The Speed of Prototyping in the Age of AI

While the speed of prototyping and even shipping to production has increased, I have been asking myself at what cost? I see a lot of garbage being shipped. Not because the code quality is bad, because execution has become cheap now. Ideas even though crap, are getting prototyped. Things which look effective on the surface, but has real UX problems in the underneath, are getting prioritised because someone in the room can talk better and enrol a leader to align with the idea. Good old user research or talking to users to validate ideas, iron out issues in the user flows has become too slow for the new process!!

I think there are costs beyond having to sacrifice writing code yourself. When prototyping yourself you learn a lot about the problem, see what design decisions lead to what tradeofs. While you write code your brain is always running in the background, giving you thoughts about how things could break, where the structure could be simplified, where the code could be extended. I feel this is lost or at least reduced a lot when an LLM writes code because you have a lot less contact with the software.

Productivity has increased only for people who knows what they are doing. I have been able to increase my productivity to build and turn around things faster and in a much polished manner. One problem is too many things goes on in your head and I see using tools like Jira or notion are very handy to capture all edge scenarios, integrations need to be captured. Taking break from AI is very very essential for this to work for me.

The page shows up however briefly and then there's a full screen error message saying "This page couldn’t load"

In the browser javascript console I see "Uncaught TypeError: can't access property "ordinal", r is undefined"

I think it is mostly accurate to say that the cost of execution has dropped to zero.

In this new world, the ability to say "no" is more important than ever. It has never been so easy to burn time, money and energy. The fact that you can try anything now can be modeled as a disadvantage. The space of possible solutions got a lot bigger. Unless you have good taste you could wander and get lost very quickly in this vast new expanse. A true expert that has more paths to work with can arrive at higher quality solutions faster. A novice will get into trouble faster.

It often takes 10k hours suffering through an idea with a live customer before we deeply learn why something is a bad/good approach. None of this painful wisdom is available in the models. You can easily change the mind of ChatGPT with a single adjective. You cannot so easily persuade the person who has successfully cast the ring into the volcano already. They know what it actually feels like to get there.

I created three throwaway android apps in an afternoon to test my code. (All fairly well written)

In software it is now possible to test ideas instantly, this is great for people like me that have so many ideas.

For the past few months, many times i’ve tried this workflow: 1. Ask a coding agent to think and implement a feature that is non trivial 2. This leads to really understand pros and cons for many possible solutions and see it happen end to end 3. Revert all changes and implement it myself when i’m settled on a solution i’m satisfied with 4. At this point the agent is just an iterative reviewer

I’ve felt that any non trivial amount of code not written myself tends to be hard to own. And like the author said, need to keep skills sharp also

Prototyping is a lot easier indeed. I've experienced this as well. And many of the prototypes are kind of shipable even after a only a bit of iteration. Mostly it's super easy to go from prototype to something shippable. I hate the term vibe coding actually. Is it still vibe coding when the thing has end to end tests and I've been trying to break it for a few days?

The flip side is, nobody cares. I've put some of these things up on Github and ... nothing. It seems even my pre-AI projects have dropped sharply in eyeballs judging by issues, prs, stars, etc. People are too busy doing their own things to bother looking at other people's stuff. And rightfully so. There's nothing magical about my prompting to what people can prompt themselves. The value of these prototypes just dropped. Except op course for people still doing things the old fashioned way.

So, you can ship your prototype. But there's very little point to doing so. Even if it isn't slop, it's just very hard to stand out from the masses of other people's prototypes. The value of custom applications just dropped by an order of magnitude. Everybody is going to expect things to be tailored to them now.

I'm truly hopeful that AI will open a new of prototyping. Back in the day, prototyping was how you figured out what to build, you'd very deliberately toss the entire first (or second!) version, and you'd plan to do that.

High quality ensued. Usually ;)

What are people doing with prototypes afterward? Do you end up shipping it as is to production? What about at work? Are the prototypes useful in that context?

Prototype? Why stop there..

that moving background is terrible, i can't read it properly

But is it really any faster than using an already existing code generator/scaffolding tool? How do you know your project isn’t just a regurgitation of another repository? Would it be just as fast to clone some existing project and hack on it?

These are the questions everyone seems to be ignoring and saying “only LLMs can make projects quickly” but ignoring everything those LLMs are built on (your llmis probably calling a code gen tool).

For the at work side, I personally haven’t experienced any disadvantages or missed any project deadlines because I didn’t use an LLM, so what does velocity get me? Thumb twiddling time?

Standard disclaimer from me that if you are forced to do it by people who have power over you then that is different from doing things voluntarily. You can still “just quit your job” but you have less agency.

I also use AI, not for muh agents but for asking questions. Even when I’m not forced to, unfortunately.

> I still don't think AI is magic, and I'm still cautious about the broader picture; the environmental, financial, and social questions haven't gone anywhere. But for me, right now, the day-to-day reality is that I can move faster, think bigger, and ship more than I could before. And that's been genuinely fun.

Three categories of concern, two of which are relevant for the well-being of commoners, and you still go ahead with it? Why? Because being productive and having fun is more important than the environment and driving people into social crises?

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AI makes it possible to ship a lot of junk really fast