Comment by pantelisk

> The real power of these tools is that there are so many ideas people would like to try, but never have the time or motivation to pursue.

This can be a negative multiplier: code I thought I wanted that gets immediately abandoned is a net-negative if no one else wants it (lets face it, this is the safest default posture for software of unknown providence).

In isolation, instant-abandonware takes up hdd space, burns dependabot's CPU-cycles, and wastes human attention when appearing in search results. In aggregate, it floods the zone with a deluge of forks with imperceptible differences between them, based on nit-picks, legitimate stand-out products will have a much harder time going forward.

I think the ideas worth pursuing still require substantial time and motivation, even with LLMs. Otherwise you just end up with a half-baked sloppy artifact that nobody will ever use or study, for a net negative benefit to humanity.

Yes but I’ve seen some devs waste a lot of time using AI to build something that was a bad idea to begin with.

Without AI they might have first spent more time validating the idea was worth it.

In this last week, I've performed experiments in an almost fully automated way - parallel to my main work, and easy to orchestrate.

This has led to 3 parallel pieces of adjacent work that each speed up our build by quite a drastic margin. When combined, this is a massive improvement. None of this would have happened in the old days, as the research itself takes a long time to babysit and a lot of options to check.

So I very much agree - the activation energy can be a lot lower on some kinds of tasks, and some of those get big returns for small inputs. It's not all like that, but part of the game is identifying when you can spot those high return efforts.

LLMs open up huge possibilities to do work that you otherwise wouldn't do. I vibe coded a PDF viewer yesterday in a couple of hours using Claude and Grok. I've been itching for a native Mac app that meets some very basic requirements: one window with file tree on the left and tabbed view on the right, with the ability to call out to pdfgrep and jump to results. Like Zotero, but with better multi-file search and a viewer that doesn't choke on big files. Claude built it for me in an hour, and Grok iterated a couple of times to make it better. I didn't look at a single line of code. It's now my default PDF viewer, and I used it today to do a bunch of my real work.

It's a braindead simple program that mostly hooks together pre-existing functionality, it just so happened that none of the widely available apps had the specific mix of features I wanted. I could probably have done it myself in a week if I took time off my non-coding day job to figure out Swift and AppKit. But I wasn't going to do that. I’m psyched. I hate web apps and now I can just write my own for all the little things I use every day.

Im not so sure if this is a pro or a con. Take two extremes at product building: brute force vs deep research first. I guess llms allow you to experiment quickly with many approaches and see what sticks. Without llms, you need to spend more time researching and thinking what’s the most economical approach. Im biased towards the non-llm approach

Yes, I work in hardware design ans the cost to code up the RTL for an idea and compare it to the existing code in terms of PPA, its very expensive in terms of engineering time. This week I had 5 different architecites coded, pushed through a functional test bench, bit accurate models created and then run through ppa analysis all done via llms. So its a task tbis project could not afford to do without llms, but can save us 10% in ppa

Agree so much. So many small bugs, nits, tweaks I just send off to an LLM agent to figure it out.

Those sort of ideas are unlikely to yield major benefit, though.

This is basically replicating the plight of the solo open source dev, writ large. Individual programmers have long built the thing they've cared about on their own time (essentially "for free" because, despite kindergarten economics theory, a programmer cannot usually monetize a marginal hour). And it usually goes that the project never gets adopted anywhere. It might acrue more features and total man-hour effort than most of what FAANG does in open source to drown out the solo devs. But the market will decide that "no organizational buy-in" is a signal the project doesn't matter. Other developers will decide, "if he could do it, so could I" and also not adopt.

Same exact thing is happening and will continue to happen with all these generated "but we wouldn't have done it otherwise" projects. It's just very, very unlikely to go anywhere.

That which took very little effort to create will receive very little effort to promote.

that and 2x is "i'm 5'10" and i round up to 6'" low.