I myself am saving a small fortune on design and photography and getting better results while doing it.
If this is not all that well I can’t wait until we get to mediocre!
Code is not an asset it's a liability, and code that no one has reviewed is even more of a liability.
However, in the end, execution is all that matters so if you and your cofounder are able to execute successfully with mountains of generated code then it doesn't matter what assets and liabilities you hold in the short term.
The long term is a lot harder to predict in any case.
Code that solves problems and makes you money is by definition an asset. Whether or not the code in question does those things remains to be seen, but code is not strictly a liability or else no one would write it.
This discussion and distinction used to be well known, but I'm happy to help some people become "one of today's lucky 10,000" as quoted from https://xkcd.com/1053/ because it is indeed much more interesting than the alternative approach.
Delta’s airplanes also require a great deal of maintenance, and I’m sure they strive to have no more than are necessary for their objectives. But if you talk to one of Delta’s accountants, they will be happy to disabuse you of the notion that the planes are entered in the books as a liability.
I don't think it's a wrong quote. Code's behavior is the asset, and code's source is the liability. You want to achieve maximum functionality for minimal source code investment.
I could always be wrong though, that was just my interpretation of it. I don't get how code could be a liability in the financial sense, but I do get how every line of code risks bugs and other issues.
You wrote a music player that only allows one artist from list of all artists? Tech debt.
You wrote optimized assembly for x86_64? It's the year 2060, and we only support NGPU_ARM_N_LEG.
The moment your expectations change (which is all the time), your code needs to be changed, and effort isn't free.
If a software company is going bankrupt, it’s very unlikely they will be able to sell code for individual apps and services they may have written for much at all, even if they might be able to sell the whole company for something.
Code isn't a liability b/c it costs money (though it does). Code is a liability like an unsafe / unproven bridge is a liability. It works fine until it doesn't - and at that point you're in trouble. Just b/c you can build lots of bridges now, doesn't mean each new bridge isn't also a risk. But if you gotta get somewhere now, conjuring bridges might be the way to go. Doesn't make each bridge not a liability (risky thing to rely on) or an asset (thing you can sell, use to build value)
The same with the bridge. Even the best built and most useful bridge requires maintenance. Assuming changing traffic patterns, it might equally require upgrades and changes.
The problem with this whole “code is a liability” thing is that it’s vacuous. Your house is a liability. The bridge that gets you to work as a liability. Everything that requires any sort of maintenance or effort or upkeep or other future cost is ina sense a liability. This isn’t some deep insight though. This is like saying your bones could break so they are liability. OK, but their value drastically outweighs any liability they impose.
But it's the opposite, deposits are liabilities because they need interest paid out and can be withdrawn at any time.
Just because the company has a thing that could be assigned value doesn't make it automatically an asset.
It's not right but it's not wrong either. It at least was a useful way to think about code, and we'll see if that applies in LLM era.
Just this week, sun-tue. I added a fully functional subscription model to an existing platform, build out a bulk async elasticjs indexing for a huge database and migrated a very large Wordpress website to NextJS. 2.5 days, would have cost me at least a month 2 years ago.
AI is helping me solve all the issues that using AI has caused.
Wordpress has a pretty good export and Markdown is widely supported. If you estimate 1 month of work to get that into NextJS, then maybe the latter is not a suitable choice.
If AI was good at a certain task then it was a bad task in the first place.
Which is just run of the mill dogmatic thinking.
I feel bad for AI opponents mostly because it seems like the drive to be against the thing is stronger than the drive towards fact or even kindness.
My .02c: I am saving months of efforts using AI tools to fix old (PRE-AI, PREHISTORIC!) codebases that have literally zero AI technical debt associated to them.
I'm not going to bother with the charts & stats, you'll just have to trust me and my opinion like humans must do in lots of cases. I have lots of sharp knives in my kitchen, too -- but I don't want to have to go slice my hands on every one to prove to strangers that they are indeed sharp -- you'll just have to take my word.
I'm a non dev and the things I'm building blow me away. I think many of these people criticizing are perhaps more on the execution side and have a legitimate craft they are protecting.
If you're more on the managerial side, and I'd say a trusting manager not a show me your work kind, then you're more likely to be open and results oriented.
I think getting results can be very easy, at first. But I force myself to not just spit out code, because I've been burned so, so, so many times by that.
As software grows, the complexity explodes. It's not linear like the growth of the software itself, it feels exponential. Adding one feature takes 100x the time it should because everything is just squished together and barely working. Poorly designed systems eventually bring velocity to a halt, and you can eventually reach a point where even the most trivial of changes are close to impossible.
That being said, there is value in throwaway code. After all, what is an Excel workbook if not throwaway code? But never let the throwaway become a product, or grow too big. Otherwise, you become a prisoner. That cheeky little Excel workbook can turn into a full-blown backend application sitting on a share drive, and it WILL take you a decade to migrate off of it.
I remember coding BASIC with POKE/PEEK assembly inside it, same with Turbo Pascal with assembly (C/C++ has similar extern abilities). Perhaps you want no more web or UI (TUI?). Once you imagine what you are looking for, you can label it and go from there.
Part of the craft of being a good developer is keeping up with current technology. I can't help thinking that those who oppose AI are not protecting legitimate craft, but are covering up their own laziness when it comes to keeping up. It seems utterly inconceivable to me that anyone who has kept up would oppose this technology.
There is a huge difference between vibe coding and responsible professional use of AI coding assistants (the principle one, of course, being that AI-generated code DOES get reviewed by a human).
But that, being said, I am enormously supportive of vibe coding by amateur developers. Vibe coding is empowering technology that puts programming power into the hands of amateur developers, allowing them to solve the problems that they face in their day-to-day work. Something that we've been working toward for decades! Will it be professional-quality code? No. Of course not. Will it do what it needs to do? Invariably, yes.
It produces code (in the hands of an amateur) that is good enough for a demo or at best an MVP, but it’s not at all a stable foundation.
I’ve been full time (almost solo) building an ERP system for years and my development velocity has gone roughly 2x. The new features are of equal quality, everything is code reviewed, everything is done in my style, adhering to my architectural patterns. Not to mention I’ve managed to build a mobile app alongside my normal full time work, something I wouldn’t have even had the time to attempt to learn about without the use of agents.
So do you think I’m lying or do you just think my eyes are deceiving me somehow?
Such an estimate is far less reliable than your eyes are.
So if people want to do more and better studies, that sounds great. But I have a good supply of salt for self-estimates. I'm listening to your input, but it's much easier for your self-assessment to have issues than you're implying.
Solo dev projects are usually reasonably sized (< million LOC), style is more uniform, there's fewer silos etc. etc.
Good studies look at a broader picture.
My cofounder is extremely technically competent, but all these people are like good luck with your spaghetti vibe code. It’s humorous.
The work was moving the many landing pages & content elements to NextJS, so we can test, iterate and develop faster. While having a more stable system. This was a 10 year old website, with a very large custom WordPress codebase and many plugins.
The content is still in WordPress backend & will be migrated in the second phase.
I don't even know what a Wordpress site is anymore.
> then maybe the latter is not a suitable choice.
But now it only takes days which makes it suitable?
There also is the paradoxical question if it is worth the time from someone who knows what they are doing? how would you even tell?
This would imply companies could delete all their code and do better, which doesn't seem true?
You and anyone else could have avoided spending millions for programmer salaries, had you been allowed to reuse freely any of the many existing proprietary or open-source programs that solved the same or very similar problems.
I would have no problem with everyone being able to reuse any program, without restrictions, but with these AI programming tools the rich are now permitted to ignore copyrights, while the poor remain constrained by them, as before.
The copyright for programs has caused a huge multiplication of the programming effort for many decades, with everyone rewriting again and again similar programs, in order for their employing company to own the "IP". Now LLMs are exposing what would have happened in an alternative timeline.
The LLMs have the additional advantage of fast and easy searching through a huge database of programs, but this advantage would not have been enough for a significant productivity increase over a competent programmer that would have searched the same database by traditional means, to find reusable code.
"Available for use" and "Automatically rewritten to work in your codebase fairly well" is very different, so copyright is probably not the blocker technically
China steals our r&d (both copyrighted and non) and gets a lot of theirs from state funding.
I don’t think I’d take China’s success as proof that the copyright system doesn’t work.
There is still much for them to steal.
Claude Code is $20 a month, and I get a lot of usage out of it. I don't see how cutting edge AI tools are only for the rich. The name OpenAI is often mocked, but they did succeed at bringing the cutting edge of AI to everyone, time and time again.
So much of programming is tedium.
The GP can free-ride uncredited on the collective work of open source at their leisure, but I'm sure Disney would string me up by my earlobes if I released a copywashed version of Toy Story 6.
Why?
Im not even casting shade - I think AI is quite amazing for coding and can increase productivity and quality a lot.
But I'm curious why he's doing this.
It was basically cost prohibitive to change anything significant until Claude became able to do most of the work for us. My cofounder (also CTO of another startup in the interim) found himself with a lot of time on his hands unexpectedly and thought it would be a neat experiment and has been wowed by the results.
Much in the same way people on HN debate when we will have self driving cars while millions of people actually have their Teslas self-driving every day (it reminds me of when I got to bet that Joe Biden would win the election after he already did) those who think AI coding is years away are missing what’s happening now. It’s a powerful force magnifier in the hands of a skilled programmer and it’ll only get better.
But if it can do 90% of the work for you, it is a serious force magnifier.
Oh it can't do 90% of the work for you. It CAN type 90% of the work for you, but someone still has to read the code and know what the best course of action is, supposedly...... I suppose some people never learned to use their IDEs or to touch type so as to find LLMs such a crazy productivity boost.
Well, we could characterize a Tesla as doing 90% of the work but it's not at all a force multiplier. Your "10%" supervisory contribution takes just as long as doing 100%.
What Tesla is selling now is the worst of both worlds. You still have to pay attention but it's way more boring so it's really hard to do so. Well until it suddenly decides to ram a barrier at highway speeds.
Wake me up when I can have a beer and watch a movie while it's driving.
The actual number of such vehicles produced is two orders of magnitude less.
You’re right that it doesn’t happen every day but that doesn’t change the point, you all are debating whether something can happen after it already happened.
My goalposts have always been on levels 3 and 4.
Elon Musk has been promising level 4, sometimes level 5, this entire time.
It has not already happened. The cars are level 2.
Plus, the idea that every single Tesla has this option is just your rought estimate, right?
By the way, why does your co-founder have to do the rewrite at all?
We have no clue the scope of the rewrite but for anything non-trivial, 2 weeks just isn't going to be possible without AI. To the point of you probably not doing it at all.
I have no idea why they are rewriting the code. That's another matter.
You sound like complete clones of us :-)
We’ve been at it since July and have built what used to take 3-5 people that long.
To the haters: I use TDD and review every line of code, I’m not an animal.
There’s just 2 of us but some days it feels like we command an army.
Waiting for it to actually go well to see what else I can do !
Probably the biggest gap would be the ability to ignite, drive, and launch new initiatives. How does an AI agent "lead" an engineering team? That's not something you can code up in an agent runtime. It'd require a whole culture change that I have a hard time seeing in reality. But of course if there comes a point where AI takes all the junior and mid-level coding jobs, then at that point there's no culture to change, so staff/principal jobs would be just as at risk.
That said, the thing it really struggles with is when the best approach is "do nothing". Which, given that a huge chunk of principal level work is in deciding what NOT to do, it may be a while before LLMs can viably take that role. A principal LLM based on current tech would approve every idea that comes across it, and moreover sell each of them as "the exact best thing needed by the organization right now!"
Of course, I could just _tell_ it to rewrite, but that’s different.
Oh no, my job is safe no longer!
I think that's sort of a theme with LLMs. It's not that it's better than "the real thing" (in this case a senior+ software engineer) or that its without flaws... but it's a fucking service. Having just a semblance of an advanced software engineer in your pocket is a game changer. It doesn't need to be perfect or better than the real thing to fundamentally change things.
Yay! Let's put all the artists out of business and funnel all the money to the tech industry. That's how to build a vibrant society. Yay!
Producing a lot of code isn’t proof of anything.
As a fractional CTO and in my decade of being co-founder/CTO I saw a lot of people and codebases and most of it is just bad. You need to compare real life codebases and outputs of developers, not what people wished it would be like. And the reality is that most of it sucks and most SWEs are bad at their jobs.
This is one of those statements that would horrify any halfway competent engineer. A cowboy coder going in, seeing a bunch of code and going 'I should rewrite this' is one of the biggest liabilities to any stable system.
Right? RIGHT?!
The "how hard could it be" fallacy claims another!
Most people have no clue the craftsmanship, work etc it takes to create a great product. LLMs are not going to change this, in fact they serve as a distraction.
I’m not a SWE so I gain nothing by being bearish on the contributions of LLMs to the real economy ;)
It's a reference to a trope where the VP of Eng or CTO (who was an engineer decades ago) gets it in their head that they want to code again and writes something absolute dogshit terrible because their skills have degraded. Unfortunately they are your boss's boss's boss and can make you deal with it anyways.
I've actually seen it IRL once, to his credit the dude finally realized the engineer smiles were pained grimaces and it got quietly dropped lol.
LLMs do the jobs of developers without telling semi-technical arrogant MBA holders “no, you’re dumb”, thereby creating all the same jobs as before but also a butt-ton more juggling expensive cleanup mixed with ego-massaging.
We’re talking a 2-10x improvement in ‘how hard could it be?’ iterations. Consultant candy.
PM has an idea. PM vibe codes a demo of this idea. PM shows it to the VP. VP gets excited and says "when can we have this." I look at the idea and estimate it'll take two people six months. VP and PM say "what the heck, but AI built the demo in a weekend, you should be able to do this with one engineer in a month." I get one day closer to quitting.
I'm doing the same as your co-founder currently. In a few days, I've rewritten old code that took previous employees months to do. Their implementation sucked and barely worked, the new one is so much better and has tests to prove it.
The author's second reference, an article from The Atlantic, describing the copyright liability issues with "generative AI", has been submitted to HN four times in the last week
AI Memorization Research (theatlantic.com)
2 points by tagyro 5 hours ago | flag | past | discuss
AI's Memorization Crisis (theatlantic.com)
2 points by twalichiewicz 1 day ago | flag | past | 1 comment
AI's Memorization Crisis (theatlantic.com)
3 points by palad1n 4 days ago | flag | past | 1 comment
AI's Memorization Crisis (theatlantic.com)
4 points by casparvitch 4 days ago | flag | past | discuss
If the LLM generating the code introduced a bug, who will be fixing it? The founder that does not know how to code or the LLM that made the mistake first?
Key thing here. The code was already written, so rewriting it isn't exactly adding a lot of quantifiable value. If millions weren't spent in the first place, there would be no code to rewrite.
Is this because you are improving your already existing design and photography skills and business ?
Or have you bootstrapped from the scratch with AI ?
Do you mind sharing or giving a hint ?
Thanks!
For now, it works out for companies - but forward to, say, ten years in the future. There won't be new intermediates or seniors any more to replace the ones that age out or quit the industry entirely in frustration of them not being there for actual creativity but to clean up AI slop, simply because there won't have been a pipeline of trainees and juniors for a decade.
But by the time that plus the demographic collapse shows its effects, the people who currently call the shots will be in pension, having long since made their money. And my generation will be left with collapse everywhere and find ways to somehow keep stuff running.
Hell, it's already bad to get qualified human support these days. Large corporations effectively rule with impunity, with the only recourse consumers have being to either shell out immense sums of money for lawyers and court fees or turning to consumer protection/regulatory authorities that are being gutted as we speak both in money and legal protections, or being swamped with AI slop like "legal assistance" AI hallucinating case law.
There are be plenty of self taught developers who didn't need any "traineeship". That proportion will increase even more with AI/LLMs and the fact that there are no more jobs for youngsters. And actually from looking at the purely toxic comments on this thread, I would say that's a good thing for youngsters to be not be exposed to such "seniors".
Credentialism is dead. "Either ship or shutup" should be the mantra of this age.
Or is any of the existing platform is used as an input for the rewrite?
I was expecting a language reference (we all know which one), to get more speed, safety and dare I say it "web scale" (insert meme). :)
Obligatory reference https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2F-DItXtZs
I trained a small neural net on pics of a cat I had in the 00s (RIP George, you were a good cat).
Mounted a webcam I had gotten for free from somewhere, above the cat door, in the exterior of the house.
If the neural net recognized my cat it switched off an electromagnetic holding the pet door locked. Worked perfectly until I moved out of the rental.
Neural nets are, end of the day, pretty cool. It's the data center business that's the problem. Just more landlords, wannabe oligarchs, claiming ownership over anything they can get the politicians to give them.
Tell me you have bland taste without telling me you have bland taste. But if your customers eat it up and your slop manages to stand out in sea of slop, who am I to dislike slop.