4 ms·

Have you worked at many startups?

by extr 2mo ago

nujabe 2mo ago
No, but not relevant. What is the point of working at a startup if you’re dealing with millions of lines of legacy code ? Isn’t the whole point of startups to create & innovate with a clean slate and modern tools?
- extr 2mo ago
  No, actually. The point is to build a profitable business.
  - sarchertech 2mo ago
    How long has your startup been around? I’ve worked at plenty of startups over the past 20 years. Including one that was still calling themselves a startup 10 years out. The org I work at now was a startup before my tech giant employer acquired them. We have a very bloated and very profitable 8 year old codebase that is barely 500k LOC. I’ve never seen a startup with a multi million line legacy codebase.
    - dgellow 2mo ago
      They may have forked something
      - sarchertech 2mo ago
        Definitely possible, but up thread they wrote: >”Have you worked at many startups?” In response to a question about a legacy codebase at a startup. That implies that they think whatever they are doing is common. And forking a multi million line codebase and heavily developing it isn’t common for startups.
        dgellow 2mo ago
        You’re right, very confusing thread
  - fatata123 2mo ago
    [dead]
- chris_money202 2mo ago
  I don't know if that's the whole point, but I agree with the sentiment, why would a startup be working in legacy code and where would that code come from if this is truly the start of something. OP might just be working at a small software company or for one that broke from a bigger one and is now "startup" like?
Karrot_Kream 2mo ago
Something isn't clear about the size of your codebase here and the level of reliability your customers expect, as a reader of your comments. Clarity there will help. My observation has been: - Initial greenfield work by an LLM is fast and very effective with minimal or no human oversight. - Subsequent work ends up being over engineered and very verbose. Assumptions are made that aren't suited to the problem at hand (for example I find Fable is extremely regex happy where structured data would work much better from a readability perspective.) - Once code bloats beyond a certain point due to unguided LLM usage, complexity is high enough that only LLMs can operate on the codebase with any economical amount of time. - Rinse repeat and your code ends up unclear about any state that's not explicitly being tested and verified in QA loops For some of our products this has been fine, for others it's been problematic. An understanding of your size and reliability requirements will help make the conversation more productive.
- extr 2mo ago
  > unguided LLM usage Why aren't you guiding your LLM usage? Is that what I said - to spam it and not guide anything? Or to have a careful workflow where you agree on design and maximize your human judgement/leverage? > any state that's not explicitly being tested and verified in QA loops As opposed to before, when engineers perfectly reasoned about code behavior from first principals and QA was unnecessary?
  - Karrot_Kream 2mo ago
    > Why aren't you guiding your LLM usage? Is that what I said - to spam it and not guide anything? Or to have a careful workflow where you agree on design and maximize your human judgement/leverage? You didn't say anything positively or negatively regarding this so I made an assumption that you were using the LLM relatively unguided (e.g. a bit of oversight, not the kind of thing that heavy code reviews used to involve pre-agents.) Feel free to add clarity on your actual usage loop. > As opposed to before, when engineers perfectly reasoned about code behavior from first principals and QA was unnecessary? In my experience, most engineers are quite good at reasoning about code behavior for non-QAed code paths. Obviously things fall through the cracks. But I've been in the ground floor of plenty of Big Techs in their early stages before agents and, yes, a lot of initial development had spotty test coverage and yet most of the engineers had good mental models of what was happening. It used to be a very valuable skill to wrap your head around a torrid piece of code with few or no tests but was nonetheless a core piece of your application. Conversely, agentic development can bring cognitive debt [1]. === This isn't a fight. We aren't sparring over what's right and wrong. I'm just curious how other people use agents in their work as someone who is also now in a startup that uses LLM agents heavily and has no limitations on spend. [1]: https://martinfowler.com/fragments/2026-02-09.html https://martinfowler.com/fragments/2026-02-09.html

Have you worked at many startups?

by extr 2mo ago

Have you worked at many startups?

No, but not relevant. What is the point of working at a startup if you’re dealing with millions of lines of legacy code ? Isn’t the whole point of startups to create & innovate with a clean slate and modern tools?

extr 2mo ago
No, actually. The point is to build a profitable business.
- sarchertech 2mo ago
  How long has your startup been around? I’ve worked at plenty of startups over the past 20 years. Including one that was still calling themselves a startup 10 years out. The org I work at now was a startup before my tech giant employer acquired them. We have a very bloated and very profitable 8 year old codebase that is barely 500k LOC. I’ve never seen a startup with a multi million line legacy codebase.
  - dgellow 2mo ago
    They may have forked something
    - sarchertech 2mo ago
      Definitely possible, but up thread they wrote: >”Have you worked at many startups?” In response to a question about a legacy codebase at a startup. That implies that they think whatever they are doing is common. And forking a multi million line codebase and heavily developing it isn’t common for startups.
      - dgellow 2mo ago
        You’re right, very confusing thread
- fatata123 2mo ago
  [dead]
chris_money202 2mo ago
I don't know if that's the whole point, but I agree with the sentiment, why would a startup be working in legacy code and where would that code come from if this is truly the start of something. OP might just be working at a small software company or for one that broke from a bigger one and is now "startup" like?

Karrot_Kream 2mo ago

Something isn't clear about the size of your codebase here and the level of reliability your customers expect, as a reader of your comments. Clarity there will help. My observation has been: - Initial greenfield work by an LLM is fast and very effective with minimal or no human oversight. - Subsequent work ends up being over engineered and very verbose. Assumptions are made that aren't suited to the problem at hand (for example I find Fable is extremely regex happy where structured data would work much better from a readability perspective.) - Once code bloats beyond a certain point due to unguided LLM usage, complexity is high enough that only LLMs can operate on the codebase with any economical amount of time. - Rinse repeat and your code ends up unclear about any state that's not explicitly being tested and verified in QA loops For some of our products this has been fine, for others it's been problematic. An understanding of your size and reliability requirements will help make the conversation more productive.

extr 2mo ago
> unguided LLM usage Why aren't you guiding your LLM usage? Is that what I said - to spam it and not guide anything? Or to have a careful workflow where you agree on design and maximize your human judgement/leverage? > any state that's not explicitly being tested and verified in QA loops As opposed to before, when engineers perfectly reasoned about code behavior from first principals and QA was unnecessary?
- Karrot_Kream 2mo ago
  > Why aren't you guiding your LLM usage? Is that what I said - to spam it and not guide anything? Or to have a careful workflow where you agree on design and maximize your human judgement/leverage? You didn't say anything positively or negatively regarding this so I made an assumption that you were using the LLM relatively unguided (e.g. a bit of oversight, not the kind of thing that heavy code reviews used to involve pre-agents.) Feel free to add clarity on your actual usage loop. > As opposed to before, when engineers perfectly reasoned about code behavior from first principals and QA was unnecessary? In my experience, most engineers are quite good at reasoning about code behavior for non-QAed code paths. Obviously things fall through the cracks. But I've been in the ground floor of plenty of Big Techs in their early stages before agents and, yes, a lot of initial development had spotty test coverage and yet most of the engineers had good mental models of what was happening. It used to be a very valuable skill to wrap your head around a torrid piece of code with few or no tests but was nonetheless a core piece of your application. Conversely, agentic development can bring cognitive debt [1]. === This isn't a fight. We aren't sparring over what's right and wrong. I'm just curious how other people use agents in their work as someone who is also now in a startup that uses LLM agents heavily and has no limitations on spend. [1]: https://martinfowler.com/fragments/2026-02-09.html https://martinfowler.com/fragments/2026-02-09.html