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> A good engineer, with a good model and harness will produce great stuff. A bad engineer with a good model and harness will produce something faster, but it w

> A good engineer, with a good model and harness will produce great stuff. A bad engineer with a good model and harness will produce something faster, but it will be worse. A good engineer, without LLM assistance, will still produce great stuff.

zinodaur 2mo ago
Yes, but much more slowly. And if they realize halfway through implementation that there is a better way to do it, but they are under pressure to deliver, they wont have time to rewrite it and will live with the consequences of that decision forever
- skydhash 2mo ago
  > And if they realize halfway through implementation that there is a better way to do it, but they are under pressure to deliver, they wont have time to rewrite it and will live with the consequences of that decision forever I've never really seen that. What I've seen is the much pragmatic take of marking the source code with a few comments to highlight the problematic areas and then goes on with the implementation. Refactoring can always be done later when the first batch of value has been extracted. There's always tradeoffs to balance and perfection is something you inch towards, not something you get done in one go.
- sillyfluke 2mo ago
  "Slow is smooth, smooth is fast." ...as Mickey Mouse was fond of telling me as I waiting for the ride at Disney World. Or it was my drill instructor. can't remember which.
- vips7L 2mo ago
  Speed doesn’t matter.
  - zinodaur 2mo ago
    For beings with finite lifespans, time is precious
  - bdangubic 2mo ago
    it does if you are writing the checks, it doesn’t if you cashing the checks
    - vips7L 2mo ago
      I genuinely doubt it. Amdahl’s law will always reign supreme.
  - crystal_revenge 2mo ago
    I take it you're not working at a startup?
    - vips7L 2mo ago
      I’ve worked at plenty of startups. It still does not matter, it never has.
crystal_revenge 2mo ago
> A good engineer, without LLM assistance, will still produce great stuff. Not fast enough to keep their job these days. Time was always the limiting factor to code quality, good engineers satisfied the classic "good", "fast" but not "cheap" selection of those three classic options. I very sincerely doubt it is possible for even an incredible engineer to keep up with the delivery schedules required to ship products now. Not to mention that frontier models do ship pretty consistently good code. By far the biggest source of issues I see is not "poorly coded" but "problem poorly specified". We still need good engineers, because they can understand how to do decompose problems well, but I don't know anyone who writes code by and anymore (other than for fun).
- cindyllm 2mo ago
  [dead]
- skydhash 2mo ago
  > I very sincerely doubt it is possible for even an incredible engineer to keep up with the delivery schedules required to ship products now. What's the current delivery rates? From my past experience, any feature can take several weeks from idea to be in a somewhat usable shape for production. While the actual coding is often less than a few days. A lot of time is spent on gathering requirements and resolving conflicts between them. I believe most current improvement in speed is just moving from idea to demo in a few days, then spend several months fighting bugs. While the customer can't really use said feature.
  - crystal_revenge 2mo ago
    > I believe most current improvement in speed is just moving from idea to demo in a few days This is an outdated view. Current timelines I'm facing are to be going from "thought", through customer trials and being fully live in the product and ready for sales in ~3 weeks (from kick off to live in app is a bit more than a week). This is for a full product feature that could easily be standalone. In 2023 I would say the timeline for a similarly shaped feature at another startup was around ~3 months (and the team at the time agreed that was an aggressive timeline). Bug rates are not noticeably different than other teams I've been on in the past 20 years. Nobody I know working in startups is still building demos with AI like they were a year or more ago (for work), that's seen as largely a waste of time since you can just ship the feature and be experimenting with customers much faster. On top of that everyone working in startup land knows that SaaS's days are numbered, so you need to be shipping working software fast enough you can get ahead of the curve to navigate where things are going next.

zinodaur 2mo ago

Yes, but much more slowly. And if they realize halfway through implementation that there is a better way to do it, but they are under pressure to deliver, they wont have time to rewrite it and will live with the consequences of that decision forever

skydhash 2mo ago
> And if they realize halfway through implementation that there is a better way to do it, but they are under pressure to deliver, they wont have time to rewrite it and will live with the consequences of that decision forever I've never really seen that. What I've seen is the much pragmatic take of marking the source code with a few comments to highlight the problematic areas and then goes on with the implementation. Refactoring can always be done later when the first batch of value has been extracted. There's always tradeoffs to balance and perfection is something you inch towards, not something you get done in one go.
sillyfluke 2mo ago
"Slow is smooth, smooth is fast." ...as Mickey Mouse was fond of telling me as I waiting for the ride at Disney World. Or it was my drill instructor. can't remember which.
vips7L 2mo ago
Speed doesn’t matter.
- zinodaur 2mo ago
  For beings with finite lifespans, time is precious
- bdangubic 2mo ago
  it does if you are writing the checks, it doesn’t if you cashing the checks
  - vips7L 2mo ago
    I genuinely doubt it. Amdahl’s law will always reign supreme.
- crystal_revenge 2mo ago
  I take it you're not working at a startup?
  - vips7L 2mo ago
    I’ve worked at plenty of startups. It still does not matter, it never has.

crystal_revenge 2mo ago

> A good engineer, without LLM assistance, will still produce great stuff. Not fast enough to keep their job these days. Time was always the limiting factor to code quality, good engineers satisfied the classic "good", "fast" but not "cheap" selection of those three classic options. I very sincerely doubt it is possible for even an incredible engineer to keep up with the delivery schedules required to ship products now. Not to mention that frontier models do ship pretty consistently good code. By far the biggest source of issues I see is not "poorly coded" but "problem poorly specified". We still need good engineers, because they can understand how to do decompose problems well, but I don't know anyone who writes code by and anymore (other than for fun).

cindyllm 2mo ago
[dead]
skydhash 2mo ago
> I very sincerely doubt it is possible for even an incredible engineer to keep up with the delivery schedules required to ship products now. What's the current delivery rates? From my past experience, any feature can take several weeks from idea to be in a somewhat usable shape for production. While the actual coding is often less than a few days. A lot of time is spent on gathering requirements and resolving conflicts between them. I believe most current improvement in speed is just moving from idea to demo in a few days, then spend several months fighting bugs. While the customer can't really use said feature.
- crystal_revenge 2mo ago
  > I believe most current improvement in speed is just moving from idea to demo in a few days This is an outdated view. Current timelines I'm facing are to be going from "thought", through customer trials and being fully live in the product and ready for sales in ~3 weeks (from kick off to live in app is a bit more than a week). This is for a full product feature that could easily be standalone. In 2023 I would say the timeline for a similarly shaped feature at another startup was around ~3 months (and the team at the time agreed that was an aggressive timeline). Bug rates are not noticeably different than other teams I've been on in the past 20 years. Nobody I know working in startups is still building demos with AI like they were a year or more ago (for work), that's seen as largely a waste of time since you can just ship the feature and be experimenting with customers much faster. On top of that everyone working in startup land knows that SaaS's days are numbered, so you need to be shipping working software fast enough you can get ahead of the curve to navigate where things are going next.