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Comment by sathish316 | Hacker News Reader

If you’re working on an app or software that has few users, no revenue or minimal revenue, tolerance to bugs is higher and just another Claude prompt away, Software factories are a perfect fit. Most personal software or hobby software or 0-1 yet-to-find-PMF startups belong in this category.

You can even take a stand that you’ll never look at the code and just ship. This is a perfect equilibrium for a Software factory, where the only input or feedback is a one-liner/specced requirement and the only output is outcome of whether the one-liner requirement worked or not.

For almost any other software that does not fit this criteria, software factories are yet to solve the Intent and Subjective Quality problem.

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> few users, no revenue or minimal revenue

The 900 pound gorilla has for a while been "where is all the output of these LLMs?", and this seems to be the answer; the number of apps on the various app stores has skyrocketed over the past two quarters but installs overall are actually down a little bit. So it seems like we've had an explosion of software that one or two people use. Which is a cool situation to think about but is pretty bearish for the "AI as a profitable business" idea.

Marketing was a problem with apps even before AI, which, with today’s slopforests makes it even harder for consumers to see any of your trees even if they wanted to.

Right but if we're going to a small-batch bespoke development model then "marketing" more or less disappears because why would I pay someone to talk to an LLM when I can also talk to an LLM? The money goes from the end user to the lab in this model.

What happens then, though? Is it good to have tens or hundreds of thousands of potentially angry marketing managers roaming around that were developed out of careers?

IDK, get Springsteen to record an aid concert for them?

I think you misconstrued my reply. I wasn't talking about that aspect.

I should expand that: the money goes from the end user to the lab and only in the cases where the marginal utility of the small app exceeds the cost.

100 points for the term Slopforest :-)

I haven’t checked in recently but a couple months ago there was an increase on the Apple App Store, but not on Android.

And when I did a spot check, most new apps were just wrappers around LLM APIs.

> If you’re working on an app or software that has few users, no revenue or minimal revenue, tolerance to bugs is higher and just another Claude prompt away, Software factories are a perfect fit. Most personal software or hobby software or 0-1 yet-to-find-PMF startups belong in this category.

I would rather claim that for my personal/hobby software, I apply a much higher quality standard than for the software that I write at work.

Believe me: I would love to apply the same high (or even higher) standard at work, too.

The problem rather is that it is a very common situation that bosses actively prohibit me from rocking the boat too much. If I make (I think typically good) suggestions, I often get very stern reactions.

At work, elegance is not celebrated - just implement the tasks of users who don't care about quality or elegance.

You either need to quit or keep your head down, I can’t tell which.

If you need to actively keep your head down, you need to quit.

Doesn’t matter whether ‘the problem’ is the employer, the employee, both, or neither. They’re a bad fit for each other.

I don't think so? It's very common in both large companies and small startups where pragmatism has a higher priority than so called elegance or whatever you call it the "artisan" feel. It's varying shades of "perfect is the enemy of good", where different cultures and business environments dictate how much a manager is going to tolerate your proposed refactoring. At least that's what I got from the parent lost.

Keep your head down, while you look for alternatives. No need to pre-emptively quit, if you can coast and collect a paycheck.

> If you need to actively keep your head down, you need to quit.

This really depends on whether they are paying you decently. The number of people I've met who found a nice corner in FAANG, and decided to keep their head down and collect a steady paycheque... One may find one can swallow a lot of engineering pride for a recurring six figures

And that’s not to say anything about personal situations. Family obligations, immigration requirements, etc.

Especially in the current job market, “find a new job and quit” is going to cost you so much time and effort and for many people it will still be a lateral move in terms of company quality in regards to engineering practices. It’s hard to make these kinds of deep company discoveries until you’re in the thick of it but by then it’s too late.

Personally, I’m advocating for change where I can and not taking it personally when the manager says no. I put in enough effort not to get paged in the middle of the night which is generally plenty for management. It helps that I don’t work in a super strict business environment.

There’s more to life outside of work as well so if you can silo that bit of your life and enjoy things outside of working hours and you’re content, so be it.

I’m always surprised when I read comments like this. I’ve come across far more situations where individual contributions take a slapdash approach and management is disengaged than management actively imposing poor quality work.

The perfect poster boy is system scripts. They’re not even published usually, but being able to just generate < 500 line scripts for everything is a huge boon.

I agree this rocks I do this almost daily

It goes hand in hand with Linux desktops too, because everything is just so much more scriptable. That used to be intimating, user unfriendly, and maybe it still is. But with AI it enables so many new avenues.

Now that LLMs can do the actual configuration, I started using NixOS and now all my config lives in one repo, and every quality of life improvement fans out to every machine without issue.

Since Claude (code) knows all about my system, it will also tailor solutions to it when I ask how to do something. Using it I can often find really neat solutions to whatever sys admin task I can imagine.

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