Ranked #4 on Hacker News with 490 points and 353 comments.
Hey. I’ve been kindly informed that this post has hit the frontpage of Hacker News, and combing through the comments I have been shown that this post reads of as what I would describe as, well, AI slop. If this is a concern of yours, please honor me with a quick glance at the post-mortem section below. Thanks!
For most of the time I have been writing software—which, compared to some of my readers, is not that long—I have come to believe that the hard thing was making the thing exist at all . This is not necessarily a new belief of mine. I started through the difficult and tedious experience of building web applications and watching them crash and burn.
You had an idea, and between the idea and the working program stood hours— sometimes weeks—of typing, of reading manuals, of misunderstanding an API and slowly grinding the wrong version into a slightly less wrong one. Production was the wall. Everyone hit it. It was the thing that separated the people who could from the people who could only talk about it.
That wall is gone. Or rather, it has been rented out. 1 You can describe a thing now and receive a plausible version of it much faster than you could have typed the first function by hand. The idea-to-artifact distance, the one that defined the entire craft, has collapsed to almost nothing.
Though, you have not been warned about one little thing: the value you built by learning to climb that wall does not disappear. It simply… moves .
We keep asking whether the machines are any good. Even yesterday I had a rather short discussion on whether they are reliable. While we have concluded that they are “reliably unreliable,” I think it is the wrong question. The output is good enough, generally anyway, and that is the problem—most of it, at least. Good enough is a solvent . It dissolves the reason to do better. For as long as making things was expensive, the expense did quiet work on our behalf. It rationed output. It meant that anything which existed had, at minimum, survived the cost of being made. You know what I mean? Effort was a filter , and like all filters it was invisible until it was removed. Nobody shipped a thousand mediocre variations of a feature, because a thousand mediocre variations cost a thousand times as much as one. The economics enforced a floor.