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by profsummergig 85 days ago
If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said "a faster horse" -- Henry Ford.
2 comments

In the abstract consumer point of view a car is exactly a faster horse. They both have high up front costs, both require continuous maintenance and fuel, and they're inconvenient to store when you're not using them.

Stationary gasoline engines were already changing the farm and reducing the head of horses necessary to feed a nation. It, too, was a faster horse for them.

Anyways.. it took the Detroit police to eventually deploy the first automatic stoplight. The real innovations seem to be often found downstream of the simple increases in capacity.

That all being said, it seems to me the current crop of LLMs haven't done this, their power and training budgets do not seem to be scaling favorably against adoption rates and profit margins. Absent a significant change in algorithm or computing substrate I don't think this strategy is the leap everyone hopes it will be.

"to generate copious amounts of source code that looks like it came from an offshore chop shop that whip cracked a thousand underpaid programmers to complete tasks under threat of violence so they'll fake the tests and cut corners but hide it with plausible bullshit"
If the source code looks like crap, THROW IT AWAY, work on your requirements document, and re-implement.
Yes, all we need are a perfect set of requirements for a thing we don't fully understand yet.

So back to waterfall again then. :P

If the middle steps of waterfall are low enough cosf, does it make sense?
As if it’s only one or another. Or you truly believe horde of low quality devs without any specs can come up with better product than Claude with quality specification?
what an outlook...