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Comment by shalmanese | Hacker News Reader

At the end of the week, if you suffered a hard drive crash and all of your recent code got erased, how quickly could you recreate it? That's how much of your week was spent coding. The rest of the week was spent transforming you into the person who could code the thing you coded.

Contrast this with a chair maker. If at the end of the week, their chair got thrown in a woodchipper, some significant fraction of the next week would be in unavoidable labor making the exact same chair.

This is the fundamental difference between these two activities that gets abstracted away when we both think of them as "labor".

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I see where you're coming at. But don't underestimate the amount of design work that goes into making a good chair. It probably took more time than your think, which transforms them into the person who can craft the chair

Yes, but that is part of the point: a chair being built is mostly distinct from a chair being designed (there is of course a small amount of design that is done while building). Software is designed at a much higher percentage while being created (or if you prefer, there is a cycle between the two states).

You also don’t often learn why you don’t need a chair while building one.

> or if you prefer, there is a cycle between the two states

Yes, what I mostly emphasize with this mode of thinking is that the act of building software is primarily there to transform people (you try a thing, it doesn't work like you think it would, that inspires you to try another thing) and the software at the end of it is largely a byproduct.

If you have the right people-state, producing the software is trivial, it's how do you port the right knowledge into their brains in the first place and and software should be just another tool in your toolbox towards that aim.

Perhaps sometimes and in an ideal state, but most folks who code learn a lot and make a lot of design decisions while producing software.

Chair makers do not make one chair - they make one for the whole family. Then they make more in a very similar style for the next family. There is very little new design in a chair - it has all been done.

We don’t order bespoke-design chairs because construction is expensive, so we adapt to available chairs. In a world without construction-related scarcities and mostly design expenses (think sci-fi with that so far unachievable ability to manipulate the reality on molecular level), a chair can be feasibly created for specific personalities of yourself and others in given circumances, possible context in which you might use it, the interior it would fit in, etc.

In software, this kind of construction scarcity does not exist. Once you design a chair, you can instantiate it to your heart’s content.

Reference to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use_of_Weapons ?

True, except when the chairmaker has to make many times the same chair it becomes less relevant.

Having been in this situation more than once, recreating a concept from scratch when you've already coded it once takes ~20% of the time. This also tracks with my long term empirical observation that roughly 80% of a software project is maintenance, testing, debugging, monitoring, fixing bugs, planning, refactoring, etc.

Sitting down to an editor and typing out ascii charachters is the smallest and least consequential part of software development. And that was _before_ LLMs enter the equation - now it's not even strictly necessary. The software industry needs to get over its obsession with coding as an activity, and with code as an asset. Code is at best a necessary liability. Software systems are what we should be focused on.

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