Definitely agree with this. Even without a large backlog, one of the things I find working on my personal project/product where I'm simultaneously the engineer/designer/project manager is it's really easy to ask the LLM to implement an idea I've been mulling for an hour or two, it one-shots it and I'm happy, and then a week or two later it starts to dawn on me that the feature was maybe not a great idea. Which isn't on the LLM, but I know when I write features by hand I tend to reach the "this is a bad idea" conclusion a lot earlier because I'm directly confronted with the cases where it won't work out, I have to think a lot harder about corner cases, etc.

Where I think/hope this goes is instead of using LLMs to go faster, we use them to do better work. I'd rather someone vibe code up better ways to test things, or use it to do in-depth code analysis and bug fixing, etc., then just pile in features.

Doesn't this just mean we need to get better at the active deconstruction and disassembly process? Like it's too easy to build, so we build more things we realize later that we shouldn't. Now, a comparable energy budget we used to use "deciding what to build" (because labour was scarce) is now energy we can divert toward "unbuilding stuff that was a mistake".

I'd much rather learn to live in the latter world. That world is based more on validated experience, and less on assumptions about a hypothetical future that hasn't yet been experienced.

Of course, we will perhaps start to atrophe in our skills at projecting futures, which is a real concern. As in "what's the benefit of building robust mental models of the future when it makes more sense to YOLO through it and experience it the results directly?"

It's all a little scary, to be honest. It turns a lot of the world on its head in many ways. Experientially tumbling into things with robust sensing processes... this is perhaps becoming more important than modelling futures in a judicious sense of economizing resources...

Sometimes it is, but sometimes it isn’t.

I can remember plenty of times in my career there were some “nice to haves” that we didn’t get to, and not having them continued to waste our time over and over again as we kept putting it off.

Time saving work for our software lifecycle that we spent so much time working around. Some of those things we finally did get to, and then spent the next few months wondering why we hadn’t don’t it before.

From the title I thought this was gonna be about software (like MacOS updater) giving users an “Update now” and “Maybe later” option but no “don’t show this again”.

I’m still holding out from upgrading to macOS 26 and it’s doing its absolute best to make me accidentally misclick to update

I think if you assume a capitalistic, commercial framing of code, this makes sense.

If you think about all the projects you don't have time to make that require code but would be really cool albeit have no *marketable* value, making those faster to make and easy to share isn't a bad thing.

I want more cool free things people make out of passion - sure, you could argue using AI removes some of that passion, but there's also a large subset of people who are passionate about their field but not passionate about code, and if they're able to make something cool by feeding the idea in and pulling the token generation slot machine's lever on repeat to get their vision, I still think that's cool.

Of course, there's a line where it's slop, so it depends what they're making. A tool to make music? Cool. An album where it's all AI gen'd audio. Not cool. A tool to modify art/apply filters/modify brushes? Cool. AI art standalone? Not cool.

Basically, is the target something standalone as a product we want to have human creativity in the output expression (art) or not. I don't think of MS office as particular artful, but I'm sure many good books have been written in it.

This line is definitely blurry and full of gray areas. For example, https://www.redwoodrhetorica.com to me is totally fine, but I could see why people find it weird.

Similarly, I'm sure to someone working in or on emacs or vim, they're almost sacred and they view the tool itself as a work of art, such that the idea of using AI to improve either sounds offensive, but as long as VSCode works (which, it has had more bugs lately...) I really don't care if they used Claude or whatever to work on the editor/IDE itself.

Of course, there are projects and features which probably shouldn't make it past the "Should this exist?" filter. Complexity does have a cost - nobody wanted CoPilot in Notepad - but having LLMs doesn't change that, I don't think. It means we can do more, but being selective and having good taste to avoid making something bad by adding unnecessary crap to it was a problem far before LLMs.

undefined

There is still code you aren't writing. facepalm