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Dylan16807yesterday at 8:27 PM1 replyview on HN

I interpreted that as you saying in a few months you could write the code but not to those standards.

If a single person can do the full job to full standards in a few months, then the whole idea of it being too annoying for a human to ever do falls apart. That's not that expensive. Your company can't spare you, sure, but most companies could handle that price.

And even with the adjustment to being something it's easy to hire someone for, that's still ballparks away from "in a week for a few dollars". Nearly every coding project is impossible for humans by that standard.


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lrvickyesterday at 8:47 PM

> Nearly every coding project is impossible for humans by that standard.

Exactly, which is why this small project, and the other dozen projects that need to be written to the same standards to make the final end result OS, would just simply not happen otherwise.

No small FOSS org can afford to spend person-years holding standards this high, which is why in practice most orgs just cut a ton of corners and pull in tons of dependencies no one will ever review and the attack surface that comes with them.

LLMs allow experienced engineers to get 10x as much done in the same time, and now that this is possible few will be willing to pay engineers to do it at 1x speeds again.

Just like once assemblers became normalized, few orgs would let people write all their assembly by hand anymore except for very small high performance sensitive portions.

Software engineering is not going away. It is just accelerating because we were able to move our attention up a layer again.

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