Ask HN: How do you decide to cut scope when AI makes it so easy to add? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do you decide to cut scope when AI makes it so easy to add?

I've been having this conversation with my co-founder for months.

It's so easy to add incremental features nowadays, and most seem useful. There's nothing obviously wrong with them.

On top of that, people are using the software, and they appreciate how complete it is. The UX is cluttered, but 99% of interactions don't use it, so who cares.

How do you decide to cut scope when in the current setup there's nothing to lose? Am I simply to old school?

For context, this is the project: https://github.com/desplega-ai/agent-swarm

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This is why AI is a broken development model for most people.

They dont appreciate that specifying the details, every single detail for every possible ambiguity or choice is not something that can be done with a prompt that is a few lines or pages.

Waterfall type development processes fail for the same reason. Its just too hard to specify everything because the end product is not going to match your imagination or requirements. You might think you specified somethibg but the result will always be wrong in many ways.

Iteration, the smaller the better works because it allows one to reflect and see the outcome of a few choices. More choices means more things could be wrong and the explosion of the consequences is a difficult problem to manage.

It's true that being agile still works, but the explosion on how much you can do as individual is non-negligible.

If you introduce too many changes at the same time, how can you attribute what works and what not?

That's the other challenge we are seeing, and that gets worse if you have bigger teams.

Centralized intelligence helps, but enforcing the correct coordination... feels like we are missing a new type of role.

Intelligence doesnt mean said entity knows it all.

Even the most intelligent person on earth has no chance of knowing what my favourite ice cream flavour is.

Its the same for AI or even a purely human team, without communication with precise details they cannot know the exact objective that a stakeholder wants. If the stakeholder cannot communicate those wishes things will be broken.

THis is the problem, you dont appreciate that intelligence cannot know localized details which are often a unique combination.

Not eveyrone is the same, we all have our quirks and personal differences. The same is true of many many other business problems.

There will be a point when something breaks, right? There will be a point when some feature bloats UX tests, breaks existing features or takes up too much space.

At some point you will see a decline or even silence from your user base since the experience changed too quickly or their workflows broke. That when you'll need to cut back and argue about what really makes sense.

Since you're in a growth phase(looking at your star counts), keep going until you spot the signs I guess.

Yeah I see this as what Cursor had a while ago where you would open it and it would have a different ui every time

I think attribution is the difficulty there right?

You could guess, but would that change something?

Feature creep is not exactly a new problem, the answer is the same as it has always been -> Only build and keep what you can prove has a positive impact on the product.

I don't think cutting is the solution; prioritizing based on value is. Create a live roadmap of value and deliver as soon as possible, collect feedback, revise the roadmap/backlog, deliver again and repeat. Pilot, scale and kill/sunset works better than ever at AI speed.

My take is that it should be ok to add scope, as far as you are ok doing huge cuts too.

As a dev or as a user?

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