Comment by pimterry | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pimterry | Hacker News Reader

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> the company has the money

It's not about money. It's not a tradeoff in cost vs quality - it's a tradeoff in development speed. Shipping N separate native versions requires more development time for any given change: you must implement everything (at least every UI) N times, which drastically increases the design & planning & coordination required vs just building and shipping one implementation.

Do you want to move slower to get "native feel", or do you want to ship fast and get N times as much feature dev done? In a competitive race while the new features are flowing, development speed always wins.

Once feature development settles down, polish starts to matter more and the slowdown becomes less important, and then you can refocus.

> it's a tradeoff in development speed

Doesn't this get thrown out the window now that everyone claims you can be 10x, 50x, 100x more productive with AI? Hell people were claiming you can ask a bunch of AI agents to build a browser from scratch, so surely the dev speed argument no longer applies.

Even if we assume a developer is actually 10x more productive with AI, if you triple their workload by having them build 3 native apps now you're only 3.33x more productive.

No, you would be ten times as productive. You would ship three different apps 3,3 times faster than you previously only shipped one.

The productivity comparison must be made between how long it takes to ship a certain amount of stuff.

Yeah that's why startups often pick iOS first, get product-market fit, and then do Android. The fallacy that abstractions tout is that Android and iOS are the same.

They are not.

A good iOS app is not 1:1 equivalent to what a good Android app would be for the same goal. Treating them as such just gives users a lowest common denominator product.

So, this certainly was a valid argument. But it seems to me that the whole value proposition behind these agentic AI coding tools is to be able to move beyond this. Are we very far from being able to define some Figmas and technical specs and have Codex generate the UIs in 5 different stacks? If that isn't a reality in the near future, then why should we buy AI Tools?

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