Meanwhile, my cofounder is rewriting code we spent millions of salary on in the past by himself in a few weeks.

I myself am saving a small fortune on design and photography and getting better results while doing it.

If this is not all that well I can’t wait until we get to mediocre!

> Meanwhile, my cofounder is rewriting code we spent millions of salary on in the past by himself in a few weeks.

Why?

Im not even casting shade - I think AI is quite amazing for coding and can increase productivity and quality a lot.

But I'm curious why he's doing this.

> Meanwhile, my cofounder is rewriting code we spent millions of salary on in the past by himself in a few weeks.

Code is not an asset it's a liability, and code that no one has reviewed is even more of a liability.

However, in the end, execution is all that matters so if you and your cofounder are able to execute successfully with mountains of generated code then it doesn't matter what assets and liabilities you hold in the short term.

The long term is a lot harder to predict in any case.

It's not directly comparable. The first time writing the code is always the hardest because you might have to figure out the requirements along the way. When you have the initial system running for a while, doing a second one is easier because all the requirements kinks are figured out.

By the way, why does your co-founder have to do the rewrite at all?

lol same. I just wrote a bunch of diagrams with mermaid that would legit take me a week, also did a mock of an UI for a frontend engineer that would take me another week to do .. or some designers. All of that in between meetings...

Waiting for it to actually go well to see what else I can do !

Sounds like an argument for better hiring practices and planning.

Producing a lot of code isn’t proof of anything.

Out of curiosity, what is your product?

I suspect he means as a trillion dollar corporation led endeavor.

I trained a small neural net on pics of a cat I had in the 00s (RIP George, you were a good cat).

Mounted a webcam I had gotten for free from somewhere, above the cat door, in the exterior of the house.

If the neural net recognized my cat it switched off an electromagnetic holding the pet door locked. Worked perfectly until I moved out of the rental.

Neural nets are, end of the day, pretty cool. It's the data center business that's the problem. Just more landlords, wannabe oligarchs, claiming ownership over anything they can get the politicians to give them.

The problem is... you're going to deprive yourself of the talent chain in the long run, and so is everyone else who is switching over to AI, both generative like ChatGPT and transformative like the various translation, speech recognition/transcription or data wrangling models.

For now, it works out for companies - but forward to, say, ten years in the future. There won't be new intermediates or seniors any more to replace the ones that age out or quit the industry entirely in frustration of them not being there for actual creativity but to clean up AI slop, simply because there won't have been a pipeline of trainees and juniors for a decade.

But by the time that plus the demographic collapse shows its effects, the people who currently call the shots will be in pension, having long since made their money. And my generation will be left with collapse everywhere and find ways to somehow keep stuff running.

Hell, it's already bad to get qualified human support these days. Large corporations effectively rule with impunity, with the only recourse consumers have being to either shell out immense sums of money for lawyers and court fees or turning to consumer protection/regulatory authorities that are being gutted as we speak both in money and legal protections, or being swamped with AI slop like "legal assistance" AI hallucinating case law.

> Meanwhile, my cofounder is rewriting code we spent millions of salary on in the past by himself in a few weeks.

This is one of those statements that would horrify any halfway competent engineer. A cowboy coder going in, seeing a bunch of code and going 'I should rewrite this' is one of the biggest liabilities to any stable system.