alt Hacker NewsI love great software and agree that great software is evolved - not built. The whole point of building v0.1 is to figure out what's wrong and should be fixed in v0.2
At the same time, there are broadly three motions in the loop: - thinking/discussing (what should it do) - building (Make it do that) - using (Seeing whether that is actually what it SHOULD do)
And then of course you repeat until you run out of time, money, patience, volition, etc. For some software there is a terminal state - it truly does exactly what it should. For most you're always reaching for it.
LLMs definitely accelerate 2 and potentially can help accelerate 1 and 3. As such cycle time can be reduced. It still may take 100 turns to get what you want, but I'd be surprised if the clock time for the 100 turns would be unchanged using AI.
> LLMs definitely accelerate 2 and potentially can help accelerate 1 and 3.
People that do think of using LLMs to accelerate 2 usually don’t think enough about 1. And from what I’ve seen, they quickly get tired of 3.
Most quality software I’ve seen usually starts from a small subset for the cycle and then incrementally add to it. LLM projects usually rush the building part and do too big of a job and it’s become cumbersome to design (sunken cost) and evaluate (too many variables). If you want to build shelters, you start with a small hut, not with a cathedral.