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pcoxon Managing AI Coding Costs at Scale

> I think part of the reason software was winner take most was the difficulty of making software.

That might be part of it, but I think it also has to do with the reality of replicating and scaling. Hardware or physical goods simply don’t scale like digital goods. There can be hundreds of knock-off physical products that have lower quality and lower cost but serve 90% of the same purpose, because physical capacity for raw materials, construction, labor, shipping, etc. have scaling limits in each market and economy. Digital goods are just so much easier to replicate and scale, so it often doesn’t make sense to buy software at lower quality and lower price if it doesn’t do most of the job. There are still limits of course, and different from physical goods, but I think this is a key reason why software is seen as winner-take-all.

pcoxon Ask HN: Stop Looking at Code?

I don’t review all the code generated by an LLM, just like I’ve never read all the code in libraries I use.

I see AI-assisted software development as just another step up the stack. My goal in development is to solve a problem. I look for the most appropriate tools to solve that problem in the most reasonable way possible. For my entire career, that’s included using plenty of libraries that I didn’t write and don’t fully understand. It’s been abstracted away from me, so I can simply “look at the output” and move onto the next step to solve my problem.

To me, AI-assisted dev is very similar. The key difference being that the LLM is “producing” the “library” on the fly, customized to the prompts and context. So it hasn’t gone through the rigor that a properly reviewed and maintained OSS library has gone through. But then again, the models generating the code were trained on essentially all OSS that could be found, so in theory it builds on the collective principles.

I read the code if I’m curious, or if I’m feeling frustrated and in a mood to debug. But if the output looks good and it solves a problem, I’m moving onto the next one. I don’t expect it to be perfect. Software has had and always will have bugs.