Hacker News Reader

That's an adorable idea, but requires willfully ignoring the existence of the Jevons Paradox.

You’re assuming that building something robustly is significantly more time consuming than the “quick and dirty” version. But that’s not really true anymore. You might need to spend another hour or two thinking through the task up front, but the implementation takes roughly the same amount of time either way.

One cannot build something robust just by thinking about it _a priori_, and while this was somewhat at the periphery of the author's argument, it is important.

You can’t get every detail right up front, but you can build a robust foundation from the beginning.

The argument seems to be that AI is causing managers to demand faster results, and so everything has to be a one-shotted mess of slop that just barely works. My point is that it doesn’t take much longer to build something solid instead. Implementation time and quality/robustness are not tightly coupled in the way they used to be.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com