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Comment by reducesuffering | Hacker News Reader

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reducesuffering

Think bigger. Say I'm starting a startup:

1. "Setup Django, Nginx, and Postgres deployed on a Digital Ocean Ubuntu droplet." Done.

2. "Make a shopping page like $URL." Done.

3. "Fill it with data from X and connect with Stripe." Done.

4. ???

5. Profit

Seems like even a great dev will take 20x the time to do that if the model is able to correctly generate this, even with an error, customization, or two.

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If you don't have someone that understands the generated code, you'll be kinda screwed. Most of my work isn't writing a function to do X. It's reading and understanding all the surrounding code and architecture and then knowing that I need a function to do X. Writing the actual function isn't usually much of a challenge. I get the feeling that this tool will just encourage write-only code that ultimately no one understands. Will all of the generated code follow a consistent style? Will it know to use the framework you built or will it just reinvent everything it needs for each problem you give it? I already see tons of code that people copy and paste without really understanding it, and a lot of the time they're just adding complexity by solving non-problems. This just automates that process. I can see it being useful in certain narrow cases, but the potential for misuse is huge.

at the point where 1/2/3 are possible, what value does the startup have when anyone else can ask it to do the same thing?

Do your competitors have access to this tool that gets you started 20x faster? If so, you want the tool.

Your copycat startup may not have incredible value, but selling shovels always pays.

ah, true... touché

Realistically if we get to that point the landscape of "startups" will drastically change

Why would you mention "Django", "Nginx", "Postgres", "Digital Ocean", "Ubuntu" or "Stripe"? Surely those are implementation details that the user wouldn't care about.

but does it really matter, if 20x is 1 week instead of 2 hours?

are startups really that shallow?

1/20th of the time? That's kind of a big deal.

i think the 1/20th of the time was mentioned was only at start, i dont think you will gain a lot after that as the spaghetti AI will come to collect.

You have a debt to pay. -- Davy Jones

That depends: https://xkcd.com/1205/

A one-time setup is perfectly OK to take a few days, especially if afterwards you have a documented process that allows you to modify and improve the result.

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