I don't understand why that is a logical progression. Writing good code and leading a team needs vastly different skill-sets in my eyes.
I was thinking the same thing. Sounds more like staff engineer not team lead/mgmt?
Readit Newsmaddmann commented on I'm a Tech Lead, and nobody listens to me. What should I do? world.hey.com/joaoqalves/... · Posted by u/joaoqalves
maddmann commented on The Gorman Paradox: Where Are All the AI-Generated Apps? codemanship.wordpress.com... · Posted by u/ArmageddonIt
No, I'm arguing that it's gotten steadily easier and easier to build high-level projects all the time over the last 20 years. React is obviously a huge part of that. There's a zillion React tutorials out there, so the value of making React accessible to beginners -- once again, that value was not created by AI, but rather by bloggers and youtubers and conversational evangelists.
I also just don't think "going fast" in that sense is such a big a deal. You're talking about frantic speed. I think about speed in terms of growth. The goal is to build sturdy foundations so that you keep growing on an exponential track. Being in a frantic hurry to finish building your foundations is not a good omen for the quality of what will be built on them.
New software may end up being less about legacy foundations and more about bespoke software, fast iteration, throw away single purpose code, etc.
AI is likely to change fundamental paradigms around software design by significantly decreasing the cost of a line of code/feature/bugfix/and or starting from scratch and enabling more stakeholders to help produce software.
maddmann commented on The Gorman Paradox: Where Are All the AI-Generated Apps? codemanship.wordpress.com... · Posted by u/ArmageddonIt
It just doesn't seem that different to me. The difficulty of building and maintaining a 3 screen webapp hasn't changed significantly. Flight schools are a niche sure (and I've been around them; I'm a private pilot) but really all the innovation that lets a flight school own a webapp has nothing to do with AI, it happened in web browsers and in React and lots of investment in abstractions until we made it pretty trivial to build and own a simple webapp.
Somehow AI took over the narrative, but it's almost never the thing that actually created the value that it gets credit for creating.
Are you arguing that the difficulty of producing a fully functioning poc is no different today than 2-3 years ago?!
Personally, I’ve been writing software for 10 years professionally. It is much easier, especially for someone with little coding experience, to create a quite complex and fully featured web app.
It makes sense that ai models are leveraging frameworks like next js/react/supabase, they are trained/tuned on a very clear stack that is more compatible with how models function. Of course those tools have high value regardless of ai. But ai has rapidly lowered the barrier to entry, and allows be to go much much farther, much faster.
maddmann commented on The Gorman Paradox: Where Are All the AI-Generated Apps? codemanship.wordpress.com... · Posted by u/ArmageddonIt
AI usually costs you the ability to pursue the right work. It blinds you and it numbs you. It will feed your ego while guiding you to spend your time doing ordinary stuff, the same ordinary stuff it is guiding everyone to do. People just can't see it because they all spend their time talking to AI now instead of talking to each other -- that's the blindness.
I was asking you a specific question and am curious of your answer. The impact of ai “blinding” people isn’t an “economic indicator” and hardly something that has been proven. Of course there are major issues with how people use ai just like any technology.
The aggregate impact isn’t known yet and the tech is still in its infancy.
maddmann commented on The Gorman Paradox: Where Are All the AI-Generated Apps? codemanship.wordpress.com... · Posted by u/ArmageddonIt
You would still expect to see traces of the economic value they were creating elsewhere.
Can you specify? I am personally using ai coding tools to replace subscription tools. While it’s valuable to me, in aggregate it would be a potential decline in economic activity for traditional services (this would only play out years from now in aggregate). We need to keep in mind that good ai coding tools like Claude code or to some extent,lovable, have barely come into existence.
maddmann commented on The Gorman Paradox: Where Are All the AI-Generated Apps? codemanship.wordpress.com... · Posted by u/ArmageddonIt
The link in the last paragraph provides some data to back up the claim. https://mikelovesrobots.substack.com/p/wheres-the-shovelware... - If the goal is to increase the rate of software production, there isn't much evidence that AI has moved the needle.
Sure, code gen is faster now. And the industry might finally be waking up to the fact that writing code is a small part of producing software. Getting infinitely faster at one step doesn't speed up the overall process. In fact, there's good evidence it that rapid code gen actually slows down other steps in the process like code review and QA.
One alternative explanation to the lack of shovelware, people are deploying software at an individual level. Perhaps millions of new people are using vibe code tools to build tools that are personalized and folks aren’t interested in trying to sell software (the hardest part of many generic saas tool is marketing/etc)
Perhaps looking at iOS, steam, and android release is simply not a great measure of where software is headed. Disappointing that the article didn’t think go a little more outside the box.
maddmann commented on The highest quality codebase gricha.dev/blog/the-highe... · Posted by u/Gricha
Oh I’ve had agents remove tests plenty of times. Or cripple the tests so they pass but are useless - more common and harder to prompt against.
Ah true, that also can happen — in aggregate I think models will tend to expand codebases versus contract. Though, this is anecdotal and probably is something ai labs and coding agent companies are looking at now.
maddmann commented on The highest quality codebase gricha.dev/blog/the-highe... · Posted by u/Gricha
> Agentic code tools have a significant bias to add versus remove/condense.
Your point stands uncontested by me, but I just wanted to mention that humans have that bias too.
Random link (has the Nature study link): https://blog.benchsci.com/this-newly-proven-human-bias-cause...
Great point, interesting how agents somehow pick up the same bias.
Really good idea!
maddmann commented on The highest quality codebase gricha.dev/blog/the-highe... · Posted by u/Gricha
lol 5000 tests. Agentic code tools have a significant bias to add versus remove/condense. This leads to a lot of bloat and orphaned code. Definitely something that still needs to be solved for by agentic tools.