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Meanwhile, my cofounder is rewriting code we spent millions of salary on in the past by himself in a few weeks. I myself am saving a small fortune on design an

Meanwhile, my cofounder is rewriting code we spent millions of salary on in the past by himself in a few weeks. I myself am saving a small fortune on design and photography and getting better results while doing it. If this is not all that well I can’t wait until we get to mediocre!

merlincorey 9mo ago
> Meanwhile, my cofounder is rewriting code we spent millions of salary on in the past by himself in a few weeks. Code is not an asset it's a liability, and code that no one has reviewed is even more of a liability. However, in the end, execution is all that matters so if you and your cofounder are able to execute successfully with mountains of generated code then it doesn't matter what assets and liabilities you hold in the short term. The long term is a lot harder to predict in any case.
- _vertigo 9mo ago
  > Code is not an asset it's a liability, and code that no one has reviewed is even more of a liability. Code that solves problems and makes you money is by definition an asset. Whether or not the code in question does those things remains to be seen, but code is not strictly a liability or else no one would write it.
  - merlincorey 9mo ago
    "Code is a liability. What the code does for you is an asset." as quoted from https://wiki.c2.com/?SoftwareAsLiability https://wiki.c2.com/?SoftwareAsLiability with Last edit December 17, 2013. This discussion and distinction used to be well known, but I'm happy to help some people become "one of today's lucky 10,000" as quoted from https://xkcd.com/1053/ https://xkcd.com/1053/ because it is indeed much more interesting than the alternative approach.
    - sswatson 9mo ago
      It’s well known and also wrong. Delta’s airplanes also require a great deal of maintenance, and I’m sure they strive to have no more than are necessary for their objectives. But if you talk to one of Delta’s accountants, they will be happy to disabuse you of the notion that the planes are entered in the books as a liability.
      - kortilla 9mo ago
        Delta leases a big portion of its fleet, which makes your example pretty bad.
        simonsmithies 9mo ago
        Not a terrible example. The planes delta owns are delta’s assets; the planes the leasing company owns are the leasing company’s assets. The point is, the code and the planes are assets despite the maintenance required to keep them in revenue-generating state.
      - OneMorePerson 9mo ago
        It's possible for something to be both an asset and a potential liability, it isn't strictly one or the other.
      - _heimdall 9mo ago
        You're hinting at the underlying problem with the quote. "Asset" in the quote reads, at least to me, in the financial or accounting meaning of the term. "Liability" reads, again to me, in the sense of potential risk rather than the financial meaning. Its apples and oranges.
        Ygg2 9mo ago
        Liability is also an economic term. As in, "The bank's assets (debt) are my liability, and my assets (house) are the bank's liability." I don't think it's a wrong quote. Code's behavior is the asset, and code's source is the liability. You want to achieve maximum functionality for minimal source code investment.
  - tom_m 9mo ago
    Not a very valuable one. Never had been. That's the funny part. So many people want software but then don't know what to do once they have it.
- deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
- wouldbecouldbe 9mo ago
  Developers that can’t see the change are blind. Just this week, sun-tue. I added a fully functional subscription model to an existing platform, build out a bulk async elasticjs indexing for a huge database and migrated a very large Wordpress website to NextJS. 2.5 days, would have cost me at least a month 2 years ago.
  - fxtentacle 9mo ago
    To me, this sounds like: AI is helping me solve all the issues that using AI has caused. Wordpress has a pretty good export and Markdown is widely supported. If you estimate 1 month of work to get that into NextJS, then maybe the latter is not a suitable choice.
    - tengbretson 9mo ago
      To me, this sounds like: If AI was good at a certain task then it was a bad task in the first place. Which is just run of the mill dogmatic thinking.
    - serf 9mo ago
      it's wild that somehow with regards to AI conversations lately someone can say "I saved 3 months doing X" and someone can willfully and thoughtfully reply "No you didn't , you're wrong." without hesitation. I feel bad for AI opponents mostly because it seems like the drive to be against the thing is stronger than the drive towards fact or even kindness. My .02c: I am saving months of efforts using AI tools to fix old (PRE-AI, PREHISTORIC!) codebases that have literally zero AI technical debt associated to them. I'm not going to bother with the charts & stats, you'll just have to trust me and my opinion like humans must do in lots of cases. I have lots of sharp knives in my kitchen, too -- but I don't want to have to go slice my hands on every one to prove to strangers that they are indeed sharp -- you'll just have to take my word.
      - jbgt 9mo ago
        Slice THEIR hands. They might say yours are rigged. I'm a non dev and the things I'm building blow me away. I think many of these people criticizing are perhaps more on the execution side and have a legitimate craft they are protecting. If you're more on the managerial side, and I'd say a trusting manager not a show me your work kind, then you're more likely to be open and results oriented.
- Zababa 9mo ago
  >Code is not an asset it's a liability This would imply companies could delete all their code and do better, which doesn't seem true?
  - thehappypm 9mo ago
    A more accurate description of code is that it’s a depreciating asset, perhaps, or an asset that requires maintenance cost. Neither of which is a liability
aprdm 9mo ago
lol same. I just wrote a bunch of diagrams with mermaid that would legit take me a week, also did a mock of an UI for a frontend engineer that would take me another week to do .. or some designers. All of that in between meetings... Waiting for it to actually go well to see what else I can do !
- nonethewiser 9mo ago
  The more I have this experience and read people maligning AI for coding, the more I think the junior developers are actually not the ones in danger.
  - daxfohl 9mo ago
    Oh I've thought this for years. As an L7, basically my primary role is to serve as someone to bounce ideas off of, and to make recommendations based on experience. A chatbot, with its virtually infinite supply of experience, could ostensibly replace my role way sooner than it could a solid junior/mid-level coder. The main thing it needs is a consistent vision and direction that aligns with the needs of nearby teams, which frankly sounds not all that hard to write in code (I've been considering doing this). Probably the biggest gap would be the ability to ignite, drive, and launch new initiatives. How does an AI agent "lead" an engineering team? That's not something you can code up in an agent runtime. It'd require a whole culture change that I have a hard time seeing in reality. But of course if there comes a point where AI takes all the junior and mid-level coding jobs, then at that point there's no culture to change, so staff/principal jobs would be just as at risk.
    - TACIXAT 9mo ago
      I have the complete opposite impression w.r.t. architecture decisions. The LLMs can cargo cult an existing design, but they do not think through design consequences well at all. I use them as a rubber duck non-stop, but I think I respect less than one out of every six of their suggestions.
      - 9mo ago
segfaultex 9mo ago
Sounds like an argument for better hiring practices and planning. Producing a lot of code isn’t proof of anything.
- sheeh 9mo ago
  Yep. Let’s see the projects and more importantly the incremental returns…
fzeroracer 9mo ago
> Meanwhile, my cofounder is rewriting code we spent millions of salary on in the past by himself in a few weeks. This is one of those statements that would horrify any halfway competent engineer. A cowboy coder going in, seeing a bunch of code and going 'I should rewrite this' is one of the biggest liabilities to any stable system.
- hactually 9mo ago
  I assume this is because they're already insanely profitable after hitting PMF and are now trying to bring down infra costs? Right? RIGHT?!
- habinero 9mo ago
  Every professional SWE is going to stare off into the middle distance, as they flashback to some PM or VP deciding to show everyone they still got it. The "how hard could it be" fallacy claims another!
  - iwontberude 9mo ago
    Definitely been in that room multiple times.
  - sheeh 9mo ago
    As someone who is more involved in shaping the product direction rather than engineering what composes the product - I will readily admit many product people are utterly, utterly clueless. Most people have no clue the craftsmanship, work etc it takes to create a great product. LLMs are not going to change this, in fact they serve as a distraction. I’m not a SWE so I gain nothing by being bearish on the contributions of LLMs to the real economy ;)
    - habinero 9mo ago
      Oh, it wasn't a bash on product people, I'm sorry if it came off that way. It's a reference to a trope where the VP of Eng or CTO (who was an engineer decades ago) gets it in their head that they want to code again and writes something absolute dogshit terrible because their skills have degraded. Unfortunately they are your boss's boss's boss and can make you deal with it anyways. I've actually seen it IRL once, to his credit the dude finally realized the engineer smiles were pained grimaces and it got quietly dropped lol.
nsoonhui 9mo ago
It's not directly comparable. The first time writing the code is always the hardest because you might have to figure out the requirements along the way. When you have the initial system running for a while, doing a second one is easier because all the requirements kinks are figured out. By the way, why does your co-founder have to do the rewrite at all?
- el_benhameen 9mo ago
  I find the opposite to be true. Once you know the problem you’re trying to solve (which admittedly can be the biggest lift), writing the fist cut of the code is fun, and you can design the system and set precedent however you want. Once it’s in the wild, you have to work within the consequences of your initial decisions, including bad ones.
  - touristtam 9mo ago
    ... And the undocumented code spaghetti that might come with a codebase that was touch by numerous hands.
- nonethewiser 9mo ago
  You can compare it - just factor that in. And compare writing it with AI vs. writing it without AI. We have no clue the scope of the rewrite but for anything non-trivial, 2 weeks just isn't going to be possible without AI. To the point of you probably not doing it at all. I have no idea why they are rewriting the code. That's another matter.
venndeezl 9mo ago
I suspect he means as a trillion dollar corporation led endeavor. I trained a small neural net on pics of a cat I had in the 00s (RIP George, you were a good cat). Mounted a webcam I had gotten for free from somewhere, above the cat door, in the exterior of the house. If the neural net recognized my cat it switched off an electromagnetic holding the pet door locked. Worked perfectly until I moved out of the rental. Neural nets are, end of the day, pretty cool. It's the data center business that's the problem. Just more landlords, wannabe oligarchs, claiming ownership over anything they can get the politicians to give them.
bwestergard 9mo ago
Out of curiosity, what is your product?
mschuster91 9mo ago
The problem is... you're going to deprive yourself of the talent chain in the long run, and so is everyone else who is switching over to AI, both generative like ChatGPT and transformative like the various translation, speech recognition/transcription or data wrangling models. For now, it works out for companies - but forward to, say, ten years in the future. There won't be new intermediates or seniors any more to replace the ones that age out or quit the industry entirely in frustration of them not being there for actual creativity but to clean up AI slop, simply because there won't have been a pipeline of trainees and juniors for a decade. But by the time that plus the demographic collapse shows its effects, the people who currently call the shots will be in pension, having long since made their money. And my generation will be left with collapse everywhere and find ways to somehow keep stuff running. Hell, it's already bad to get qualified human support these days. Large corporations effectively rule with impunity, with the only recourse consumers have being to either shell out immense sums of money for lawyers and court fees or turning to consumer protection/regulatory authorities that are being gutted as we speak both in money and legal protections, or being swamped with AI slop like "legal assistance" AI hallucinating case law.
- saxenaabhi 9mo ago
  > There won't be new intermediates or seniors any more to replace the ones that age out or quit the industry entirely in frustration of them not being there for actual creativity but to clean up AI slop, simply because there won't have been a pipeline of trainees and juniors for a decade. There are be plenty of self taught developers who didn't need any "traineeship". That proportion will increase even more with AI/LLMs and the fact that there are no more jobs for youngsters. And actually from looking at the purely toxic comments on this thread, I would say that's a good thing for youngsters to be not be exposed to such "seniors". Credentialism is dead. "Either ship or shutup" should be the mantra of this age.
  - Bridged7756 9mo ago
    More like "Either slop or shut up". Classic startup culture, fuck processes and doing things right, it's all about larping and lying to investors. Damn right, your value as an engineer is all about how much slop you can churn out, I'd love (not) to be in a team filled with people like you.
nonethewiser 9mo ago
> Meanwhile, my cofounder is rewriting code we spent millions of salary on in the past by himself in a few weeks. Why? Im not even casting shade - I think AI is quite amazing for coding and can increase productivity and quality a lot. But I'm curious why he's doing this.
- mattmaroon 9mo ago
  The codebase is old and really hard to work on. It’s a game that existed pre-iPhone and still has decent revenue but could use some updating. We intentionally shrank our company down to auto-pilot mode and frankly don’t even have a working development environment anymore. It was basically cost prohibitive to change anything significant until Claude became able to do most of the work for us. My cofounder (also CTO of another startup in the interim) found himself with a lot of time on his hands unexpectedly and thought it would be a neat experiment and has been wowed by the results. Much in the same way people on HN debate when we will have self driving cars while millions of people actually have their Teslas self-driving every day (it reminds me of when I got to bet that Joe Biden would win the election after he already did) those who think AI coding is years away are missing what’s happening now. It’s a powerful force magnifier in the hands of a skilled programmer and it’ll only get better.
  - idiotsecant 9mo ago
    I agree that code is being written in exactly the same sense that Teslas are driving themselves.
    - mattmaroon 9mo ago
      Yes, in both cases it takes someone to steer. It’s not a complete solution. Someone who can’t drive can’t just ride a Tesla around town and someone who can’t program can’t vibe code anything complex. But if it can do 90% of the work for you, it is a serious force magnifier.
      - Bridged7756 9mo ago
vlod 9mo ago
>my cofounder is rewriting code we spent millions of salary on in the past by himself in a few weeks. I was expecting a language reference (we all know which one), to get more speed, safety and dare I say it "web scale" (insert meme). :)
- oenton 9mo ago
  > and dare I say it "web scale" Obligatory reference https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2F-DItXtZs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2F-DItXtZs
rf15 9mo ago
no need to wait, by using AI you already are mediocre at best (because you forego skill and quality for speed)
- xnx 9mo ago
  Is this also true of carpenters who use circular saws and airguns instead of hand saws and hammers?
  - rf15 9mo ago
    these are very different tools tbh
thefz 9mo ago
> Meanwhile, my cofounder is rewriting code we spent millions of salary on in the past by himself in a few weeks. If the LLM generating the code introduced a bug, who will be fixing it? The founder that does not know how to code or the LLM that made the mistake first?
gloosx 9mo ago
>rewriting code Key thing here. The code was already written, so rewriting it isn't exactly adding a lot of quantifiable value. If millions weren't spent in the first place, there would be no code to rewrite.
mawadev 9mo ago
Doesn't this imply that you were not getting the level of efficiency out of your investment? It would be a little odd to say this publicly as this says more about you and your company. The question would be what your code does and if it is profitable.
RamblingCTO 9mo ago
In this thread: people throwing shade on tech that works, comparing it to a perfect world and making weird assumptions like no tests, no E2E or manual testing just to make a case. Hot take: most SWEs produce shit code, be it by constraints of any kind or their own abilities. LLMs do the same but cost less and can move faster. If you know how to use it, code will be fine. Code is a commodity and a lot of people will be blindsided by that in the future. If your value proposition is translating requirements into code, I feel sorry for you. The output quality of the LLM depends on the abilities of the operator. And most SWEs lack the system thinking to be good here, in my experience. As a fractional CTO and in my decade of being co-founder/CTO I saw a lot of people and codebases and most of it is just bad. You need to compare real life codebases and outputs of developers, not what people wished it would be like. And the reality is that most of it sucks and most SWEs are bad at their jobs.
sjw987 9mo ago
Good luck with fixing that future mess. This is such an incredibly short sighted approach to running a company and software dev that I think your cofounder is likely going to torpedo your company.
adrian_b 9mo ago
All the productivity enhancement provided by LLMs for programming is caused by circumventing the copyright restrictions of the programs on which they have been trained. You and anyone else could have avoided spending millions for programmer salaries, had you been allowed to reuse freely any of the many existing proprietary or open-source programs that solved the same or very similar problems. I would have no problem with everyone being able to reuse any program, without restrictions, but with these AI programming tools the rich are now permitted to ignore copyrights, while the poor remain constrained by them, as before. The copyright for programs has caused a huge multiplication of the programming effort for many decades, with everyone rewriting again and again similar programs, in order for their employing company to own the "IP". Now LLMs are exposing what would have happened in an alternative timeline. The LLMs have the additional advantage of fast and easy searching through a huge database of programs, but this advantage would not have been enough for a significant productivity increase over a competent programmer that would have searched the same database by traditional means, to find reusable code.
- immibis 9mo ago
  Then it really proves how much the economy would be booming if we abolished copyright, doesn't it? China ignores copyright too, and look at them surpassing us in all aspects of technology, while Western economies choose to sabotage themselves to keep money flowing upwards to old guys.
  - jvanderbot 9mo ago
    Well no, because copyright != cannot use. "Available for use" and "Automatically rewritten to work in your codebase fairly well" is very different, so copyright is probably not the blocker technically
    - mattmaroon 9mo ago
      Yeah, I love the idea that all software could just be cobbled together from other software, but none of it does anything new.
  - 9mo ago
ehnto 9mo ago
Howcome you need to re-write millions of dollars in code?
cadamsdotcom 9mo ago
G’day Matt from myself another person with a cofounder both getting insane value out of AI and astounded at the attitudes around HN. You sound like complete clones of us :-) We’ve been at it since July and have built what used to take 3-5 people that long. To the haters: I use TDD and review every line of code, I’m not an animal. There’s just 2 of us but some days it feels like we command an army.
- ta9000 9mo ago
  As a software engineer this scares me from an employment perspective but I also use Claude Code to produce 90% of the code I commit now (after reviewing and revision of course) so there’s that… ;)
blks 9mo ago
On design and photography? So you’re filling your product with slop images and graphics? Users won’t like it
alfonsodev 9mo ago
>I myself am saving a small fortune on design and photography and getting better results while doing it. Is this because you are improving your already existing design and photography skills and business ? Or have you bootstrapped from the scratch with AI ? Do you mind sharing or giving a hint ? Thanks!
1vuio0pswjnm7 9mo ago
When I read the blog post, the impression I get is that the author is referring to the proposed "business" of licensing or selling "generative AI" (i.e., making money for the licensor or seller), not whether generative AI is saving money for any particular user The author's second reference, an article from The Atlantic, describing the copyright liability issues with "generative AI", has been submitted to HN four times in the last week AI Memorization Research (theatlantic.com) 2 points by tagyro 5 hours ago | flag | past | discuss AI's Memorization Crisis (theatlantic.com) 2 points by twalichiewicz 1 day ago | flag | past | 1 comment AI's Memorization Crisis (theatlantic.com) 3 points by palad1n 4 days ago | flag | past | 1 comment AI's Memorization Crisis (theatlantic.com) 4 points by casparvitch 4 days ago | flag | past | discuss
deleted 9mo ago
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sidtrey 9mo ago
Senior developer here, your co-founder is making a huge mistake. Their lack of knowledge about the codebase will be your undoing. PS. I work in GenAI.
reaperducer 9mo ago
I myself am saving a small fortune on design and photography and getting better results while doing it. Yay! Let's put all the artists out of business and funnel all the money to the tech industry. That's how to build a vibrant society. Yay!
kermatt 9mo ago
Is the cofounder "rewriting" that code providing zero of the existing code as context? Doing it in a completely green field fashion? Or is any of the existing platform is used as an input for the rewrite?
Voultapher 9mo ago
> I myself am saving a small fortune on design and photography and getting better results while doing it. Tell me you have bland taste without telling me you have bland taste. But if your customers eat it up and your slop manages to stand out in sea of slop, who am I to dislike slop.
jbbryant 9mo ago
Exactly, our venture studio that partnered with our startup collapsed. The code there team wrote was that took two years was terrible and didn't fully function. My CTO and I are rewriting 60% of the code with AI! Now everything works with bugs.....

merlincorey 9mo ago

> Meanwhile, my cofounder is rewriting code we spent millions of salary on in the past by himself in a few weeks. Code is not an asset it's a liability, and code that no one has reviewed is even more of a liability. However, in the end, execution is all that matters so if you and your cofounder are able to execute successfully with mountains of generated code then it doesn't matter what assets and liabilities you hold in the short term. The long term is a lot harder to predict in any case.

_vertigo 9mo ago
> Code is not an asset it's a liability, and code that no one has reviewed is even more of a liability. Code that solves problems and makes you money is by definition an asset. Whether or not the code in question does those things remains to be seen, but code is not strictly a liability or else no one would write it.
- merlincorey 9mo ago
  "Code is a liability. What the code does for you is an asset." as quoted from https://wiki.c2.com/?SoftwareAsLiability https://wiki.c2.com/?SoftwareAsLiability with Last edit December 17, 2013. This discussion and distinction used to be well known, but I'm happy to help some people become "one of today's lucky 10,000" as quoted from https://xkcd.com/1053/ https://xkcd.com/1053/ because it is indeed much more interesting than the alternative approach.
  - sswatson 9mo ago
    It’s well known and also wrong. Delta’s airplanes also require a great deal of maintenance, and I’m sure they strive to have no more than are necessary for their objectives. But if you talk to one of Delta’s accountants, they will be happy to disabuse you of the notion that the planes are entered in the books as a liability.
    - kortilla 9mo ago
      Delta leases a big portion of its fleet, which makes your example pretty bad.
      - simonsmithies 9mo ago
        Not a terrible example. The planes delta owns are delta’s assets; the planes the leasing company owns are the leasing company’s assets. The point is, the code and the planes are assets despite the maintenance required to keep them in revenue-generating state.
    - OneMorePerson 9mo ago
      It's possible for something to be both an asset and a potential liability, it isn't strictly one or the other.
    - _heimdall 9mo ago
      You're hinting at the underlying problem with the quote. "Asset" in the quote reads, at least to me, in the financial or accounting meaning of the term. "Liability" reads, again to me, in the sense of potential risk rather than the financial meaning. Its apples and oranges.
      - Ygg2 9mo ago
        Liability is also an economic term. As in, "The bank's assets (debt) are my liability, and my assets (house) are the bank's liability." I don't think it's a wrong quote. Code's behavior is the asset, and code's source is the liability. You want to achieve maximum functionality for minimal source code investment.
- tom_m 9mo ago
  Not a very valuable one. Never had been. That's the funny part. So many people want software but then don't know what to do once they have it.
deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
wouldbecouldbe 9mo ago
Developers that can’t see the change are blind. Just this week, sun-tue. I added a fully functional subscription model to an existing platform, build out a bulk async elasticjs indexing for a huge database and migrated a very large Wordpress website to NextJS. 2.5 days, would have cost me at least a month 2 years ago.
- fxtentacle 9mo ago
  To me, this sounds like: AI is helping me solve all the issues that using AI has caused. Wordpress has a pretty good export and Markdown is widely supported. If you estimate 1 month of work to get that into NextJS, then maybe the latter is not a suitable choice.
  - tengbretson 9mo ago
    To me, this sounds like: If AI was good at a certain task then it was a bad task in the first place. Which is just run of the mill dogmatic thinking.
  - serf 9mo ago
    it's wild that somehow with regards to AI conversations lately someone can say "I saved 3 months doing X" and someone can willfully and thoughtfully reply "No you didn't , you're wrong." without hesitation. I feel bad for AI opponents mostly because it seems like the drive to be against the thing is stronger than the drive towards fact or even kindness. My .02c: I am saving months of efforts using AI tools to fix old (PRE-AI, PREHISTORIC!) codebases that have literally zero AI technical debt associated to them. I'm not going to bother with the charts & stats, you'll just have to trust me and my opinion like humans must do in lots of cases. I have lots of sharp knives in my kitchen, too -- but I don't want to have to go slice my hands on every one to prove to strangers that they are indeed sharp -- you'll just have to take my word.
    - jbgt 9mo ago
      Slice THEIR hands. They might say yours are rigged. I'm a non dev and the things I'm building blow me away. I think many of these people criticizing are perhaps more on the execution side and have a legitimate craft they are protecting. If you're more on the managerial side, and I'd say a trusting manager not a show me your work kind, then you're more likely to be open and results oriented.
Zababa 9mo ago
>Code is not an asset it's a liability This would imply companies could delete all their code and do better, which doesn't seem true?
- thehappypm 9mo ago
  A more accurate description of code is that it’s a depreciating asset, perhaps, or an asset that requires maintenance cost. Neither of which is a liability

aprdm 9mo ago

lol same. I just wrote a bunch of diagrams with mermaid that would legit take me a week, also did a mock of an UI for a frontend engineer that would take me another week to do .. or some designers. All of that in between meetings... Waiting for it to actually go well to see what else I can do !

nonethewiser 9mo ago
The more I have this experience and read people maligning AI for coding, the more I think the junior developers are actually not the ones in danger.
- daxfohl 9mo ago
  Oh I've thought this for years. As an L7, basically my primary role is to serve as someone to bounce ideas off of, and to make recommendations based on experience. A chatbot, with its virtually infinite supply of experience, could ostensibly replace my role way sooner than it could a solid junior/mid-level coder. The main thing it needs is a consistent vision and direction that aligns with the needs of nearby teams, which frankly sounds not all that hard to write in code (I've been considering doing this). Probably the biggest gap would be the ability to ignite, drive, and launch new initiatives. How does an AI agent "lead" an engineering team? That's not something you can code up in an agent runtime. It'd require a whole culture change that I have a hard time seeing in reality. But of course if there comes a point where AI takes all the junior and mid-level coding jobs, then at that point there's no culture to change, so staff/principal jobs would be just as at risk.
  - TACIXAT 9mo ago
    I have the complete opposite impression w.r.t. architecture decisions. The LLMs can cargo cult an existing design, but they do not think through design consequences well at all. I use them as a rubber duck non-stop, but I think I respect less than one out of every six of their suggestions.
    - 9mo ago

segfaultex 9mo ago

Sounds like an argument for better hiring practices and planning. Producing a lot of code isn’t proof of anything.

sheeh 9mo ago
Yep. Let’s see the projects and more importantly the incremental returns…

fzeroracer 9mo ago

> Meanwhile, my cofounder is rewriting code we spent millions of salary on in the past by himself in a few weeks. This is one of those statements that would horrify any halfway competent engineer. A cowboy coder going in, seeing a bunch of code and going 'I should rewrite this' is one of the biggest liabilities to any stable system.

hactually 9mo ago
I assume this is because they're already insanely profitable after hitting PMF and are now trying to bring down infra costs? Right? RIGHT?!
habinero 9mo ago
Every professional SWE is going to stare off into the middle distance, as they flashback to some PM or VP deciding to show everyone they still got it. The "how hard could it be" fallacy claims another!
- iwontberude 9mo ago
  Definitely been in that room multiple times.
- sheeh 9mo ago
  As someone who is more involved in shaping the product direction rather than engineering what composes the product - I will readily admit many product people are utterly, utterly clueless. Most people have no clue the craftsmanship, work etc it takes to create a great product. LLMs are not going to change this, in fact they serve as a distraction. I’m not a SWE so I gain nothing by being bearish on the contributions of LLMs to the real economy ;)
  - habinero 9mo ago
    Oh, it wasn't a bash on product people, I'm sorry if it came off that way. It's a reference to a trope where the VP of Eng or CTO (who was an engineer decades ago) gets it in their head that they want to code again and writes something absolute dogshit terrible because their skills have degraded. Unfortunately they are your boss's boss's boss and can make you deal with it anyways. I've actually seen it IRL once, to his credit the dude finally realized the engineer smiles were pained grimaces and it got quietly dropped lol.

nsoonhui 9mo ago

It's not directly comparable. The first time writing the code is always the hardest because you might have to figure out the requirements along the way. When you have the initial system running for a while, doing a second one is easier because all the requirements kinks are figured out. By the way, why does your co-founder have to do the rewrite at all?

el_benhameen 9mo ago
I find the opposite to be true. Once you know the problem you’re trying to solve (which admittedly can be the biggest lift), writing the fist cut of the code is fun, and you can design the system and set precedent however you want. Once it’s in the wild, you have to work within the consequences of your initial decisions, including bad ones.
- touristtam 9mo ago
  ... And the undocumented code spaghetti that might come with a codebase that was touch by numerous hands.
nonethewiser 9mo ago
You can compare it - just factor that in. And compare writing it with AI vs. writing it without AI. We have no clue the scope of the rewrite but for anything non-trivial, 2 weeks just isn't going to be possible without AI. To the point of you probably not doing it at all. I have no idea why they are rewriting the code. That's another matter.

venndeezl 9mo ago

I suspect he means as a trillion dollar corporation led endeavor. I trained a small neural net on pics of a cat I had in the 00s (RIP George, you were a good cat). Mounted a webcam I had gotten for free from somewhere, above the cat door, in the exterior of the house. If the neural net recognized my cat it switched off an electromagnetic holding the pet door locked. Worked perfectly until I moved out of the rental. Neural nets are, end of the day, pretty cool. It's the data center business that's the problem. Just more landlords, wannabe oligarchs, claiming ownership over anything they can get the politicians to give them.

bwestergard 9mo ago

Out of curiosity, what is your product?

mschuster91 9mo ago

The problem is... you're going to deprive yourself of the talent chain in the long run, and so is everyone else who is switching over to AI, both generative like ChatGPT and transformative like the various translation, speech recognition/transcription or data wrangling models. For now, it works out for companies - but forward to, say, ten years in the future. There won't be new intermediates or seniors any more to replace the ones that age out or quit the industry entirely in frustration of them not being there for actual creativity but to clean up AI slop, simply because there won't have been a pipeline of trainees and juniors for a decade. But by the time that plus the demographic collapse shows its effects, the people who currently call the shots will be in pension, having long since made their money. And my generation will be left with collapse everywhere and find ways to somehow keep stuff running. Hell, it's already bad to get qualified human support these days. Large corporations effectively rule with impunity, with the only recourse consumers have being to either shell out immense sums of money for lawyers and court fees or turning to consumer protection/regulatory authorities that are being gutted as we speak both in money and legal protections, or being swamped with AI slop like "legal assistance" AI hallucinating case law.

saxenaabhi 9mo ago
> There won't be new intermediates or seniors any more to replace the ones that age out or quit the industry entirely in frustration of them not being there for actual creativity but to clean up AI slop, simply because there won't have been a pipeline of trainees and juniors for a decade. There are be plenty of self taught developers who didn't need any "traineeship". That proportion will increase even more with AI/LLMs and the fact that there are no more jobs for youngsters. And actually from looking at the purely toxic comments on this thread, I would say that's a good thing for youngsters to be not be exposed to such "seniors". Credentialism is dead. "Either ship or shutup" should be the mantra of this age.
- Bridged7756 9mo ago
  More like "Either slop or shut up". Classic startup culture, fuck processes and doing things right, it's all about larping and lying to investors. Damn right, your value as an engineer is all about how much slop you can churn out, I'd love (not) to be in a team filled with people like you.

nonethewiser 9mo ago

> Meanwhile, my cofounder is rewriting code we spent millions of salary on in the past by himself in a few weeks. Why? Im not even casting shade - I think AI is quite amazing for coding and can increase productivity and quality a lot. But I'm curious why he's doing this.

mattmaroon 9mo ago
The codebase is old and really hard to work on. It’s a game that existed pre-iPhone and still has decent revenue but could use some updating. We intentionally shrank our company down to auto-pilot mode and frankly don’t even have a working development environment anymore. It was basically cost prohibitive to change anything significant until Claude became able to do most of the work for us. My cofounder (also CTO of another startup in the interim) found himself with a lot of time on his hands unexpectedly and thought it would be a neat experiment and has been wowed by the results. Much in the same way people on HN debate when we will have self driving cars while millions of people actually have their Teslas self-driving every day (it reminds me of when I got to bet that Joe Biden would win the election after he already did) those who think AI coding is years away are missing what’s happening now. It’s a powerful force magnifier in the hands of a skilled programmer and it’ll only get better.
- idiotsecant 9mo ago
  I agree that code is being written in exactly the same sense that Teslas are driving themselves.
  - mattmaroon 9mo ago
    Yes, in both cases it takes someone to steer. It’s not a complete solution. Someone who can’t drive can’t just ride a Tesla around town and someone who can’t program can’t vibe code anything complex. But if it can do 90% of the work for you, it is a serious force magnifier.
    - Bridged7756 9mo ago

vlod 9mo ago

>my cofounder is rewriting code we spent millions of salary on in the past by himself in a few weeks. I was expecting a language reference (we all know which one), to get more speed, safety and dare I say it "web scale" (insert meme). :)

oenton 9mo ago
> and dare I say it "web scale" Obligatory reference https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2F-DItXtZs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2F-DItXtZs

rf15 9mo ago

no need to wait, by using AI you already are mediocre at best (because you forego skill and quality for speed)

xnx 9mo ago
Is this also true of carpenters who use circular saws and airguns instead of hand saws and hammers?
- rf15 9mo ago
  these are very different tools tbh

thefz 9mo ago

> Meanwhile, my cofounder is rewriting code we spent millions of salary on in the past by himself in a few weeks. If the LLM generating the code introduced a bug, who will be fixing it? The founder that does not know how to code or the LLM that made the mistake first?

gloosx 9mo ago

>rewriting code Key thing here. The code was already written, so rewriting it isn't exactly adding a lot of quantifiable value. If millions weren't spent in the first place, there would be no code to rewrite.

mawadev 9mo ago

Doesn't this imply that you were not getting the level of efficiency out of your investment? It would be a little odd to say this publicly as this says more about you and your company. The question would be what your code does and if it is profitable.

RamblingCTO 9mo ago

In this thread: people throwing shade on tech that works, comparing it to a perfect world and making weird assumptions like no tests, no E2E or manual testing just to make a case. Hot take: most SWEs produce shit code, be it by constraints of any kind or their own abilities. LLMs do the same but cost less and can move faster. If you know how to use it, code will be fine. Code is a commodity and a lot of people will be blindsided by that in the future. If your value proposition is translating requirements into code, I feel sorry for you. The output quality of the LLM depends on the abilities of the operator. And most SWEs lack the system thinking to be good here, in my experience. As a fractional CTO and in my decade of being co-founder/CTO I saw a lot of people and codebases and most of it is just bad. You need to compare real life codebases and outputs of developers, not what people wished it would be like. And the reality is that most of it sucks and most SWEs are bad at their jobs.

sjw987 9mo ago

Good luck with fixing that future mess. This is such an incredibly short sighted approach to running a company and software dev that I think your cofounder is likely going to torpedo your company.

adrian_b 9mo ago

All the productivity enhancement provided by LLMs for programming is caused by circumventing the copyright restrictions of the programs on which they have been trained. You and anyone else could have avoided spending millions for programmer salaries, had you been allowed to reuse freely any of the many existing proprietary or open-source programs that solved the same or very similar problems. I would have no problem with everyone being able to reuse any program, without restrictions, but with these AI programming tools the rich are now permitted to ignore copyrights, while the poor remain constrained by them, as before. The copyright for programs has caused a huge multiplication of the programming effort for many decades, with everyone rewriting again and again similar programs, in order for their employing company to own the "IP". Now LLMs are exposing what would have happened in an alternative timeline. The LLMs have the additional advantage of fast and easy searching through a huge database of programs, but this advantage would not have been enough for a significant productivity increase over a competent programmer that would have searched the same database by traditional means, to find reusable code.

immibis 9mo ago
Then it really proves how much the economy would be booming if we abolished copyright, doesn't it? China ignores copyright too, and look at them surpassing us in all aspects of technology, while Western economies choose to sabotage themselves to keep money flowing upwards to old guys.
- jvanderbot 9mo ago
  Well no, because copyright != cannot use. "Available for use" and "Automatically rewritten to work in your codebase fairly well" is very different, so copyright is probably not the blocker technically
  - mattmaroon 9mo ago
    Yeah, I love the idea that all software could just be cobbled together from other software, but none of it does anything new.
- 9mo ago

ehnto 9mo ago

Howcome you need to re-write millions of dollars in code?

cadamsdotcom 9mo ago

G’day Matt from myself another person with a cofounder both getting insane value out of AI and astounded at the attitudes around HN. You sound like complete clones of us :-) We’ve been at it since July and have built what used to take 3-5 people that long. To the haters: I use TDD and review every line of code, I’m not an animal. There’s just 2 of us but some days it feels like we command an army.

ta9000 9mo ago
As a software engineer this scares me from an employment perspective but I also use Claude Code to produce 90% of the code I commit now (after reviewing and revision of course) so there’s that… ;)

blks 9mo ago

On design and photography? So you’re filling your product with slop images and graphics? Users won’t like it

alfonsodev 9mo ago

>I myself am saving a small fortune on design and photography and getting better results while doing it. Is this because you are improving your already existing design and photography skills and business ? Or have you bootstrapped from the scratch with AI ? Do you mind sharing or giving a hint ? Thanks!

1vuio0pswjnm7 9mo ago

When I read the blog post, the impression I get is that the author is referring to the proposed "business" of licensing or selling "generative AI" (i.e., making money for the licensor or seller), not whether generative AI is saving money for any particular user The author's second reference, an article from The Atlantic, describing the copyright liability issues with "generative AI", has been submitted to HN four times in the last week AI Memorization Research (theatlantic.com) 2 points by tagyro 5 hours ago | flag | past | discuss AI's Memorization Crisis (theatlantic.com) 2 points by twalichiewicz 1 day ago | flag | past | 1 comment AI's Memorization Crisis (theatlantic.com) 3 points by palad1n 4 days ago | flag | past | 1 comment AI's Memorization Crisis (theatlantic.com) 4 points by casparvitch 4 days ago | flag | past | discuss

deleted 9mo ago

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sidtrey 9mo ago

Senior developer here, your co-founder is making a huge mistake. Their lack of knowledge about the codebase will be your undoing. PS. I work in GenAI.

reaperducer 9mo ago

I myself am saving a small fortune on design and photography and getting better results while doing it. Yay! Let's put all the artists out of business and funnel all the money to the tech industry. That's how to build a vibrant society. Yay!

kermatt 9mo ago

Is the cofounder "rewriting" that code providing zero of the existing code as context? Doing it in a completely green field fashion? Or is any of the existing platform is used as an input for the rewrite?

Voultapher 9mo ago

> I myself am saving a small fortune on design and photography and getting better results while doing it. Tell me you have bland taste without telling me you have bland taste. But if your customers eat it up and your slop manages to stand out in sea of slop, who am I to dislike slop.

jbbryant 9mo ago

Exactly, our venture studio that partnered with our startup collapsed. The code there team wrote was that took two years was terrible and didn't fully function. My CTO and I are rewriting 60% of the code with AI! Now everything works with bugs.....