| This mirrors insights from Andrew Ng's recent AI startup talk [1]. I recall he mentions in this video that the new advice they are giving to founders is to throw away prototypes when they pivot instead of building onto a core foundation. This is because of the effects described in the article. He also gives some provisional numbers (see the section "Rapid Prototyping and Engineering" and slides ~10:30) where he suggests prototype development sees a 10x boost compared to a 30-50% improvement for existing production codebases. This feels vaguely analogous to the switch from "pets" to "livestock" when the industry switched from VMs to containers. Except, the new view is that your codebase is more like livestock and less like a pet. If true (and no doubt this will be a contentious topic to programmers who are excellent "pet" owners) then there may be some advantage in this new coding agent world to getting in on the ground floor and adopting practices that make LLMs productive. 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNJCfif1dPY |