72 lines
3.2 KiB
Plaintext
72 lines
3.2 KiB
Plaintext
• [1]Home
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• [2]About
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• [3]Archives
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• [4]Bookshelf
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• [5]Projects
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• [6]Stories
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• [7]
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The time to unmaintainable is very low
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January 23, 2024
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It’s so easy nowadays to get up and going on a project. I can burp some npm
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commands into my terminal, burp some more to setup a deployment pipeline and
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blam! Website. The time to product demo is so low. You can get far on your own…
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very quickly… but then… you’re on your own. And it’s possible you’ve built
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something way past your ability to maintain.
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To fix that problem or to allow you to do more business’y work, you add people
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to the process. But people cost lots of money. Unless what you’re building
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makes lots of money already, you probably have to raise VC. With a squad of
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developers burping npm commands, now you’re moving super fast. Hopefully money
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starts coming in, but the whole point of investment was so you could price the
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application artificially cheap to grow a user base that you upsell later. As
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the investment coffers tick down, the pressure goes up to land a new feature or
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gimmick so you can get another round of investment.
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You can, of course, ride the hype cycles. This year that’s AI. Investors might
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throw money at that. But now you’ve bolted on a feature from a highly volatile,
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emergent, non-deterministic space into your overgrown application. You’ll
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either need to hire more expensive people who know the space or divert existing
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resources who were performing maintenance over to the new feature.
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Oops, AI costs more than you can charge for it. You burned through the
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investment even faster and must do a round of layoffs. Now your app maintained
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by 10 people has 8 people… then 5… then 2…
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Paying people to burp npm commands is expensive, could AI do that? Vercel’s [8]
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v0, for example, farts out entire UIs. Great. In a day I have twelve thousand
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screens built. I have more UI than some developers will code in a lifetime. But
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I’m getting the itch to update it and the machine isn’t doing what I want it
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to… perhaps I’ll take some VC to hire some people to clean up these robo-farts.
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And by the time you finish all that work, it’ll be right in time for a major
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version update on a core dependency. Good luck out there.
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I realize I’m complaining about moving too fast but that’s not my intent.
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Although, I could argue that while driving 200mph is fun and exciting, you’re
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one small fuckup away from a major fuckup. My point is that a key factor of
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sustainability is making sure maintainability stays on par with growth. At the
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risk of sounding like a Luddite – [9]which I am – the ability to fancy
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copy-paste your way into an unmaintainable situation is higher than ever and
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that’s a trade-off we should think about.
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© 2024 Dave Rupert • [10]Mastodon • [11]Twitter • [12]Github
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References:
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[1] https://daverupert.com/
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[2] https://daverupert.com/about/
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[3] https://daverupert.com/archive/
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[4] https://daverupert.com/bookshelf/
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[5] https://daverupert.com/projects/
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[6] https://daverupert.com/stories/
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[7] https://daverupert.com/atom.xml
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[8] https://v0.dev/
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[9] https://amzn.to/3NA62WE
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[10] https://mastodon.social/@davatron5000
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[11] http://twitter.com/davatron5000
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[12] http://github.com/davatron5000/
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