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Comment by reilly3000 | Hacker News Reader

What I have heard from YC folks was that typically the hard costs (GPU compute) and data moats of large players make the space virtually impossible for an upstart to make a meaningful difference that isn’t immediately copied wholesale by a major player.

Software velocity is increasing. Investors should be considering what that means for their investments.

I would be worried if I were tied up in a company that depends on bloated professional services. LLM-enabled senior engineers are 100X more efficient and safe than brand new junior devs. These organizations that embrace the best people using the best tech ought to make Oracle and their famous billion dollar cost overruns quake in their boots.

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> LLM-enabled senior engineers are 100X more efficient and safe than brand new junior devs.

Come on man. Having seen the inside of big-tech-TM and the senior engineers there, yes they are fast and good, but they are not 100x better than the new guy. Maybe 3--5x at best.

Anyway how do you train good senior engineers? They don't just pop up out of thin air.

Amen.

Even an LLM enabled senior engineer was 100x better, the situation has to be the right one where all 100x can be applied productively.

An analogy -- if I am an athlete who runs a mile 100x faster than my competition, does that mean that my country will win 100x more medals at the Olympics? Not unless I compete in every competition.

Now, if you can make a system that consistently creates or recruits (or even just prevents your competition from finding) more productive developers you can get a real advantage. And, as soon as you do it you will have people imitating your strategy and tactics and poaching the people who are most important to building the system. It is way more complex than providing an LLM.

> Maybe 3--5x at best.

More like infinity since juniors usually can't independently progress on non trivial tasks (and will probably regres if left to try).

I sort of get what OP is saying, if LLMs get better you can delegate stuff you usually delegate to juniors.

But that's nowhere near reality right now, LLMs are not even a net positive with all the failure modes and poor workflow.

It takes too much compute to get meaningful context. Having to summarize and chunk problems is more work than the benefits.

Copilot is great at speeding up obvious typing, but that's like 10% bump.

> Anyway how do you train good senior engineers? They don't just pop up out of thin air.

Don't underestimate the industry's capacity to self-sabotage on the long-term for a short-term pay-off. This happened with de-industrialization in the West and might happen with Tech. You only need these senior developers until you realize that you haven't trained any new senior devs. But that problem is for 20-years-in-the-future CEO. No one cares now as long as you can keep next quarter revenue/profit up.

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