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Comment by hooby | Hacker News Reader

The examples mainly show Robb creating PRs with code changes that are less work to write, than the corresponding issue... ^_^'

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That's definitely how it has played out, yes. The big one for me was:

https://github.com/robb-oat/server/issues/7

I coded it up myself and then was like "wait I should be dogfooding this" so I did and Robb Oat spit out basically what I had just written. That was the aha moment for me.

Also I've been reading Innovator's Dilemma and basically all disruptive technology sucks at first so I haven't been too discouraged about it.

Everything sucks at first. That doesn't make it disruptive or good or gives you any information as to how it will work in the future.

True! It is not disruptive just because it sucks. In fact, it is not disruptive at all yet—what has it disrupted? Nothing. :^) What I said, though, is that I'm not _discouraged_ at its limited utility at this point in the game. It's to be expected. Everything, as you say, sucks at first.

In terms of Innovators Dilemma: Robb Oat is not useful to existing "customers" of software engineers (product managers, engineering managers, lead engineers). But because of its drastically lower cost and higher speed, it _may_ open up new markets that barely exist right now. If successful in these new, smaller markets, it may eventually move upmarket and displace existing "technology" (i.e., us) once it can compete on productivity. That's the point at which it will have proven itself to be disruptive.

The next step for Robb Oat, if it's to go anywhere, is to find the smaller, newer market where it can be useful. TBD

It's still a win if the person writing them costs less than the person who'd be coding, and/or if it expands the pool of people capable of making changes to the code base.

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