Comment by ahepp
10 hours ago
What do you think about the argument that we are entering a world where code is so cheap to write, you can throw the old one away and build a new one after you've validated the business model, found a niche, whatever?
I mean, it seems like that has always been true to an extent, but now it may be even more true? Once you know you're sitting on a lode of gold, it's a lot easier to know how much to invest in the mine.
It hasn't always been true, it started with rapid development tools in the late 90's I believe.
And some people thought they were building "disposable" code, only to see their hacks being used for decades. I'm thinking about VB but also behemoth Excel files.
Someone has to figure out how to make the experiences of the two generations consistent in the ways it needs to be and differ only in the ways it doesn't still.
I actually think that might actually be a good path forward.
I hate self-promotion but I posted my opinions on this last night https://blog.tombert.com/Posts/Technical/2026/04-April/Stop-...
The tl;dr of this is that I don't think that the code itself is what needs to be preserved, the prompt and chat is the actual important and useful thing here. At some point I think it makes more sense to fine tune the prompts to get increasingly more specific and just regenerate the the code based on that spec, and store that in Git.
> At some point I think it makes more sense to fine tune the prompts to get increasingly more specific and just regenerate the the code based on that spec, and store that in Git.
Generating code using a non-deterministic code generator is a bold strategy. Just gotta hope that your next pull of the code slot machine doesn’t introduce a bug or ten.
We're already merging code that has generated bugs from the slot machine. People aren't actually reading through 10,000 line pull requests most of the time, and people aren't really reviewing every line of code.
Given that, we should instead tune the prompts well enough to not leave things to chance. Write automated tests to make sure that inputs and outputs are ok, write your specs so specifically that there's no room for ambiguity. Test these things multiple times locally to make sure you're getting consistent results.
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Infrastructure-as-code went through this exact cycle. Declarative specs were supposed to replace manual config, but Terraform still needs state files because specs drift from reality. Prompts have it worse since you can't even diff what changed between two generation runs.
This is actually a pretty good callout.
Observability into how a foundation model generated product arrived to that state is significantly more important than the underlying codebase, as it's the prompt context that is the architecture.
Yeah, I'm just a little tired of seeing these pull requests of multi-thousand-line pull requests where no one has actually looked at the code.
The solution people are coming up with now is using AI for code reviews and I have to ask "why involve Git at all then?". If AI is writing the code, testing the code, reviewing the code, and merging the code, then it seems to me that we can just remove these steps and simply PR the prompts themselves.
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