I have yet to see evidence that this is really the case. Already 15 years ago, people were creating impressive software over the course of a hackday, by glueing open source repos together in a high level language. Now that process has been sped up even more, but does it matter that much if the prototype takes 4 or 24 hours to make? The real value is in well-thought-out, highly polished apps, and AFAICT those still take person-years to complete.
The REAL speed up comes to efforts that are already well-designed, but require lots of human busy work. I've personally seen multi-day human efforts reduced to a 15-minute session with an LLM. In a way, LLMs are reducing implementation costs to the kolmolgorov complexity -- you can get what you prompt for, but you have to remember to prompt for everything you want to get -- which comes easiest if you already took time to consider the design.
> At some level, the simplest thing to do is to give up and crash if things are no longer sane.
The problem with this attitude (that many of my co-workers espouse) is that it can have serious consequences for both the user and your business.
- The user may have unsaved data
- Your software may gain a reputation of being crash-prone
If a valid alternative is to halt normal operations and present an alert box to the user saying "internal error 573 occurred. please restart the app", then that is much preferred IMO.
> If a valid alternative is to halt normal operations and present an alert box to the user saying "internal error 573 occurred. please restart the app", then that is much preferred IMO.
You can do this in your panic or terminate handler. It's functionally the same error handling strategy, just with a different veneer painted over the top.
Crashing is bad, but silently continuing in a corrupt state is much worse. Better to lose the last few hours of the user's work than corrupt their save permanently, for example.
> Your software may gain a reputation of being crash-prone
Hopefully crashing on unexpected state rather than silently running on invalid state leads to more bugs being found and fixed during development and testing and less crash-prone software.
That should not need to be a consideration. Crashing should restore the state from just before the crash. This isn't the '90s, users shouldn't have to press "save" constantly to avoid losing data.
That's mentioned in the article, but is the lock-in really that big? In some cases, it's as easy as changing the backend of your high-level ML library.
That's what it is on paper. But in practice you trade one set of hardware idiosyncrasies for another and unless you have the right people to deal with that, it's a hassle.
On top, when you get locked into Google Cloud, you’re effectively at the mercy of their engineers to optimize and troubleshoot. Do you think Google will help their potential competitors before they help themselves? Highly unlikely considering their actions in the past decade plus.
Grok got to hold the top spot of LMArena-text for all of ~24 hours, good for them [1]. With stylecontrol enabled, that is. Without stylecontrol, gemini held the fort.
I have yet to see evidence that this is really the case. Already 15 years ago, people were creating impressive software over the course of a hackday, by glueing open source repos together in a high level language. Now that process has been sped up even more, but does it matter that much if the prototype takes 4 or 24 hours to make? The real value is in well-thought-out, highly polished apps, and AFAICT those still take person-years to complete.
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