alt Hacker NewsAgree 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.
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Yeah, a bit of hyperbole there. I do think the codebase is still super important. Just less informative maybe, and becomes hard to reconcile with as the amount of changes in a codebase increases by an order of magnitude.
It is self-serving to say "the code base is no longer important" for companies that want to sell you LLM tokens for swarms of agents to have to constantly burn away at a pile of increasingly messy and broken code.
If they can convince people to never look at the code, the people will have no choice but to keep throwing more and more piles of their product at mysterious blobs of codebases that become increasingly difficult and expensive to manage.