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Comment by acedTrex | Hacker News Reader

I will do what i know gives me the best possible and fastest outcome over the long term, 5-10 year period.

And that remains largely neovim and by hand. The process of typing code gives me a deeper understanding of the project that lets me deliver future features FASTER.

I'm fundamentally convinced that my investment into deep long term grokking of a project will allow me to surpass primarily LLM projects over the long term in raw velocity.

It also stands to reason that any task that i deem to NOT further my goal of learning or deep understanding that can be done by an LLM i will use the LLM for it. And as it turns out there are a TON of those tasks so my LLM usage is incredibly high.

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> I will do what i know gives me the best possible and fastest outcome over the long term, 5-10 year period. And that remains largely neovim and by hand. The process of typing code gives me a deeper understanding of the project that lets me deliver future features FASTER. I'm fundamentally convinced that my deep long term understanding of a project will allow me to surpass primarily LLM projects over the long term.

I have never thought of that aspect! This is a solid point!

This is exactly what I’m doing expressed much more succinctly than I could have done myself. Thanks!

I love that take and sympathise deeply with it. I also have come to the conclusion to focus my manual work on those areas where I can get learning from and try to automate the rest away as much as possible.

I often find myself in the role of the old guy advising a team to slow down a bit, and invest in doing things better now.

I generally frame this as: Are you optimizing for where you will be in 6 months, or 2 years?

Yea, using agents and having them do work means not only a lot of context switching, I actually don't have any context.

Idk what the median lifespan of a piece of code / project / employee tenure is but probably way less than 10 years, which makes that "long term investment" pretty pointless in most cases.

Unsuccessful projects: way less than 10 years

Successful projects: quite often much longer than 10 years

Code quality doesn't matter until lots of people start using what you wrote and you need to maintain/extend/change it

God it's a depressing thought that whatever work you do is just a throwaway no-one will use. That shouldn't be your end goal

> God it's a depressing thought that whatever work you do is just a throwaway no-one will use

I didn't say that.

In fact if your code doesn't significantly change over time it probably means your project wasn't successful.

Maybe we're talking about different things?

That's one of the biggest benefits of software quality and the long-term investment: how easy is your thing to change?

Right, but that usually means higher quality software design, and less so the exact low level details of function A or function B (in most cases)

If anything I'd claim using LLMs can actually free up your time to really focus on the proper design of the software.

I think the disconnect here is that people bashing LLMs don't understand that any decent engineer isn't just going around vibe coding, but instead creating a well thought design (with or without AI) and using LLMs to speed up the implementation.

This is the way. I think we’re in for some rough years at first but then what you described will settle in to the “best practice” (I hate that term). I look forward to the really bizarre bugs and incidents that make the news in the next 2-3 years. …Well as long as they’re not from my teams hah :)

> really bizarre bugs and incidents that make the news in the next 2-3 years

I take it that you are not using Windows 11

If you can't deliver features faster with AI assistance then you're either using it wrong or working on very specialized software that AI can't handle yet.

I haven't seen any evidence yet that using AI is improving developer performance, just a bunch of people who "feel" like it does.

I'm still on the fence about codegen but it's certainly helping explain code quickly without manually step through and providing quick access to docs

I've built a SaaS (with paying customers) in a month that would have taken me easily 6 months to build with this level of quality and features. AI wrote I'd say 99.9% of code. Without AI I wouldn't even have done this because it would have been too large of a task.

In addition, for my old product which is 5+ years old, AI now writes 95%+ of code for me. Now the programming itself takes a small percentage of my time, freeing me time for other tasks.

No-one serious is claiming 6x productivity improvements for close to equal quality

This is proving GP's point that you're going off feels and/or exaggerating

Quality is better both from a user and a code perspective.

From a user perspective I often implement a feature and then just throw it away no worries because I can reimplement it in an hour again based on my findings. No sunken cost. Also I can implement very small details that otherwise I'd have to backlog. This leads to a higher quality product for the user.

From a code standpoint I frequently do large refactors that also would never have been worth it by hand. I have a level of test coverage that would be infeasible for a one man show.

> I have a level of test coverage that would be infeasible for a one man show.

When a metric becomes a target, it ceases to be a good metric.

Cool. What's the product? Like, do you have a link to it or something.

It's boring glorified CRUD for SMBs of a certain industry focused on compliance and workflows specific to my country. Think your typical inventory, ticketing, CRM + industry specific features.

Boring stuff from a programming standpoint but stuff that helps businesses so they pay for it.

Okay, but where's the product? You described the product, but didn't share it.

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