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I wonder how this trade-off will age. I'm not a Mag7/Saas/SV startup tech guy, so I've tended to work on systems that are in service & maintained for upwards of 10 years. It's not unusual to see 20 year old codebases in my field.

We scoff at clever code thats hard to understand leading to poor ability for teams to maintain, but what about knowingly much lower quality code?



When the price of building becomes low, you just toss it and build more.

Much like Ikea's low cost replaceable furniture has replaced artisan, hand made furniture and cheap plastic toys have replaced finely made artifacts. LLM produced code is cheap and low effort; meant to be discarded.

In recognizing this, then it should be used where you have this in mind. You might still buy a finely made sofa because it's high touch. But maybe the bookshelves from Ikea are fine.


Ikea has a lot of hardwood stuff that will last longer than you and your progeny…


In startups there's no real plan to even live that long. Many of them just exist to con investors.

So it's not so important.




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