alt Hacker News"Producing code has always been low cost"
Relative to what?
I don't understand people dismissing the massive decrease in both cost of producing code and the speed of producing code.
Before AI, people running businesses had similar issued as people have with AI now, but the costs were much greater.
They could hire someone to write them a prototype for their idea, but it would cost them on the order of 1000s of dollars, and it would take weeks at the minimum!
Now it could cost them 20$ and be done in a few days. The feedback loop is the bottleneck.
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I understood it in the spirit of “code is a liability not an asset.” Code still needs to be maintained, changed, etc whether that is by a human or LLM.
In other words, just because more code can be produced quickly does not mean that it is cheap.
edit: I’m maybe hearing your point is that LLMs may change that POV but I think that is TBD.
I'm not dismissing it, I'm saying it's never been the bottleneck. Like you said, the feedback loop is A bottleneck, so is figuring out all the nasty things that nobody on HN seems to have heard of before, like "what are the requirements", "which tradeoffs can we make to get this done in time", "what is the architecture for this", and building it in such a way that you can guarantee that it won't fall apart in 20 years when your requirements change.