Explaining to business people why building software is still hard

> You have enough budget for only the first floor, but you have a big family, and you know you’ll want a second one in a couple of years. > Adding the infrastructure to support a 2nd floor is MUCH cheaper right now than it will be when you actually want that 2nd floor.

The problem with this thinking is it requires certainty about the future. It's much cheaper right now IF AND ONLY IF you end up needing the thing. If you don't need it, then you've threw time and money down the drain.

Where I think this analogy weakens is you probably have far more certainty of whether or not you want a big family then you do on whether or not a new product line will see major adoption.

This is all caused because no-one understands the purpose of quality in software

Low quality = cascading bugs, issues, slow to iterate and add or change features

This is just as true for human written as it is for AI

Instead we have everyone giving up on code quality as if it was just "beautiful code" perfectly indented that was only there for people to ooh and aah at

Even if you do use AI tools to help you write the code, at some level you have to specify what the program's output should be for every possible input.

By loosely specifying things in a prompt, there's simply not enough context for the AI tool to know the "right" output to produce for all possible inputs. What's "right" is often subjective anyway ("Should this button be red or blue?").

My manager who vibe coded our entire webapp in claude design. Has difficulty understanding why its still not production ready.

My job is to wire to our backend data, and a lot of these wiring require me to be in there and actually think about the features. These take time, and I just haven't figure out a way to speed this process up with Claude.

> "Never really finish building it" is the key insight.

The problem with software is that it is never done. There is always another feature you could have and worse than building a property the work is only done by the people on the outside.

Medical doctors mostly follow standard procedure and decision trees.

I don't know that saying "this work is hard" is enlightening.

More useful would be to be able to explain at some high level what the the inherent and accidental complexity is, the tradeoffs to navigate, long-term vs short-term decisions, etc.

Saying "it is hard" makes the audience think you're less of an expert in your domain and they are then inclined to find someone who doesn't say "this work is hard".

We’re in the self driving car stage right now. A Waymo can drive itself but the belts and suspenders involved are more expensive than a normal car.

This is definitely getting my favorite. I’m also going to shamelessly steal this house analogy.

Thanks for writing this!

TBH I think we still need to explain this to ourselves first.

My experience over many decades is this:

* If a business person thinks a change or new program is very easy to do, it is really a very hard project.

* If a business person thinks the change or new program us hard to do, usually it is a trivial project.

For me, this has been true for well over 40 years. I never use any kind AI for my work, it did not exist before I retired.

It's the rest of the owl.

To me stories like this seem like just a moment in time.

Like in 1 to 5 years, vibe coding without looking at the code will likely be a lot better.