The conversation

dimitrios1HNSource author
Lessons learnedExperience excerpt · English

All of this might sound like I agree with you, and to some extent I do, but I am realizing as the …

… All of this might sound like I agree with you, and to some extent I do, but I am realizing as the apps I have built out like a cannon shot out of hell with tremendous speed and polish right out of the gate are starting to slow down. Feature adds are getting more complex. My memory is not what it used to be. Each run and pass through the code consumes more of my tokens and limits. I am starting to do less in the same amount of time. Codex did a vertical slice of a feature for me (well defined and well planned). It contained functionality that has historically plagued us developers -- the dreaded time. I used xHigh GPT 5.5. It had obvious bugs, but I wanted the robots to catch it. I popped it in claude (on the new sonnet 5! heyo!) -- Claude caught the bugs. Even said they "immediately stood out" I wondered how this happened. Frontier model from company A was evaluated by workhorse model from company B. All of this again took massive amounts of usage. And time. And this is -- best case scenario, perfect world, everything is in perfect alignment. Now for the work reality. …

Original discussionClaude Sonnet 5784 source comments · at import
3

What was this responding to?

Parent context · original excerpt

PM
pmarreckHN

> I don't think they're a net gain if you're a skilled senior I'm a skilled senior (I'm 54 and been coding since I was about 8; I've been 100% AI-generated code for at least 6 months now and have produced a combination of speed and quality that has astonished me; my velocity is apparent at https://github.com/pmarreck/ ) and this has been a massive net gain, so your claim is now officially in sheer defiance of reality. In a skilled senior's hands, this is like an expert power tool. In the hands of someone less-skilled, it is likely also... less-skilled. It's a magnifier. > and the hidden cost in terms of technical debt and skill atrophy is just being swept under the rug. Nope, no it's not. It's being reviewed, measured, and controlled against. Because... you WILL need more controls to take full advantage. Look, I even invented a whole new control methodology around it called MFIC: https:/…

Full original

Community replies 0

No community replies yet. Add your perspective.

Replies from the source 3

Direct replies available in this import. Original-language excerpts.

ST
stpedgwdgfhgddHN

+1 the distinction between personal projects and Enterprise development is a big one. A severe bug in my personal projects, i fix it on the fly. A bug in our products rolled out, nightmare.

Full original
RE
Revanche1367HN

And you’ll never know because even if you could turn back time and do it from scratch, you’re likely to opt again not to do it all manually because the cognitive load is going to keep tempting you to reach for the agent again.

Full original
SI
sisiissjz77HN

It’s simultaneously simple and deceptively difficult to coax a growing system into staying sane. It reminds me of forcing a fractal into growth yet somehow letting it remain similar at all scales, manually. Scaling in this sense is not operational (“servers”), but conceptual (“features”). I don’t want to be a downer but I find many devs are not great at this. Very clever folks, but they tend to not see these issues clearly. They’ll nod and recognize when you talk about separating content from form and the importance of various design principles like high cohesion and loose coupling but completely disregard them once in contact with reality. Part of the problem, as you nicely showed, is that technology is only a single slice of this problematic pie. Organizations in general are systems as well and they tend to be either badly architected, badly maintained or often both. Some technological…

Full original
Continue on Hacker News

Respect different perspectives. Share concrete experiences.

Sign in to post, reply, repost, and quote.