Comment by fzeroracer
1 day ago
> Meanwhile, my cofounder is rewriting code we spent millions of salary on in the past by himself in a few weeks.
This is one of those statements that would horrify any halfway competent engineer. A cowboy coder going in, seeing a bunch of code and going 'I should rewrite this' is one of the biggest liabilities to any stable system.
I assume this is because they're already insanely profitable after hitting PMF and are now trying to bring down infra costs?
Right? RIGHT?!
My cofounder is an all the way competent engineer. Making this many assumptions would horrify someone halfway competent with logic though.
It's crazy how some people here will just make all the assumptions possible in order to refuse to believe you. Anyone who's used a good model with open code or equivalent will know that it's plausible. Refactoring is really cheap now when paired with someone competent.
I'm doing the same as your co-founder currently. In a few days, I've rewritten old code that took previous employees months to do. Their implementation sucked and barely worked, the new one is so much better and has tests to prove it.
HN comments are wild.
Every professional SWE is going to stare off into the middle distance, as they flashback to some PM or VP deciding to show everyone they still got it.
The "how hard could it be" fallacy claims another!
LLMs do the jobs of developers, thereby eating up countless jobs.
LLMs do the jobs of developers without telling semi-technical arrogant MBA holders “no, you’re dumb”, thereby creating all the same jobs as before but also a butt-ton more juggling expensive cleanup mixed with ego-massaging.
We’re talking a 2-10x improvement in ‘how hard could it be?’ iterations. Consultant candy.
As someone who is more involved in shaping the product direction rather than engineering what composes the product - I will readily admit many product people are utterly, utterly clueless.
Most people have no clue the craftsmanship, work etc it takes to create a great product. LLMs are not going to change this, in fact they serve as a distraction.
I’m not a SWE so I gain nothing by being bearish on the contributions of LLMs to the real economy ;)
Oh, it wasn't a bash on product people, I'm sorry if it came off that way.
It's a reference to a trope where the VP of Eng or CTO (who was an engineer decades ago) gets it in their head that they want to code again and writes something absolute dogshit terrible because their skills have degraded. Unfortunately they are your boss's boss's boss and can make you deal with it anyways.
I've actually seen it IRL once, to his credit the dude finally realized the engineer smiles were pained grimaces and it got quietly dropped lol.
Definitely been in that room multiple times.
This has become my new hell.
PM has an idea. PM vibe codes a demo of this idea. PM shows it to the VP. VP gets excited and says "when can we have this." I look at the idea and estimate it'll take two people six months. VP and PM say "what the heck, but AI built the demo in a weekend, you should be able to do this with one engineer in a month." I get one day closer to quitting.