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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
My cofounder is extremely technically competent, but all these people are like good luck with your spaghetti vibe code. It’s humorous.
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.
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?
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.
This would imply companies could delete all their code and do better, which doesn't seem true?