Development speed is not a bottleneck

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.

Exactly the comment I came to make after reading this article. The article is basically claiming that "trying different things until something works" is what takes time, but the actual act of "trying things" requires development time. I can't see how someone can think about this topic this long, which the author clearly has, and come to this conclusion.

Perhaps I've just misunderstood the point, but it seems like a nonsensical argument.

> trying different things until something works

That sounds like an awful way of software design. Trial and error isn’t engineering but explains the current state of software security.

Trying things and changing if it doesn’t work is the only way I know how to build software.

What would you do? Don’t change?

The question is, why doesn’t it work? Erroneous code, erroneous algorithm, missing feature in the underlying infrastructure?

The effort it takes to implement a feature makes is more likely you think twice before you start.

If the effort goes to zero, so does the thinking.

We will turn from programmers to just LLM customers sooner or later.

Because testing if it works can be done by none programmers