Thread

1. torben-friis · 1790026444 · focus · HN ↗

   Here's my constant question:

   Everyone's going so fast that they keep hitting walls. Review, CI, product asking for things, whatever.

   Why have we not seen an improvements in products?

   While every post and thread feels like a 90's wall street office, the new android and iphone ship with fewer features than usual. No indie guys come up with a linux-sized alternative OS. Switch 2 remains unhacked. Windows takes 3 seconds to show the right click menu.

   Is everyone just running full speed in circles or something?

   1. ehnto · 1790043062 · focus · HN ↗

      Probably for the same reason that SV companies hiring thousands of developers struggled to improve their product much past the original product, that was built by a handful of people.

      Scale in headcount was a tactic to get investment, then you had to find stuff for everyone to work on. Suddenly people have the time to engineer so hard that we get runtime JSON defined CSS rendering engines to produce the same buttons we've had since 1995, instead of just writing a stylesheet and html.

      Code output velocity from AI threatens to be useful, except it's also prone to over-engineering and burning tokens on the unnecessary. It's learned from the best after all. My suspicion is there is a lot getting done, but it's just not that impactful to flagship products.

      As others have noted, there is a lot of new work going into passion projects that would have never happened otherwise, and that is cool. But I wouldn't hold my breath for SV tech to become super pragmatic and effective.

      1. dmboyd · 1790043545 · focus · HN ↗

         With pay-per-token, there’s also an incentive for over-engineered but functionally harmless architectures. A json based css engine is probably something that can be test-cased really well in the training set.

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