Social media is, paraphrasing Jon Stewart, ultra-processed shit that's not good for most people.
More generally, it's weird. 10 years ago, the technical aspects would legitimately be seen as a major, perhaps main obstacle to building a product. It's questionable whether that is really gone (can you really, really build a software product now with just LLMs? With deployment, security etc).
But for sure the technological bar is now much lower, it might disappear altogether, and what remains is actually finding a useful product, marketing, finding clients etc. Which I'd argue were actually always the biggest step to overcome.
he would be extremely pleased to pay for (and have to listen to the complaints of) far fewer programmers.
[edit] also any interaction with storage / database isn't fun either, unless you use some ORM frameworks, and then you have some even bigger problems.
Then a lot of things about the way code should be structured can change. If you're not editing by hand, and want to limit the scope of changes, and have AI tools to make future edits faster... THEN you can have a lot of redundancy in your code. You can just not have complex code that shares responsibility and instead have redundant repeated code that solves one problem differently.
It's not what I would advocate for every single part of every program, but many things now make sense to be structured in this way. Separate out concerns way more, and not try to have complex solutions that solve many problems at once, and favour repetitive code slightly more.
Much as you would structure a project if you had some junior programmers, you might have sections that only seniors should be touching - complex cores and difficult parts where you have way more oversight. And use more AI in the areas where you'd let juniors do scut work.
A. you are doing this "full time"
B. Know what to build
C. More importantly you know "how" you want it built and you push the llm to refactoring regularly in your style.
I don't buy into the "let the agent code for 6 hours straight" agentic nonsense. I review every (big) change and just saving me stackoverflow/Google visits has been a huge productivity booster. Heck I wrote css, proto plugins, dsl parsers, simple games and more because now I needed much less "onboarding" times.
Ask your AI to write tests and to review the code, of course /s
> And, what kind of solution needs 10,000 lines of code added to it daily?
In the first days, adding 10,000 useful lines a day can be very helpful. It means you get your MVP out earlier and/or makes it way easier to experiment with different ways to solve a problem.
I meet people all the time who say the most incredible things. Sometimes, rarely, these things turn out to be true.
Just for fun I checked the codebase stats for platform I am working on and it is 70k lines of code. We are talking about enterprise saas processing payments in billions per year.
What could go wrong?
https://xcancel.com/paulg/status/1953289830982664236
I've done that, occasionally, though through deterministic means, i.e. code generation tools. If you know what you're getting it's no big deal. If you don't, it probably is, but not in a good way.
If it's actually true and the result reasonable, I expect ~7-8 KLOC out of those 10 to be adequate and necessary tests, and roughly 4 out of those 12 h a day to be waiting for tests to finish. I also expect static analysis tooling, linters, ast-grep and so on get a lot of use.
Better yet, feedback from these kind of tools is exactly what AI is great at in iteratively resolving so you don't have to review code below your standard of quality.
When people say "I did this" showing something they did with AI, the reality is "I asked an AI for this". Okay, not every time, but something on this scale would, they don't even know what those 10K lines of code do, they asked and received.
Either way, extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence and from that one visible tweet without an account I remain unconvinced.
AI is a too and can be useful at times. But amount of hype is unjustified in my opinion. Ergo, I am getting a feeling that there is some kind of elite conspiracy going on.
> As it turns out I met another startup today that's using AI to do ongoing testing of changing codebases. (He's not using them yet though.)
This is a satire, right?
Or: too much weed tweeting.
Twitter is such a superficial format that obliterates all context, reason, and sense of humanity. I'm still 100% unsure what the intent of that conveyance was. Brain fart? That's why I don't tweet. Also, I'm too old.
Rust (backend) and TypeScript - Admin app (for managers), Menu app (for guests) and marketing site. SQLite database with LiteStream for backups. Basic tests, CI/CD.
All this - solo, in 10 days. Plus I market a lot more than I have ever had time.
- Source code and GitHub issues: https://github.com/brainless/letsorder
- Site: https://letsorder.app
I am sure there are parts that will break, but what I am getting out of a Claude Pro $20/month in value is a dream. I am generating a couple other products in parallel too, all sources available.
Looking at the code, there is a good chance this codebase is vulnerable to SQL injection.
I live in a remote village in Himalayas, WB, India that I am sure no one on HN has heard of. I got 5G based broadband that is flaky just a few weeks back. By the end of this year, I am sure I will be able to attempt 4-5 products and market them more than I have ever done in my 16 years of professional life.
Software development has changed, forever.
Last week I have been working on remote controlling Borunte welding robots, I wrote 10k lines of code per day, creating all kinds of interfaces, weird ik strategies, camera calibrations, weird joypad controls, cad mouse controls, simulations etc.
None of it was prod ready, I was just experimenting, but tbh I would've made 1/10th of the progress if it wasn't for gemini and claude.
Now I know what to write.
PS: the default ik engine on those robots have a bug that can easily kill you when it gets singular, so if you are working on them, keep your distance :)
