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Business & incomeExperience excerpt · English

And then I get presented with a piece of code and a product that I wouldn't have chosen - but in …

… And then I get presented with a piece of code and a product that I wouldn't have chosen - but in some cases would be perfectly sufficient for minor work I shouldn't be yak-shaving. On the other hand, going beyond the simplest or most obvious is how I built my business. Bringing ideas to the table and executing them. So then I discard the Claude code and sit down to write it from scratch. It is at that exact point that I start to wonder: does anyone even care? People who take the time to think deeply through their work, and who "hammer in the extra nail" as my grandpa used to say (he was a general contractor) do so most often for their own sense of pride in a job well done, and for the trust that comes from their clients or employers knowing that they will go the extra mile and do a job well. But what happens when employers or clients don't treat the work as important - and when they would be okay with a bad or mediocre version on the cheap? That's not a new problem - usually I just won't work for those people. …

Original discussionLLMs as the new high level language378 source comments · at import
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PA

This claim has been going around for a while. I know someone who has been spending $7k / month on Cursor tokens for the past six months, managing such a team of agents… But curiously the results seem to be endless PDF-ware, and every month there’s a new reason why the project is not yet quite ready to be used on real data. LLMs are very good at making you think they’re giving you what you hoped to get.

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PA

This happened to painters and illustrators a few years earlier than programmers. People used to think detailed drawing and realistic painting were kinds of unachievable wizardry. Now they go on ChatGPT or Midjourney and press a button. Professionals despair at the slop results, but they’re good enough for most people. I try to think of this positively as a transition similar to the invention of photography. The bourgeois classes used to need artists to paint pictures of themselves and their daughters. The camera turned portrait creation into a one-button affair. But that actually freed artists to be more creative. Monet and Picasso happened after photography for an obvious reason.

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JA

This is correct, we see (and have seen before the AI slops) code those quality is not really important At job, we have a lot of internal web apps coded like hell : "people just have to reload the page ..": this is lame On the other hand, on many situations, when people are faced with something that works, that is well designed and well executed, it's a breath of fresh air and they do notice and they do note that "that team is not like the others" (even if they cannot always pinpoint the "why") High quality work also leads to higher velocity, low/no regressions etc Management does notice, product owner do notice

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