revenue. Reminds of Google’s Prabhakar Raghavan story: deliberately making search worse [1]
[1]: https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/24/naming-names/#prabhakar-r...
This was more true a few months ago but Fable has improved the situation considerably.
Also just remember - minimalist code looks and feels great but customers do not read your code. I have caught myself many times providing "corrections" to abstractions that were already ~fine, just not perfect. The average SWE costs $200/hr. Careful you don't burn $50 worrying about code that will likely be rewritten or can be better abstracted when that's actually needed.
It took me a few seconds of deliberating if The Homer was a reference to baseball or "The Odyssey" and then realized there was a footnote
> software production has become a mass-produced commodity in every sense - it's much more expensive to produce software manually, but the quality is not the same.
Agreed.