Comment by merlincorey
1 day ago
> Meanwhile, my cofounder is rewriting code we spent millions of salary on in the past by himself in a few weeks.
Code is not an asset it's a liability, and code that no one has reviewed is even more of a liability.
However, in the end, execution is all that matters so if you and your cofounder are able to execute successfully with mountains of generated code then it doesn't matter what assets and liabilities you hold in the short term.
The long term is a lot harder to predict in any case.
> Code is not an asset it's a liability, and code that no one has reviewed is even more of a liability.
Code that solves problems and makes you money is by definition an asset. Whether or not the code in question does those things remains to be seen, but code is not strictly a liability or else no one would write it.
"Code is a liability. What the code does for you is an asset." as quoted from https://wiki.c2.com/?SoftwareAsLiability with Last edit December 17, 2013.
This discussion and distinction used to be well known, but I'm happy to help some people become "one of today's lucky 10,000" as quoted from https://xkcd.com/1053/ because it is indeed much more interesting than the alternative approach.
Code requires maintenance, which grows with codebase size, minus some decay over time. (LLMs do not change this, and might actually be more sensitive to this), So increasing code size, esp with new code, implies future costs, which meets the definition of a liability on a LOC kinda-sorta-basis.
It's not right but it's not wrong either. It at least was a useful way to think about code, and we'll see if that applies in LLM era.
It’s well known and also wrong.
Delta’s airplanes also require a great deal of maintenance, and I’m sure they strive to have no more than are necessary for their objectives. But if you talk to one of Delta’s accountants, they will be happy to disabuse you of the notion that the planes are entered in the books as a liability.
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Not a very valuable one. Never had been. That's the funny part. So many people want software but then don't know what to do once they have it.
Developers that can’t see the change are blind.
Just this week, sun-tue. I added a fully functional subscription model to an existing platform, build out a bulk async elasticjs indexing for a huge database and migrated a very large Wordpress website to NextJS. 2.5 days, would have cost me at least a month 2 years ago.
To me, this sounds like:
AI is helping me solve all the issues that using AI has caused.
Wordpress has a pretty good export and Markdown is widely supported. If you estimate 1 month of work to get that into NextJS, then maybe the latter is not a suitable choice.
it's wild that somehow with regards to AI conversations lately someone can say "I saved 3 months doing X" and someone can willfully and thoughtfully reply "No you didn't , you're wrong." without hesitation.
I feel bad for AI opponents mostly because it seems like the drive to be against the thing is stronger than the drive towards fact or even kindness.
My .02c: I am saving months of efforts using AI tools to fix old (PRE-AI, PREHISTORIC!) codebases that have literally zero AI technical debt associated to them.
I'm not going to bother with the charts & stats, you'll just have to trust me and my opinion like humans must do in lots of cases. I have lots of sharp knives in my kitchen, too -- but I don't want to have to go slice my hands on every one to prove to strangers that they are indeed sharp -- you'll just have to take my word.
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You are assuming a lot of things.
The work was moving the many landing pages & content elements to NextJS, so we can test, iterate and develop faster. While having a more stable system. This was a 10 year old website, with a very large custom WordPress codebase and many plugins.
The content is still in WordPress backend & will be migrated in the second phase.
To me, this sounds like:
If AI was good at a certain task then it was a bad task in the first place.
Which is just run of the mill dogmatic thinking.
There is much going on in that exchange.
I don't even know what a Wordpress site is anymore.
> then maybe the latter is not a suitable choice.
But now it only takes days which makes it suitable?
There also is the paradoxical question if it is worth the time from someone who knows what they are doing? how would you even tell?
>Code is not an asset it's a liability
This would imply companies could delete all their code and do better, which doesn't seem true?
A more accurate description of code is that it’s a depreciating asset, perhaps, or an asset that requires maintenance cost. Neither of which is a liability