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Comment by swatcoder | Hacker News Reader

That sounds like papier mache more than bridge building, forever pasting more code on as ideas and time permit without the foresight to engineer or architect towards some cohesive long-term vision.

Most software products built that way seem to move fast at first but become monstrous abominations over time. If those are the only places you keep finding yourself in, be careful!

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There are a wide number of small problems for which we do not need bridges.

As a stupid example, I hate the functionality that YouTube has to maintain playlists. However, I don't have the time to build something by hand. It turns out that the general case is hard, but the "for me" case is vibe codable. (Yes, I could code it myself. No, I'm not going to spend the time to do so.)

Or, using the Jira API to extract the statistics I need instead of spending a Thursday night away from the family or pushing out other work.

Or, any number of tools that are within my capabilities but not within my time budget. And there's more potential software that fits this bill than software that needs to be bridge-stable.

Absolutely.

But the person I replied to seemed to be talking about a task agenda for their professional work, not a todo list of bespoke little weekend hobby hacks that might be handy "around the house".

You assume they were talking about a single product. at my job there is essentially endless amounts of small tasks. We have many products and clients we have many internal needs, but can't really justify the human capital. Like I might write 20 to 50 Python scripts in a week just to visualize the output of my code. Dead boring stuff like making yet another matplotlib plot, simple stats, etc. Sometimes some simple animations. there is no monstrosity being built, this is not evidence of tagging on features or whatever you think must be happening, it's just a lot of work that doesn't justify paying a bay area principal engineer salary to do in the face of a board that thinks the path to riches is laying off the people actually making things and turning the screws on the remaining people struggling to keep up with the workflow.

Work is finite, but there can be vastly more available than there are employees to do it for many reasons, not just my personal case.

Fun fact, papier mache was used to create bathtubs and can make furniture that holds an amazing amount of weight.

Learn to Build With Cardboard! STRONG, Waterproof and Free. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45JhacvmXV8

Building a Flyable Airplane out of CardBoard! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T46SHLzlV1A

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papier-mâché

The vision is "being compatible with protocols used in my field". There's hundreds over hundreds of those. Example: this app supports more than 700 protocols, hardware, etc. (https://bitfocus.io/connections) and still it's missing an AWFUL LOT and only handles fairly basic cases in general. There's just no way around writing the code for each custom bespoke protocol for whatever $APPLIANCE people are going to bring and expect to work. Even if each protocol fits neatly in a single self-contained class or two.

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