the_af's comments | Hacker News

What's bizarre is this particular account is from 2007.

Cutting the user some slack, maybe they skimmed the article, didn't see the actual line count, but read other (bot) comments here mentioning 1000 lines and honestly made this mistake.

You know what, I want to believe that's the case.

I've read the book and I'm a fan of Ishiguro in general, but I'm failing to make the reference, so I'm going to go with "no" :)

> Generally speaking, my feeling is that most code doesn't need to be carefully-crafted. We have error budgets for a reason, and AI is just shifting how we allocate them. It's only in certain roles where small mistakes can end your company - think hedge funds, aerospace, etc. - where there's safety in the non-determinism argument.

That's a bit shortsighted. There have been cries of software becoming needlessly bloated and inefficient since computers have existed (Wirth, of course, but countless others too). Do you visit any gamer communities? They are constantly blaming careless waste of resources and lack of optimization in games for many AAA games performing badly in even state of the art hardware, or constantly requiring you to upgrade your gaming rig.

I don't think the only scenario is boring CRUD or line of business software, where indeed performance often doesn't matter, and most of it can now be written by an AI.

Even in CRUD line of business software, lack of performance causes enormous problems that the current software development culture glosses over.

Just one example I've seen time and again. You take an application that if optimized could run on a single server (maybe 2 if you absolutely have to have zero downtime deployments), but because no one cares about performance it runs on 10 or more. You now have a complexity avalanche that rapidly blows up. Then you need more hierarchy to handle the additional organizational complexity etc...

Then people start breaking out pieces of the app so they can scale them separately and before long you're looking at 200 engineers to do a job that certainly doesn't need that many people.

I realize I'm ignoring a whole lot of other issues that result in this kind of complexity, but lack of performance contributes to this a lot more than people want to admit.

Agreed. I wanted to give some credence to the fact many cookie-cutter CRUD apps can absorb a ton of inefficiencies until they truly burst at the seams, but yeah, even in that case software bloat and bad use of resources matters.

I find it intriguing seeing this new batch of dev-types completely giving up on the matter. The conversation of machine vs developer efficiency is not new, but completely giving up on any sane use of resources is something relatively new, I think. Especially coming from some in the HN crowd. Maybe these are new people, so I can chalk it up to generational turnover?

I've been in industry for >15 years and have given up on sane use of resources because it's been actively disincentivised everywhere I've worked.

Sanity is for my personal projects.

> I think now you are freed up to make a shooter that people will actually want to play. Or at least attempt it.

Taking this to an extreme, let's say vibe coding becomes real enough, and frictionless enough, that you can prompt a first person shooter into existence in a few minutes or hours.

If/when this becomes true, nobody will want to play your shooter. You'll share your shooter with people and if they care at all about shooters, they'll just go prompt their favorite AI tool and conjure their own into existence.

Admittedly this is a bit extreme, and we aren't there yet. But I've thought about this in relation to art, and how some people now go "well, this empowers people who didn't know how to make a movie/cartoon/painting/game, it's empowering and democratizing". But in my mind, art is a form of communication between humans. Without the exchange between humans, art cannot exist. If all of us are each lost in our own AI-powered projects, and if anything can be easily conjured out of thin air, then why bother with the next person's art project (game or whatever)? I don't care about your game, let me make my own in a few minutes.

I'm thinking about potential counterpoints: ah, yes, but it's about "ideas". While we can both make our ideas reality, my ideas are more inventive, so my AI-powered projects are more appealing. I'm not convinced about this; I think slop will dominate and invade public spaces, but also... why draw the line at ideas? Why is "skill with a pencil" replaceable with AI-slop, but ideas aren't? Ideas are often overrated, what matters is execution, anyway.

> It's hard to tell any more.

Wait, I think I have the answer!

"You're in a desert, walking along in the sand when all of a sudden you look down and see a tortoise. It's crawling toward you. You reach down and flip the tortoise over on its back. The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over. But it can't. Not without your help. But you're not helping. Why is that?"