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by runarberg 25 days ago
Simon Willison’s analogy does not apply unless that other team was immediately fired after they delivered the image resize service, or (more commonly) was done by a one off contractor. The difference is the trust model. We trust that our company has hired a competent team which maintains knowledge of the image resizing service, that they respond to bug reports and feature requests and that they know how to fix and implement those.

Now I have been on HN long enough to know that we used to despise code written by contractors which we now depend on.
1 comments
theshrike79 25 days ago
Why does the team need to be "fired"?

The single person who did the service might just quit and go to another job. They might be external consultants that rotate away when the contract ends. It might be a SaaS service where you don't control the code at all - nor the composition of their team.

We have trusted services, contractors and teams within our companies before. Now suddenly _everyone_ has ALWAYS read and meticulously analyzed every single line of code they have ever imported to a project?

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skydhash 25 days ago
As your parent comment says. It’s about trust. People don’t hire contractors with low reputations. Same with SaaS services. That’s why you see so much stuff about branding and customer testimonials. It can be gamed, but usually works well enough.

LLM have no reputation to lose. Their work may or may not be aligned with your goals and they can’t care if they messed up.

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runarberg 25 days ago
Personally, if my company would have one person write a utility which mine would depend on, and that person would quit soon after delivery, I would be pissed. And I would demand that my team take ownership of the utility, and gain intimate knowledge of the utility, and voice my concerns with management who made the decision to hand out a task like that to a single person. I would then inform that management about the concept of bus factor, and how they just violated best practices. That next time they decide to hand out a task like that to a single person, that they should instead just hand it out to the team which is gonna rely on that utility.
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