Comment by zkmon
Just my curiosity: Why are you producing so much code? Is it because it is now possible to do so with AI, or because you have a genuine need (solid business usecase) that requires a lot of code?
Just my curiosity: Why are you producing so much code? Is it because it is now possible to do so with AI, or because you have a genuine need (solid business usecase) that requires a lot of code?
Often code in SaaS companies like ours is indeed how we solve customer problems. It's not so much the amount of code but the rate (code per time) we can effectively use to solve problems/build solutions. AI, when tuned correctly, lets us do this faster than ever possible before.
>> Why are you producing so much code?
This is basically a "thinking tax".
If you don't want to think and offload it to llm they burn through a lot of tokens to implement in a non-efficient way something you could often do in 10 lines if you though about it for a few minutes.
I’ve just implemented a proof of concept that involved an API, a MCP server, an Authorization Server, a React frontend, token validation and proof of possession on the client, a CIBA flow for authentication… took a week , and I don’t even know the technologies used very well, it was all TypeScript but I work on JVM languages normally. This was a one off for a customer and I was able to show a fairly complex workflow end to end and what each part involves. I let the LLM write most of it but I understand every line and did have to make manual adjustments (though to be honest, I could easily explain to the LLM what I needed changed and given my experience it would eventually get there.
If you tell me I didn’t really need a LLM to be able to do all that in a week and just some thought and 10 lines of code would do, I suspect you are not really familiar with the latest developments in AI and just vastly underestimates the capabilities they have to do tricky stuff.
In a large project with decent code structure there can be quite a bit of boilerplate, convention, testing required. Also we are not talking about a 10-line change. More like 10k line feature.
Before LLMs we simply wouldn't implement many of those features since they were not exactly critical and required a lot of time, but now when the required development time is cut signifficantly, they suddenly make sense to implement.
I just started developing self-hosted services largely with AI.
It wasn't possible before for me to do any of this at this kind of scale. Before, getting stuck on a bug could mean hours, days, or maybe even weeks of debugging. I never made the kind of progress I wanted before.
Many of the things I want, do already exist, but are often older, not as efficient or flexible as they could be, or just plain _look_ dated.
But now I can pump out react/shadcn frontends easily, generate apis, and get going relatively quickly. It's still not pure magic. I'm still hitting issues and such, but they are not these demotivating, project-ending, roadblocks anymore.
I can now move at a speed that matches the ideas I have.
I am giving up something to achieve that, by allowing AI to take control so much, but it's a trade that seems worth it.