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Comment by Oarch | Hacker News Reader

Perhaps this is something to be normalised. It's perfectly feasible eBay no longer needs to build, develop and market at the pace it once did?

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It's going to be normalised in the coming years, across small and huge companies. Not sure how all the web devs will adjust.

Also we aren't in 2010. You don't need to build as much in house anymore or patch up tech that doesn't scale. Modern frameworks, cloud, and open source tech makes things at least 10x easier than they used to be. We will only improve in this regard.

In the past this just meant it was easier for people to make new services and companies etc. and overall employment in the sector actually increased.

Maybe AI will change this, but we've seen plenty of doom-mongering before that never bore out.

Only if the rate of newer services/companies keep up and outweigh the ease of development we should eventually reach. People are currently still maintaining jQuery PHP and other tech that makes doing anything much more complicated than it needs to be.

might be a naive take but i think LLMs will improve the ease with which maintenance can happen. one of the major problems with older tech is finding people who are willing to work in that domain for cheap - LLMs seem to trivialise that.

How do you think they trivialize it? I've found them to be good for writing short scripts or answering a specific question. I've never seen one that you point at your own code base and have it do things like write a new endpoint that takes into account all the existing database and authentication code. If such a thing exists I'd like to know about it.

Your first sentence is describing the web based LLMs. There are others that operate against the project structure and has read all the files. But a lot of CRUDs also involve a much easier modular domain structure.

LLMs amplify you quite a bit in productivity if you're doing CRUD which is what most people are doing. You just clean up the code and clarify potential improvements.

That's entirely possible. eBay is a very mature product, and it has been like this for years. Among the e-commerce platforms, it's still one that empowers the little people and serves a goal. I hope they won't "disrupt" it.

Alternatively, they could be in a crisis.

Every year or two Ebay rewrites their UI and makes it slightly worse. I kind of wish they'd laid off a good chunk of their designers/developers three or four UI's ago.

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