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Exactly the comment I came to make after reading this article. The article is basically claiming that "trying different things until something works" is what ta
by seneca 1y ago
Exactly the comment I came to make after reading this article. The article is basically claiming that "trying different things until something works" is what takes time, but the actual act of "trying things" requires development time. I can't see how someone can think about this topic this long, which the author clearly has, and come to this conclusion.
Perhaps I've just misunderstood the point, but it seems like a nonsensical argument.
- flail 1y agoIf only "trying things" always equaled "developing things". There's a whole body of knowledge (under the Lean Startup umbrella) that argues otherwise. Do we always have to build it before we know that it will work (or, in 9 cases out of 10, that it will not work)? Even more so, do we have to build a fully-fledged version of it to know? If yes, then I agree, development is the bottleneck.
- thenanyu 1y agoThe lean startup offers a lot of lossy proxies for building and releasing things because it presupposes that building things takes a long time
- flail 1y agoI would actually challenge you to read/reread Lean Startup with the following filter: Disregard parts that explicitly assume that they are relevant only because, in 2013, development was expensive. There are very few parts that you would throw out.
- croes 1y ago> trying different things until something works That sounds like an awful way of software design. Trial and error isn’t engineering but explains the current state of software security.
- seneca 1y agoSure, and that is more my own clunky paraphrasing than anything the article states. Iterating and testing to find a fit for customers is the business/product side of software. How you execute on those iterations is engineering.
- croes 1y agoBut the business/product side is the shallow side, customers rarely care about what happens behind the curtain. And most customer needs are pretty similar in the backend
- thenanyu 1y agoTrying things and changing if it doesn’t work is the only way I know how to build software. What would you do? Don’t change?
- croes 1y agoThe question is, why doesn’t it work? Erroneous code, erroneous algorithm, missing feature in the underlying infrastructure? The effort it takes to implement a feature makes is more likely you think twice before you start. If the effort goes to zero, so does the thinking. We will turn from programmers to just LLM customers sooner or later. Because testing if it works can be done by none programmers
- chii 1y ago> Because testing if it works can be done by none programmers like testing whether a building is structurally sound can just be done by the inhabitants!
- flail 1y agoIn no part was that suggestion addressed to software design/architecture. It is telling that, while the article's theme is product management (and its relationship with the pace of development), that context is largely ignored in some comments. It's as if the article's scope was purely what happens within the IDE and/or AI agent of choice. The whole point is that the perspective necessarily should be broader. Otherwise, we make it a circular argument, really: development is a bottleneck of development. Well, hard to disagree on that.