[spicyusername]

We're entering an era where the delivering of software is cheap. Basically any idea can have an MVP implemented by one or two people in just a month or two now. Very quickly the industry is learning what the next set of bottlenecks are, now that the bottleneck is no longer writing code.

Planning, design, management alignment, finding customers, integrating with other products, waiting for review, etc. Basically all the human stuff that can't be automated away.

Your comment reminds me to add building a support team to the list.

[localhoster]

Was it ever? Even before llm, writing software, or at least web clients, was as easy as it can get.

[written-beyond]

I agree, software (software startups) has always been the golden child of investors because of how cheap it is compared to hardware or any other physical good.

Good software is expensive regardless of the involvement of LLMs because you need someone to take responsibility. Large companies will save a buck because there may be fewer people needed to take said responsibility, but it's probably a marginal saving compared to the overall scheme of things.

[varispeed]

It was "easy" in the sense you could deploy 7B equivalent of a developer, who could get something sort of working eventually or you could spend a lot of money for actually getting the results from talented developers - equivalent of daily maxing out Opus 4.6.

[jcmeyrignac]

Delivering is cheap, but maintenance is expensive... if not impossible!

[holoduke]

It's not. Maintainance is easy now. We have at least 200 legacy products in various old languages. Never it has been easier to work on those since Claude came into the picture. The argument I hear about support being expensive is not true I think.

[apsurd]

Maintenance of mountains more agentic code.

The argument is the agents can maintain what the agents build. But someone has to manage the explosion in system complexity.

I just quit my job because there was top down explosion of shipping agentic code. I don't think it's going to work and I don't want my job to be maintaining someone else's 50x code output.

[KellyCriterion]

...and customer support!