alt Hacker NewsProduct Development is being Rewritten
Comments
There is no shortage of articles on the HN front page, stating that being "just a code monkey" is likely going to have much less employment options soon-ish.
A likely correct but also at this point rather stale observation.
The graph of the engine efficiency vs number of horses per person at the end doesn't fit IMO. I am tired of people trying to make these analogies between the following transitions:
- Horses to Engines
(non-deterministic to deterministic)
- Assembly to Higher-Level Language
(deterministic to deterministic)
- Higher-Level Language to LLM Prompts
(deterministic to non-deterministic)
These things are not the same. They are all fundamentally different transitions.
This post seems very concerned about what a product does - and rightly so. However, it doesn't really talk about figuring out what a product doesn't do. This is a blind spot large enough to fly a 747 full of CVEs through.
Early stage hands-on involvement in shaping the code base’s architecture is still important if you want to build a product that can scale cleanly as you add more features.
I assume the name of this startup is meant to be pronounced like "revel" rather than "revile."
This just in: slop vomit company is telling you we should make more slop vomit and that the code matters less and less.
If your goal is to post that slop on linkedin and make a shitty startup that gets bought within 5 years, sure. In the mean time, the adults in the room will continue to maintain well thought out, well working software.
Agree on the changing work interface layer going higher to product capabilities, but not on “the code base is no longer important”. It’s easy to dismiss given how easy it is to ask an agent to generate a bunch of code. But the code base encodes the intersection of the orgs learnings and its arc of product growth as well. Good code bases encode the learnings as checks and abstractions that form the foundation for future growth. It would be a mistake to give up this formal language. Personally, I would bet on better abstractions in code bases, and being able to embed your product description in code, for high leverage and verifiability.