| ▲ | switchbak 5 hours ago | |
It's like a tool that has caused a fan out of both good and bad outcomes. Good: you can refactor your codebase at will, throw out legacy cruft by the megabyte, improve build/CI time, and simplify ruthlessly. Not to mention kick out new features in simple and consistent ways that align with what a user actually wants. Or you could add megabytes of vibe coded crap, solutions that add a ton of mass but don't actually solve the problem at hand (seriously!), implement abstractions that are logically inconsistent with the rest of the system, etc. Both of these are happening right now, and I think the latter is happening at a rate far higher than the former. But our fundamental dynamics are still at play - the ball of mud is still a ball of mud, even if AI lets you make it 100x bigger. The problem just gets more entrenched. Eventually AI will learn how to simplify code, understand coupling, etc - and hopefully it will just iron out problems as it goes. I think we're a long way away from that. But this is uncharted territory, and I don't think anyone really knows. I certainly don't hear anyone focusing on that as a target of optimization however. My hope is that we'll see a number of companies collapse as they scale - with basically no hope of rescue, and perhaps we can re-learn these lessons yet again. It kind of feels like GitHub might be the first example of this. | ||
| ▲ | oceanplexian 4 hours ago | parent [-] | |
> My hope is that we'll see a number of companies collapse as they scale - with basically no hope of rescue If you worked in SV like I did from 2010-2020 you know that the exact opposite of that will happen. I saw hundreds of companies successfully scale out of their garbage stack such as Facebook and PHP. The only thing that matters is the problem you’re solving and the quality of the code is irrelevant. | ||