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Comment by baron3dl | Hacker News Reader

What is the right, best software organization in the current era of AI coding? This question is critical and wholly unanswered in comprehensive research along the same axis as Accelerate (2018, Forsgren, Humble, Kim).

There are a lot of (excruciatingly) long-form posts about what folks are pioneering but not a whole lot of follow up about what failed. Where are the short posts on the negative space? How did halving your staff work out? Flattening your org? All those dark factories, what haven't they produced? How about all the other things tried, failed, and unceremoniously scrapped?

We need to explore and communicate the negative space more efficiently. Don't repeat the same mistakes, and don't make me read 2653 words when 300 do it better.

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Hard to say what caused what, but the internet seems to mistake verbosity for authority, and so does AI.

A tech comm course I took in college was graded on two 20-page papers and accompanying 5-minute presentations. That was like 10k written words in a single semester. It was a challenging class, and gave me substantial sense of accomplishment, just to hand in completed work.

Similar to a functioning side project in the 5-10k LOC range. Announcing something that worked a year ago, was laudable, even if not profitable.

I vibe coded 15k LOC this morning and read 20k words of AI generated text while doing so. No longer are either noteworthy or valuable public contributions just by virtue of having been done. I don't think that's widely recognized yet.

> I don't think that's widely recognized yet.

The recognition is represented by one word: Slop.

> mistake verbosity for authority

Isn't that the essence of "attention is all you need"?

> and don't make me read 2653 words when 300 do it better.

A million times this. Can we please RL the next models to learn the “if I had more time I would’ve written a shorter letter” method please.

I see it every day in tickets, many communication channels, PR descriptions, comments, documentation. All have at least 70% verbose fluff which is so taxing and makes it very hard to keep track of the one important thing they’re trying to communicate in the message

It's not just the length, but the ramp. You have 50 words to hook me onto the next 100, which hook me on to the next 150. If you're going to go beyond 300 words, it'd goddamned better be something that I am electing into, not something I'm required to get to whatever is your point. If it's obviously TLDR, I prompt Claude to summarize a paste of the post with the same framing: 50, +100, +150, and beyond only if absolutely necessary.

Great framing.

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