Comment by pech0rin
7 hours ago
I find posts like this interesting because it seems to show the true bottleneck which is good ideas. Faster regex is cool but is it ambitious?
We can rewrite existing libraries and software all we want, but the true test is if we can create something new.
The thing I learned about myself with AI is that now I have time to work on every idea that pops into my head —- my ideas aren’t that great.
ideas can be make-or-break but it's much more common that execution is the bottleneck, and AI is the king of high-speed low-quality execution. High-quality execution can only come from running a human feedback loop through a huge number of iterations.
I like to think of the evolution of Factorio. It's been 15 years with the same core team playing their own game in a LAN party every week, as well as individually. And it's high quality.
Dogfooding led them to counter-intuitive decisions like, if a flying robot runs out of battery, it should obviously crash into the ground and explode, but it turned out way better for gameplay if it just limps slowly to the nearest charging point instead. This fact and many more can only be discerned from actual gameplay experience. No amount of pure linguistic reasoning will tell you them. Another one is how the burner inserters (coal-powered robot arms) fuel themselves - in the first version, they didn't. They could have made running around to refuel your robot arms a part of the game, but that isn't where they discovered the statue within the marble. You had to try the game both ways and see what feels more fun. A third: filter inserters and smart inserters were removed, and their features were moved to all inserters. A fourth: trains originally ran on strict time-based timetables, but it was frustrating so they were made able to move based on logistics needs instead. A fifth: basic oil processing used to produce all three oil products, and now it doesn't. A sixth: the basic oil refinery has its liquid I/O ports set up in a way that's compatible with switching to advanced oil refining later, instead of requiring you to redo your pipes.
All these little things you get from actually using the software and streamlining it, those are the quality. The list above obviously doesn't translate directly to any other project, but something like Microsoft has its own list, probably starting with things like common controls, dialog tabbing, and drag'n'drop. Did you know the reason you click "Start" to shut down in Win95 is because they did actual user testing and that's where the users looked first?
>which is good ideas
... and politics! To me LLMs are just another piece of evidence that it was never the lack of resources that made Microsoft produce bad user experiences.