To answer your question, although I would certainly have preferred you to phrase your comments less insultingly: this project would otherwise never have got to a state where it could find bugs. I am not paid to write this code, and it would have taken far more years than I would have been willing to spend.
It's not actually unheard of for people to pay other entities to build their passion projects. For example, I visited [Eltham Palace](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eltham_Palace) last weekend, which was not in fact built entirely by the two Courthaulds who commissioned it.
What does that have to do with LLMs? There's morev to delivering value to the customer than just shipping code. We used to understand that technical debt was an existential risk to a project. I can't see how "code nobody understands" is not technical debt.
I disagree. Shipping functionality that works and users consume is all that matters. Everything else is noise. Technical debt can be viewed through this lens - it reduces the rate in which functioning code is shipped. That's bad, but it's only one of many dials.
The author states they feel that using LLMs allowed them to ship years faster. That's years of time in which they can collect feedback and iterate. They might even choose to scrap the entire project and rewrite it based on their learnings. The practicality of this is directly enabled by agentic coding.
Technical debt is aptly named. From time to time it demands it's interest in the form of delaying a new feature, but as long as your overall technical revenue is positive, it's fine.
Something of a passion project. It's going to fail horribly if you try and use it, I'm sure, but it can already do some neat stuff!
Is it, though? A passion project? Cuz it sounds like you lost the passion and have started to farm it out to Anthropic.
I don't get it. If this is a passion project, why would you abdicate to someone else?
To answer your question, although I would certainly have preferred you to phrase your comments less insultingly: this project would otherwise never have got to a state where it could find bugs. I am not paid to write this code, and it would have taken far more years than I would have been willing to spend.
It's not actually unheard of for people to pay other entities to build their passion projects. For example, I visited [Eltham Palace](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eltham_Palace) last weekend, which was not in fact built entirely by the two Courthaulds who commissioned it.
because some software engineers enjoy shipping usable software more than writing the code needed to do so?
What does that have to do with LLMs? There's morev to delivering value to the customer than just shipping code. We used to understand that technical debt was an existential risk to a project. I can't see how "code nobody understands" is not technical debt.
I disagree. Shipping functionality that works and users consume is all that matters. Everything else is noise. Technical debt can be viewed through this lens - it reduces the rate in which functioning code is shipped. That's bad, but it's only one of many dials.
The author states they feel that using LLMs allowed them to ship years faster. That's years of time in which they can collect feedback and iterate. They might even choose to scrap the entire project and rewrite it based on their learnings. The practicality of this is directly enabled by agentic coding.
Technical debt is aptly named. From time to time it demands it's interest in the form of delaying a new feature, but as long as your overall technical revenue is positive, it's fine.