alt Hacker News> Wasn't writing code always cheap?
No.
If you’re a startup that wanted to ship your product, you were stuck hiring developers and waiting 6 months. I’m old enough to remember th “6-8 weeks” it was supposed to take to build the first version of Stackoverflow (hint it was more like several months).
Creating a v1 of a product / feature is now cheap. When you’re a mature product and need to make complicated / iterative decisions - that’s not cheap and requires expertise to make good decisions.
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I made a SO clone in 1 week at a previous job (ok not 100% feature complete obviously but good enough to start using). This is by myself with no AI of course (10 years ago).
With Claude Code today I could do it maybe 2x faster? Maybe not that much even though, a lot of time is spent not on purely mechanically typing out characters so it’s not a huge savings necessarily.
> I’m old enough to remember th “6-8 weeks” it was supposed to take to build the first version of Stackoverflow (hint it was more like several months).
And they had to do this without help from Stack Overflow! :-)
Startups, famous for writing clean, quality code.