> $168k
Billions of dollars of annual revenue go through Claude Code, and the people who work on it must be a lot of millions in headcount.
The time matters a fair bit, it's probably time someone can't spend breaking things in the name of new features, but if rewriting the stack had even a tiny impact on retention or driving higher usage, it would pay back that $168k.
If only paying the $168k was some sort of a guarantee. Vibing doesn't give you that.
You might get more maintainable code for $168k by hiring humans, but if its something bespoke it isn't going to get you far (or far quickly).
Vibing is straight out gambling right now, the thing is, I don't know who the house is any more.
It's going to take an order of magnitude longer though, delaying any of that revenue significantly. I'm sorry, but we're talking 11 days here. What does "maintainable" even mean with impossible time-scales like this now!?
The new normal is there is no normal. No common sense, FOMO, YOLO, everything combined is what we're living right now :)
Perpetual complete rewrites. When there’s more bugs the LLM can fix, rewrite the whole codebase. Repeat ad infinitum.
True on the premise, remains to be seen if that's what's going to happen in practice.
In my work I have Fable/Opus add bespoke linters and tie them to verify/precommit tasks (including in CI) so nothing of the reworks and 15+ initiatives we have in flight ever regresses.
Some discipline will remove that worry of yours. It's not nice to immediately assume that the rewrite's orchestrator (Jarred) did not use discipline. He even outlined a few false starts.
.. by hiring the right humans - which is not always a given
Even worse: it's much safer to assume you'll hire the wrong humans, most of the time.
Yep, same thought. And it seems Anthropic agrees.
The company I work for is about 15mm into what is effectively a rewrite. Just a lone data point…
Millimeters?
I read "man months".
15 million dollars
15 million mollars :)