A quarter of Y-Combinator’s W25 startup batch have 95% of their codebases generated by AI. The interesting question is what their codebases and products look like a year from now. Writing new code is easy. Maintaining and evolving it is the hard part. - ThreadSky

carnage4life.bsky.social • 12 days ago

A quarter of Y-Combinator’s W25 startup batch have 95% of their codebases generated by AI. The interesting question is what their codebases and products look like a year from now.

Writing new code is easy. Maintaining and evolving it is the hard part.

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msdobalina.bsky.social•12 days ago

I can hear the tech debt gamble: "By the time we're trying to scale, AI will be able to repair its dog vomit code."

As if this is just a coding problem.

wingedpig.com•12 days ago

I agree and have experienced this first hand. However, I do think this will be less of an issue as LLMs continue to get better. I can envision a future where commenting code doesn't really matter any more, as the LLM built into whatever IDE you're using just accurately explains things on the fly.

yeep.bsky.social•12 days ago

I personally think that if your comments only explain what the code is doing, you're doing it wrong. The code should be written in a way its clear what it's doing. The comments should explain why you are doing it this way. That is something an LLM will never be able to do.

matthewhutton.bsky.social•12 days ago

Pretty much every previous tech trend improves massively to start with and then really slows down a lot.

What are the improvements in MS Office in the last 15 years vs 1995-2010 and then 1985-2000 was even bigger?

markus.oberlehner.net•12 days ago

To be fair, the overlap between startup founders and people who write great code never was that big to begin with.

I’d even say that’s the sweet spot: if the product works, get in good coders and they’ll happily rewrite from scratch.

doubleohkevin.bsky.social•12 days ago

I swear the people pushing genAI as replacement for engineers are people who have never actually worked on a large codebase.

There's a reason why engineers are so valuable - codebases are complex af.

Good luck when your house of cards crumbles.

raulguerrap.bsky.social•12 days ago

Something that doesn’t get brought up is that all these companies are stuck with programming languages and paradigms for which there is a lot of training data in the web.

raulguerrap.bsky.social•12 days ago

You could easily get an advantage if there is a new programming language, paradigm, etc .. for which LLMs have not been trained on. So for companies on the cutting edge this is restricting.

raulguerrap.bsky.social•12 days ago

also if they don’t fully understand the code an “it just works”. There will be a bug in the future that the LLM will not be able to solve and will shut them down indefinitely. But move fast and break things amirite

matthewhutton.bsky.social•12 days ago

Also I get the feeling that AI is writing a lot more code than you would by hand. So you are getting a lot more complexity and therefore technical debt than you would with a hand-written approach much sooner.

derelict515.bsky.social•12 days ago

I can’t even vibe code for more than a couple days before it feels like the code base starts to fall apart and the AI can no longer profitably fix things correctly/quickly. Perfect for tricking some VCs I guess

hardxcoded.bsky.social•12 days ago

my pwediction - next year 75% of code written by AI, advanced AI agents to maintain and develop large code basis (openAI already has them), first fully AI developed unicorn within next 12 months, mawk my words.

sarahofswords.bsky.social•12 days ago

What is their moat?

ztopia.bsky.social•12 days ago

Excellent point. If AI can be a strong partner in evolving and maintaining, that’d be big.

mike.puterbaugh.net•12 days ago

If 95% of your product can be produced by AI then you’re 20x overvalued

yeep.bsky.social•12 days ago

It's the dream of all these "idea guys". Just explain your world-changing product idea to an LLM, and it will create the code for you. You'll no longer have to deal with these codes who'll just say you're idea is stupid and want to get paid and stuff...

raulguerrap.bsky.social•12 days ago

But they can’t prompt like I can.

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