But it’s not a man-month anymore. It’s like half a day.

And if I break up an application then 9 coders with Claude Code can build that application in an unprecedentedly short period.

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otabdeveloper4 29 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

> Claude Code can build that application in an unprecedentedly short period

Yes, with the caveat that the application doesn't actually work.

P.S. If you wrote non-working applications even before the age of AI, then this is an upgrade, I guess.

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bingemaker an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

There is a difference between building a product and building a product that sells. So, which one are we talking about here? In my opinion MMM talks about the latter

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_puk 4 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

If you've got 9 coders, you've at least got a business idea and some financial backing.

Get it out quickly, market it, iterate it. That hasn't changed. Just the speed of iteration before you go from product to product that sells.

Once you know what sells, then again, it takes far less time to rebuild it well if you need to.

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Gigachad an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

If you can vibecode a product that sells, I can vibecode a free open source one just as easily, probably even easier since I can just ask the AI to copy the existing one. Software is trending towards being free and open source.

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_puk 2 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Yeah, and then who maintains it?

Maintaining vibe coded software is going to become hours spent with Claude not your users.

That's going to be the difference. It takes nothing to rebuild the software, but listening to users, iterating, handling issues. That's boring.

The ones that win will be the ones that stay the course, not the ones that were built the quickest.

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pydry 2 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Half of the value in open source was that it was used by lots of people and all of the nasty edge cases and bugs have been ironed out.

If LLMs were performing according to hype then yes, virtually all paid software would be gone by now and there would be a high quality FOSS equivalent of all of it.

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sedan_baklazhan 31 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

In the good old days that was called 'piracy'.

	▲	ben_w 8 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Unclear if this is that. If someone makes their own FOSS Photoshop, that's not piracy, it's GIMP. Training a AI on things that one otherwise has lawful access to (and not, e.g., pirating the material which Meta is being sued over and Anthropic settled over) has been ruled lawful. Is asking an LLM to "make an open-source Photoshop clone" more like GIMP, or more like opening someone else's photo in Photoshop and clicking the menu option for the filter to make it look like a stained glass window and claiming the stained glass window version is your own IP that doesn't need permission from the original creator? We may need new IP laws. Or, to the horror of many software developers 20 years ago, software patents. And "new IP laws" doesn't mean "stronger": the justification for giving creators a monopoly on their works (the right to copy, or copyright) is to encourage more. If we've got a machine to automate this, there's suddenly no reason to encourage more.

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31 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

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