[theshrike79]

It's the empty page problem.

For some people (most?) it's really hardhard, almost impossible, to fill the page with text, but when you have a page of text - even if it's shit - suddenly it's easy to critique it and interate to make it better.

AI lets me poop out an MVP out of any idea or spec with very little effort on my part, then I can go in and start improving it.

[ChrisMarshallNY]

> MVP

I guess a lot of folks are having better luck than I am, in getting ship-quality results from LLMs.

In my case, I find that the first iteration is almost never suitable for shipping. In fact, the more intricate the functionality, the more likely it is, to contain some real showstopper bugs.

In my experience, iteration really requires that I know my shit. I have to know what to look for, and how to form effective prompts. Testing is absolutely vital. I can’t ever “just assume” that the code is fundamentally sound; even for extremely basic stuff.

That lack of trust in my output is something I haven’t had, in decades. It can be a bit stressful.

For example, I write a lot of mobile software, so resource usage is a big deal. I had gotten used to not testing for battery usage, leaks, or out-of-control allocations, over the years of using Swift. I am now back to routinely running Instruments.

In a couple of instances, I was just unable to get anything useful from the LLM, had to toss all its output, and rewrite by hand.

That’s why I can’t even imagine directly shipping anything the LLM gives me.

That said, I have generally had extremely positive experiences with LLMs. It’s now a basic component of my workflow.

[theshrike79]

If you never ship, how can you iterate?

Do you spend weeks running benchmarks and optimising your code without asking/observing a single actual user whether they care if that bit is fast or not?

Or would it be more efficient to ship something, gather data and iterate where relevant?

Because if you're not doing that, I can guarantee other people are. Sadly being the first and moving fast (adding features as users request them) is in many cases better in the mobile market than having the snappiest app with zero memory leaks and excellent battery efficiency.

The whole Turkish mobile gaming industry works on this principle, they ship like crazy and iterate quickly to see what sticks.

[feoren]

> If you never ship, how can you iterate?

Our discipline has swung way too far in this direction. The useful insight of "watch your users use your product -- you will always be surprised about something" has turned into "you cannot possibly have any vision or produce a useful product without constantly probing your users".

A/B testing, design by committee -- it reeks of cowardice and produces garbage. It reminds me of an SNL skit where politicians in a debate were able to see real-time social media responses to their talking points, and they immediately started playing a sort of "hotter/colder" game, changing their politics to try to get the graph to go up.

I promise you it's possible to just have an actual vision yourself. Yes, talking to users will surprise you, and it's important. But the idea that you cannot possibly iterate without shipping code is way, way too extreme.

[ChrisMarshallNY]

It’s an old concept, called “taking risks.” Corporations and executives have been doing it for centuries. In fact, that's the excuse that executives give, for their monstrous salaries.

I think we have a culture, where people genuinely believe that we have some “right” to a risk-free fortune.

Training users to pay for unripe garbage, is probably one of modern Marketing’s biggest coups. It affords the “MVP model,” that everyone uses.

The other big coup, is “The Company is the Product, the User is the Resource, and the Investor is the Customer” model.

Steve Jobs famously, made many errors, in his career. Probably most of his ideas were duds, but the ones that scored, scored big.

He was also, famously, a world-class prick; but he wasn’t a misanthropic prick. He actually liked people (certain ones, more than others, I guess), and had a way of understanding them. That figured prominently, in his product ideas. Many folks are misanthropes, and refuse to understand people, so they have difficulty coming up with ideas that people might like.

Taking risks, and "putting our money where our mouth is," is the “old-fashioned” way of doing it.

[feoren]

As much as I hate the veneration of Steve Jobs, this is one thing he was good at. Does anyone seriously think the iPod and iPhone would have ended up the way they were if he was putting half-assed music players with bare wires in the hands of users and going "do you like it? Is it OK? Would you buy this? What do you think? Is it too much? It's too much, isn't it? Should it be white? Is white OK? Do you like white? I noticed you didn't push the button. Do you like buttons?". Hell no. He took the prototype and said "Too clunky. Too big. I need to be able to lick it. It needs to feel better in my hand. Try again"

Yet not only do software developers do the timid design-by-focus-group all the time, they confidently tell you you're doing it wrong if you don't do it this way.

[ChrisMarshallNY]

It depends on the target market.

The mistake many people make, is casting what’s good for the goose, onto the gander.

I Serve a demographic that can suffer great harm, from half-baked crap. Also, there’s no money to be made, so what’s the hurry? If someone else comes up with something better, that’s actually a good thing.

I have been shipping software for my entire career. It’s quite possible to ship good stuff.

It’s just more work, and less financially rewarding, so fewer people do it. It just gets my goat, to hear people say that it’s not possible.