Thread

1. etothepii · 1790106737 · focus · HN ↗

   > "Never really finish building it" is the key insight.

   The problem with software is that it is never done. There is always another feature you could have and worse than building a property the work is only done by the people on the outside.

   1. randusername · 1790107674 · focus · HN ↗

      I think it's deeper than that, once you know software is never done you have to design for constant change.

      When clients ask why something takes so long, I explain that I'm not building what you asked for today, I'm building something that will be easy to turn into what you asked for today and possible to turn into whatever you ask for tomorrow.

      1. Fr0styMatt88 · 1790109884 · focus · HN ↗

         AI has vastly changed the shape of what that looks like though. There are whole classes of refactoring work that are much cheaper and quicker to do with agents. Integrating a protocol client library say, or swapping one library for another are now potentially hour-long instead of days-long tasks, especially when you have test coverage to back you up (which AI also immensely helps you with).

         1. skydhash · 1790111399 · focus · HN ↗

            That’s merely code churn, which is not a good property. What you want in a codebase is something rigid enough to satisfy today’s constraints (including optimizing them) and flexible enough to be modified for some likely future prospects.

            So for any current features, cost of fixing bugs and do trivial adjustments should be very low. But working on new things should have a great ROI, especially because what’s existing can be reused as a foundation.

Unofficial Hacker News client; not affiliated with Y Combinator.