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Comment by overgard | Hacker News Reader

Definitely agree with this. Even without a large backlog, one of the things I find working on my personal project/product where I'm simultaneously the engineer/designer/project manager is it's really easy to ask the LLM to implement an idea I've been mulling for an hour or two, it one-shots it and I'm happy, and then a week or two later it starts to dawn on me that the feature was maybe not a great idea. Which isn't on the LLM, but I know when I write features by hand I tend to reach the "this is a bad idea" conclusion a lot earlier because I'm directly confronted with the cases where it won't work out, I have to think a lot harder about corner cases, etc.

Where I think/hope this goes is instead of using LLMs to go faster, we use them to do better work. I'd rather someone vibe code up better ways to test things, or use it to do in-depth code analysis and bug fixing, etc., then just pile in features.

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The good thing is since the feature was cheap to implement, you can just say "this was a bad idea" and remove it, as long as adding that feature wasn't a one way decision. People are typically more reticent to remove things that were hard to implement, even if that's the right thing to do.

> People are typically more reticent to remove things that were hard to implement, even if that's the right thing to do.

Careful. The sunk cost fallacy isn't just about time, it's also about money, and people may naturally be reluctant to remove bad features that cost them a lot of tokens, especially if the act of removal itself is going to cost even more tokens.

That's a pretty good point, and I assume at $work they wouldn't appreciate throwing away $n dollars worth of code.

That's the problem, even with an LLM, removing a feature two weeks later can be a nightmare because things have grown to depend on it. In a way it's even harder because the velocity of stuff piling in is much greater.

> you can just say "this was a bad idea" and remove it

Have you ever actually done that in a "serious" product, or just made it up?

In any product with actual customers, especially those from other (big) companies, features don't just go away at the snap of a finger. Otherwise, have fun discovering users moving to your competitors.

Anecdotally, a product from another company had removed or made significant changes to important features our users rely on every day multiple times with short notice, several times. We didn't hesitate to migrate to another service, which completed within about a month.

That’s why I usually starts with the simplest version of something I want, which is usually a shell or a perl script. When I nailed down my workflows and needs, that’s when I build a proper program. This is one of the reason I like cli programs. They’re like lego blocks for workflows.

Same things with bigger projects. Write the most minimalistic version of a feature, and then ship it (or do a round of testing). Iterate based on feedback.

"my personal project"

Sure.

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