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by tyre 462 days ago
> I like to build things, the faster the better.

what's the largest (traffic, revenue) product you've built? quantity >>>> quality of code is a great trade-off for hacking things together but doesn't lend itself to maintainable systems, in my experience.

Have you seen it work to the long term?

3 comments

Sure, but the vast majority of the time in greenfield applications situations, it's entirely unclear if what is being built is useful, even when people think otherwise. So the question of "maintainable" or not is frequently not the right consideration.
> in greenfield applications situations

which isn't most of the software industry

right, which is why I asked about the largest project.

If they've never worked on something post-PMF, I get it. They might be mostly right.

I suppose that's where the use case for LLMs starts to diminish rapidly.
To be fair, this person wasn’t claiming they’re making a trade off on quality, just that they prefer to build things quickly. If an AI let you keep quality constant and deliver faster, for example.

I don’t think that’s what LLMs offer, mind you (right now anyway), and I often find the trade offs to not be worth it in retrospect, but it’s hard to know which bucket you’re in ahead of time.