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by martinald 312 days ago
Exactly. _So much_ software dev is "throwaway" in my experience. Of course some isn't. Landing pages, A/B tests, even a lot of feature work is very speculative and gets put in the trash.

I do wonder if this is why there is such a gulf in LLM experience. If you're doing hardcore huge scale distributed systems then I can (maybe?) see why you'd think it is useless. However, that is very niche imo and most software dev work is some level (unfortunately) of virtually throwaway code. Of course, not all is - of all the ideas and experiments, some percentage is hopefully very successful and can be polished.

1 comments

Indeed. And you get some engineers who only want to code perfect bespoke code all the time and sometimes that’s useful and sometimes it’s not. It depends on the requirements of the client, just as it would in any other trade. We need to be flexible to both the clients time and money budget, and also make code that suits the criticality of the task at hand. If you can’t lower your standards to fit a use case, I think it’s actually a bad thing.