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Comment by zbentley | Hacker News Reader

I don’t disagree with any of that, but I think the brutal truth is that the priority of most businesses was always that approximate, slipshod, business-driven development. The human engineering process was only coincidentally a check back against the worst outcomes of that philosophy, not intentionally one.

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I certainly think that is true of the current moment, but where I think this is going is towards a model where the cost of human labor collapses, feature delivery slows (relative to the churn that is happening now), but becomes more predictable and less error prone (in terms of final delivery). I think that is the model that we see in manufacturing, and I think it's probably going to replicate in software engineering. New code (that a human didn't even look at, tbh) will be stress tested for correctness, progressively introduced and final delivery will be easy to forecast and most of the time will be delivered on time.

Yeah but all these firms are going to get destroyed by firms led by people who are more disciplined and enforce rigour in thought etc that’ll be pushed through discouraging over-use of llm’s.

Apple didn’t go from near bankrupt to where it is today without that discipline.

We can hope. The markets are rarely rational to begin with and we live in a time where the biggest measuring stick for most companies is "what have you done in the last 3 months". There's not a lot of pressure on companies in today's marketplace to do the right thing over the "right now" thing or the fast broken thing or the dumb thing.

> more disciplined and enforce rigour

Eventually this will be automated as well. Discipline, rigor and correctness are not strictly human tasks.

I don't know if it really plays out like that, though I hope so. Many businesses are mega successful in spite of incredibly poor or inefficient technical execution. I don't know if it really matters so long as customers get the thing they want for the price they're willing to pay.

I think this matters even less in higher tech companies, because they're not playing in the margins where an inefficiency can hurt. Though perhaps ironically, I think AI providers really are in a realm where technical execution at the margins will make or break them.

I agree as well. And now they can make slipshod products at 10x speed.

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