[sathish316]

I call it the Intent-Implement-Quality problem.

Software factories can implement anything given a one-liner requirement. That one-liner requirement can be a complete app/product, epic, feature, bug, design change or refactoring. But these one liner requirements are requirements coming from a human who has an intent or requirement or direction for the product to evolve in mind. Can Software factories manufacture intent that reflects the exact requirements of the person using it or their vision of how the product or software should evolve?

Implementation in any language is as easy as generating a summary for an LLM. If coding is only math and there is only one way to translate a requirement into an implementation, the problem boils down to just providing or verifying generated intent. But, there is definitely more than one way to implement a thing and one of the ways leads to a design and architecture that is coherent with rest of the system, design and architecture that is extensible and evolves, code that you can keep in your head when you want to change things next time or tomorrow, software that can serve millions of users and securely guarantee millions of dollars of revenue. There is a combinatorial explosion of ways and the one right way is also subjective of the person and the problem. Software factories can of course improve Quality by generating more unit tests, more integration tests, fix code violations, generate Proof of work as videos, screenshots etc, but there is no feedback loop or test suite to verify and correct the other subjective notions of Quality.

[canpan]

It's even worse: Customer says I want X!

One or more of the following can be true:

  - Customer really wants X
  - Customer doesnt actually need X at all
  - Customer wants Y not X but couldnt express himself
  - Customer B and C do NOT want X at all
  - Customer is just messing with you for no reason

[podocarp]

Also quite common for me is like someone says X is good (usually a PM) but common sense says it's crap, and when you actually ask the user they also say it's crap. If only LLMs could email a bunch of people for second opinions.

[shermantanktop]

Or fire the PM?

[RugnirViking]

PM = politics maestro

They will out-corporate you. Better to be friends with them, or failing that, move from under them

[stevefan1999]

Or fuck them, fuck the managers, fuck the c-suites (intentionally decapitalized), go for a flat organizational structure like Valve where you have no one to report to (well maybe Gabe Newell or the team leader for that project occasionally), but the culture is that everyone can manage themselves organically rather than having hierarchies and forced, useless reportings

[nfbdhdfbf]

Valve ships almost nothing, and the engineering quality is mediocre. Their game design is good, but subsidized by a unique early mover monopoly market owner position.

There is almost nothing that can be generalized, and people who hold up their organization as an example to strive for are utterly clueless

[syndacks]

Hierarchies are burned deep into our DNA little boy, u ever read Utopia?

[antonvs]

I’ve outlived many PMs and helped get at least one fired. If they were omnipotent they’d be better at product design.

[NamlchakKhandro]

ask Ed Zitron how well that statistically pans out

[clintonb]

https://xyproblem.info/

[copperx]

Why deliver one solution? You're thinking small. If LLMs were fast enough, they could build A,B,C,...,Z in parallel. So that's what will end up happening. The operator will just have to make sure there's no combinatorial explosion of the possible requirements.

[cjfd]

Right. Because If I want feature A and it is available in configuration among features A through Z I will always perfectly pick the right letter of the alphabet and I will not at all be irritated by having 26 options that I have no idea about what is the difference between them.

[locallost]

But I think there's anyway a point there. I watched a talk once and it was humorously said that the amount of time spent discussing whether solution A is better than B is more than implementing both A and B and seeing in practice. It's funny because it's true.

[sathish316]

If you’re working on an app or software that has few users, no revenue or minimal revenue, tolerance to bugs is higher and just another Claude prompt away, Software factories are a perfect fit. Most personal software or hobby software or 0-1 yet-to-find-PMF startups belong in this category.

You can even take a stand that you’ll never look at the code and just ship. This is a perfect equilibrium for a Software factory, where the only input or feedback is a one-liner/specced requirement and the only output is outcome of whether the one-liner requirement worked or not.

For almost any other software that does not fit this criteria, software factories are yet to solve the Intent and Subjective Quality problem.

[bandrami]

> few users, no revenue or minimal revenue

The 900 pound gorilla has for a while been "where is all the output of these LLMs?", and this seems to be the answer; the number of apps on the various app stores has skyrocketed over the past two quarters but installs overall are actually down a little bit. So it seems like we've had an explosion of software that one or two people use. Which is a cool situation to think about but is pretty bearish for the "AI as a profitable business" idea.

[tmikaeld]

Marketing was a problem with apps even before AI, which, with today’s slopforests makes it even harder for consumers to see any of your trees even if they wanted to.

[bandrami]

Right but if we're going to a small-batch bespoke development model then "marketing" more or less disappears because why would I pay someone to talk to an LLM when I can also talk to an LLM? The money goes from the end user to the lab in this model.

[bandrami]

I should expand that: the money goes from the end user to the lab and only in the cases where the marginal utility of the small app exceeds the cost.

[jambalaya8]

What happens then, though? Is it good to have tens or hundreds of thousands of potentially angry marketing managers roaming around that were developed out of careers?

[bandrami]

IDK, get Springsteen to record an aid concert for them?

[davidgl]

100 points for the term Slopforest :-)

[sarchertech]

I haven’t checked in recently but a couple months ago there was an increase on the Apple App Store, but not on Android.

And when I did a spot check, most new apps were just wrappers around LLM APIs.

[aleph_minus_one]

> If you’re working on an app or software that has few users, no revenue or minimal revenue, tolerance to bugs is higher and just another Claude prompt away, Software factories are a perfect fit. Most personal software or hobby software or 0-1 yet-to-find-PMF startups belong in this category.

I would rather claim that for my personal/hobby software, I apply a much higher quality standard than for the software that I write at work.

Believe me: I would love to apply the same high (or even higher) standard at work, too.

The problem rather is that it is a very common situation that bosses actively prohibit me from rocking the boat too much. If I make (I think typically good) suggestions, I often get very stern reactions.

At work, elegance is not celebrated - just implement the tasks of users who don't care about quality or elegance.

[tonyedgecombe]

I’m always surprised when I read comments like this. I’ve come across far more situations where individual contributions take a slapdash approach and management is disengaged than management actively imposing poor quality work.

[andrewljohnson]

You either need to quit or keep your head down, I can’t tell which.

[taneq]

If you need to actively keep your head down, you need to quit.

Doesn’t matter whether ‘the problem’ is the employer, the employee, both, or neither. They’re a bad fit for each other.

[podocarp]

I don't think so? It's very common in both large companies and small startups where pragmatism has a higher priority than so called elegance or whatever you call it the "artisan" feel. It's varying shades of "perfect is the enemy of good", where different cultures and business environments dictate how much a manager is going to tolerate your proposed refactoring. At least that's what I got from the parent lost.

[swiftcoder]

> If you need to actively keep your head down, you need to quit.

This really depends on whether they are paying you decently. The number of people I've met who found a nice corner in FAANG, and decided to keep their head down and collect a steady paycheque... One may find one can swallow a lot of engineering pride for a recurring six figures

[yurishimo]

And that’s not to say anything about personal situations. Family obligations, immigration requirements, etc.

Especially in the current job market, “find a new job and quit” is going to cost you so much time and effort and for many people it will still be a lateral move in terms of company quality in regards to engineering practices. It’s hard to make these kinds of deep company discoveries until you’re in the thick of it but by then it’s too late.

Personally, I’m advocating for change where I can and not taking it personally when the manager says no. I put in enough effort not to get paged in the middle of the night which is generally plenty for management. It helps that I don’t work in a super strict business environment.

There’s more to life outside of work as well so if you can silo that bit of your life and enjoy things outside of working hours and you’re content, so be it.

[eru]

Keep your head down, while you look for alternatives. No need to pre-emptively quit, if you can coast and collect a paycheck.

[preg_match]

The perfect poster boy is system scripts. They’re not even published usually, but being able to just generate < 500 line scripts for everything is a huge boon.

[dhorthy]

I agree this rocks I do this almost daily

[preg_match]

It goes hand in hand with Linux desktops too, because everything is just so much more scriptable. That used to be intimating, user unfriendly, and maybe it still is. But with AI it enables so many new avenues.

[black_knight]

Now that LLMs can do the actual configuration, I started using NixOS and now all my config lives in one repo, and every quality of life improvement fans out to every machine without issue.

Since Claude (code) knows all about my system, it will also tailor solutions to it when I ask how to do something. Using it I can often find really neat solutions to whatever sys admin task I can imagine.

[high_na_euv]

>If coding is only math and there is only one way to translate a requirement into an implementation, t

What??

It is definitely not true

[sathish316]

I’m of course saying there are infinite ways to implement a non-trivial feature.