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Development speed is not a bottleneck

(pawelbrodzinski.substack.com)
191 points flail | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0.519s | source
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thenanyu ◴[] No.45138802[source]
It's completely absurd how wrong this article is. Development speed is 100% the bottleneck.

Just to quote one little bit from the piece regarding Google: "In other words, there have been numerous dead ends that they explored, invalidated, and moved on from. There's no knowing up front."

Every time you change your mind or learn something new and you have to make a course correction, there's latency. That latency is just development velocity. The way to find the right answer isn't to think very hard and miraculously come up with the perfect answer. It's to try every goddamn thing that shows promise. The bottleneck for that is 100% development speed.

If you can shrink your iteration time, then there are fewer meetings trying to determine prioritization. There are fewer discussions and bargaining sessions you need to do. Because just developing the variations would be faster than all of the debate. So the amount of time you waste in meetings and deliberation goes down as well.

If you can shrink your iteration time between versions 2 and 3, between versions 3 and 4, etc. The advantage compounds over your competitors. You find promising solutions earlier, which lead to new promising solutions earlier. Over an extended period of time, this is how you build a moat.

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1. jayd16 ◴[] No.45139417[source]
When they say dev speed they mean the coding the AI can do.

It's agreed that testing, evaluating, learning and course correcting are what takes the time. That's the entire point being made.

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2. thenanyu ◴[] No.45139677[source]
Sure, but the actual lag from "I have an idea worth trying" to "here's a working version people can interact with" is one of the larger pieces of latency in that entire process.

You can't test or evaluate something that doesn't work yet.