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Comment by immortalloom | Hacker News Reader

Great question! So all of the files are generated with either compiles or GPT-3, or if the files already exist on the repo and need to be modified, the bots use GPT-3 code edits to modify the files.

$299/project/month will sound expensive if you compare it to starter kits (usually free), templates (usually < $100), or no-code tools (around $100). But I believe Second will feel very close to having a dedicated developer that can build commodity features for you. I want engineers to use Second for the common stuff, so that they can focus on the stuff that special to the project.

Also, yea pricing is hard! It may change.

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$299/month sounds pretty reasonable if it does what it says on the tin.

That's $3.6k/year.

You don't need to make up many development hours before you've paid that back.

And it seems like there's good opportunity to stratify billing via modules -- Using only the basic stuff? $. Using more advanced / larger modules? $$.

I agree. I think if it continues to grow it will pay dividends back in development hours saved.

> But I believe Second will feel very close to having a dedicated developer that can build commodity features for you.

A “developer” or a “grunt coder”? Or, to use the ~40+ year old terms that even the least trendy places have phased out [0], a programmer/analyst or just a programmer?

[0] Largely because one of the two didn’t really fit into modern development methodologies anymore, since it presumed too narrow of a skillset and responsibility area.

This. Thinking about any of the sizeable apps I develop and maintain, 90% of the job is just thinking of edge cases in the business logic as transmitted to me by the people running the business I'm writing an app for. About 10% is actually coding and testing. While I'm impressed with copilot/GPT's ability to write SQL queries and imitate my coding style to write functions that usually have no obvious bugs, it's the subtle, non-obvious bugs that I'm worried about. Anything it writes demands careful reading and correction - just like anything written by ChatGPT demands a great deal of fact-checking. So much so that it's not really efficient. The idea of reviewing a whole code branch it's written fills me with dread, because who knows where the corner cases are lurking? And when they arise, who knows what else patching them might affect? At least with my own code or code written by humans, I know where things are and can deduce why they were written that way. With copilot, there's no why.

In a sense it's a metaphor for the whole problem of LLMs ... or AI in general. When unlimited compute lets you replace logical deduction with brute force heuristic reduction, it makes it impossible to trace routes and find bugs.

And this boilerplate can't be added fast with Copilot? Which is $100/year.

Maybe. Copilot is more like an extreme programming experience, where you are still piecing together things yourself in the IDE. Second does all of that for you by building complete features and raising a pull request!

I believe that in the future, A.I. bots will be used to build large chunks of the codebase (like Second). And then human engineers will use A.I. bots in the browser to make low level tweaks and additions (Copilot)

Hopefully in your future an AI bot doesn't invent a Second competitor and put you out of business.

Hah. To be honest, 2023 is going to be insane. I'm sure hundreds, if not thousands, of companies are going to emerge which greatly improve the software development process.

I think the software development process is fine, it's all the organizational cruft that slows it down. Your company is a good example of it--you probably didn't use Second to make Second, and being a solo dev had to have been a huge benefit to your velocity.

The things that hurt software development are people/process related, and can't be fixed by software, IMO.

Funny enough, I did use second to build the authentication flows. But I've diverged a bit because I haven't had a chance to fully build out the other modules that Second will need.

I'm planning on rebuilding Second with Second as soon as I have all of the appropriate modules in place!

Please write a blog post about that when you get a chance to do it!

What like scrum and agile? Or can you be more specific? Or point me to blog posts about this stuff.

Is it true that the larger the app, the less effective/accurate the bot is? In that case, might it be more sensible to charge a 1-time price?

Good question! I believe the accuracy will still be good, but it will just be more work for the bots to get it right (lots more files and code to reason with). So my OpenAI costs will prob go up a lot for bigger code bases. Hadn't thought about that!

What would be some examples of features that your service could add to my app?

you forgot one alternative - chatgpt, which is $20/month and infinitely flexible

True, but it's still work. Using ChatGPT manually is great, but it's not as fast as configuring a feature and then having the whole thing built and integrated. A lot of users also struggle with knowing what to even ask ChatGPT, unless they are already an experienced developer.

if they aren’t experienced, how will they know the solution is what they need? chicken/egg problem

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