1rre@discuss.tchncs.de 1 month ago
if any of these startups succeed, my condolences to the engineers who get hired afterwards and are stuck bugfixing
This is any successful startup - you don’t succeed by making a perfect product, you succeed by making a buggy mess that’s enough to convince both investors and more importantly customers that there’s potential… That means you need to rebuild from scratch in years 2-4 anyway, so frankly for the engineers who are coming in then, frankly there’s little to no difference
Kache@lemm.ee 1 month ago
I think there is a difference. Because software is so flexible and quick to build, it’s orders of magnitude easier to build something known and understood.
A promising startup with its systems in a knot, but their initial team is still on retainer? Brains can be picked, abstraction boundaries placed, surgical rewrites deployed. Despite the mess, they still understand it, and development can expand.
It remains to be seen if AI-generated code is recoverable, if any existing strategies can be applied so humans can contribute, or if the company is forever beholden to AI providers to release a better AI to manage/improve what they’ve already got.