degreesoffun

One dynamic that AI coding has introduced is that features grow and are more "complete" or "complex" after their first development iteration compared to coding pre-AI. An example of this is that I recently built a web crawler for an internal documentation site at my company. My design for scraping, parsing, vectorizing and indexing the data was far more complex/complete than if I had not used AI. This is primarily due to my lack of knowledge in the space and general time constraints for the project.

That increased complexity, while less costly than before, still added time/cost to the project in terms of cognitive load and testing that otherwise wouldn't have been there had the design been "dumber". This notion of increased design complexity could be thought of as a form of Parkinson's Law where the complexity of the design grows to fill the time available.

I think AI is certainly making us write code faster but how much time is really being freed up now that writing code is cheaper? I get the impression that we are often just finding other things to fill that freed up time with, increased design complexity being one of those things.

I have a few friends that work or have worked at Unity. This is purely anecdotal but from what I've heard it sounds like the place is fairly dysfunctional at this point. A lot of the dysfunction that exists now wasn't there even 3-4 years ago.

> Who cares what he did to some diaper companies. Are consumers paying more or less because of amazon? Much less.

They are probably generally paying less but Amazon isn't the surefire low-cost provider on the internet the way they used to be. I don't expect the trend of them raising prices to reverse as they gain market power.

> How much would you have to charge for same day delivery for that many products? Could you get close to Amazon? You would have to rip off you customers so badly just to stay alive.

It's not "ripping off" it's just charging customers the actual cost of the service they are getting.

And don't forget Amazon. They aren't venture backed but they have access to capital at cheaper rates than most countries due to their position as a stock market darling. They use ultra-cheap money and a willingness to run negative margins which they refer to "reinvesting in the business" to bleed competitors dry. Few other companies on the planet have the ability to run negative or break-even margins the way Amazon does.

Diapers.com example: "When Bezos’s lieutenants learned of Wal-Mart’s counterbid, they ratcheted up the pressure, telling the Quidsi founders that [Bezos] was such a furious competitor that he would drive diaper prices to zero if they sold to Bentonville. The Quidsi board convened to discuss the possibility of letting the Amazon deal expire and then resuming negotiations with Wal-Mart. But by then, Bezos’s Khrushchev-like willingness to use the thermonuclear option had had its intended effect. The Quidsi executives stuck with Amazon, largely out of fear. The deal was announced Nov. 8, 2010."

https://slate.com/technology/2013/10/amazon-book-how-jeff-be...