There's no such thing as a small software team anymore

My current theory I might test out is to treat generative AI as generative AI. This means instead of editing things like a microservice in place you version freeze them to bug fixes only and create new versions for new features. This way you can go and update all the places that use the old version to the new version one at a time. As you do you can check that the new version does not break anything while still having an old version to fall back to.

They still make up some whole product that presumably does something as a whole that you actually care about, and the complexity inherent to that doesn't go away with either approach.

It will just be computing new geometric states and syncing them to the screen.

Incidentally not having devs save endless copies of their dev tools and languages will save a bunch of electricity; storing and copying that stuff around uses a lot of electricity.

Software engineers who want to be taken as experts in their craft need to understand the chip makers are experts in theirs all the same. They’re not leaving your concerns about correctness, efficiency, and stability unconsidered.

Almost offensive for non-experts in hardware dev to continue to insinuate no one but SaaS devs have any idea how computers work.

Metrics like pr count and commits have always been terrible gauges for success compared to business performance.

But they're easy to measure, and even easier to game now with AI.

So we're seeing an outrageous gain on these metrics, and they've become almost completely divorced from business results.

No one cares how fast you ship prs. They care that you offer a compelling product, that works when they need it work, for a price they're able and willing to pay.

It's like we've decided to measure how far we've traveled in gallons of gas burned, but completely forgotten about measuring miles per gallon.

Notice how difficult it is to turn off photo bursts in iPhone? Because that free cloud space needs to be filled fast. So ask your question again and you will find the answer very rapidly. They even gave it a cool name, "tokenmaxxing" what even the fuck.

software used outside of nerd niches? photoshop, canva, clickup, after effects and unreal engine over feh, imagemagick, impressive, emacs org mode, ffmpeg CLI and pico-8?

Some people operate like little boys. They want the BIG RED TRUCK. They haven't considered that's it's really hard to park and gets 5MPG, or that their use cases don't involve fighting fires (for which they are not trained), but they want the big red truck so they can drive the big red truck.

Anyway, if you go the 5000 microservices route, you move all your problems from the application layer into networking and orchestration problems. Best of luck with that.

I agree that these companies' products were fully mature prior to usable coding agents in late 2025, so I don't understand why they would require a large volume of code changes beyond minor promotions and localization enhancements. I would expect their challenges to be in the ML, data, storage, capacity, and compute infrastructure areas.

    1. Dependency on some outsourced LLM vendors (no Internet? No API response? Welp, you do you.);
    2. Undefined amount of payments/paid subscriptions at vendors;
    3. Undefined amount of tokens burnt on each prompt/iteration within undisclosed algorithms;
    4. Absolutely no responsibility/copyright for the LLM output;
    5. Privacy concerns on inside/company project source code uploaded;
    6. Incremental eventual atrophy of developer's own skills;
    7. Inhuman attitude for art, development, effort, purpose in general, since the models are built on stolen effort of other, now unknown, people...

It’s going to be very successful, because I used all sorts of LLM assistance (and because it’s adding onto a successful app that’s been shipping for two years).

There’s absolutely no way that I could have managed this scale, on my own.

There will be examples of both success and failure, with LLMs.

What approach are you taking? I'm about to start a mithril.js project, was always under the impression it was the most efficient approach. Are you doing something similar or different or are you referring to WASM?