Hacker News Reader

Comment by ajross | Hacker News Reader

> inefficient but working

FWIW, an inefficient but working product is pretty much the definition of a startup MVP. People are getting hung up on the fact that it doesn't beat gcc and clang, and generalizing to the idea that such a thing can't possibly be useful.

But clearly it can, and is. This builds and boots Linux. A putative MVP might launch someone's dreams. For $20k!

The reflexive ludditism is kinda scary actually. We're beyond the "will it work" phase and the disruption is happening in front of us. I was a luddite 10 months ago. I was wrong.

View on HN

> FWIW, an inefficient but working product is pretty much the definition of a startup MVP

It depends on what kind of start-up we're talking about.

A compiler start-up probably should show some kind of efficiency gain even in an MVP. As in: we're insanely efficient in this part of the work, but we're still missing all other functionalities but have a clear path to implementing the rest.

This is more like: It's inefficient, and the code is such a mess that I have no idea on how to improve on it.

As per the blog improvements were attempted but that only started a game of whack-a-mole with new problems.

If on the other hand you're talking about Claude Teams for writing code as an MVP: the outcome is more like proof that the approach doesn't work and you need humans in the loop.

You are projecting and over-reacting. My response is measured against the insane hype this is getting beyond what was demonstrared. I never said ot wasn't impressive.

I'm not hung up on anything. Clearly the project isn't stable because it can't be modified without regression. It can be an MVP but if it needs someone to rewrite it or spend many man-months just to grok the code to add to it then its conceivable it isnt an economic win in the long run. Also, they haven't compared this to what a smaller set of agents could accomplish with the same task and thus I am still not fully sold on the economic viability of horizontally scaling agents at this time (well at least not on the task that was tested).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com