https://sanketsaurav.com/writing/end-of-rationing how would software change if we stopped thinking of programmer time as limited and running websites as free, and started thinking of "thought" as cheap and "operating costs" as nontrivial?
my thoughts:
we would probably optimize performance much more! except in this case it's primarily optimizing LLM calls in the finished product, to make em rare and efficient.
we would change software much more in general.
"maintenance" becomes cheaper, and design for maintainability becomes less important; we no longer have to worry about it being "difficult" to modify something later. difficulty becomes simply a function of money and good testing infrastructure.
https://already-clean.goodfire.com/ claims that neurons are not polysemantic after all. i'm going to wait for the dust to settle and the technical report to come out before judging what it all means.
But also kinda expensive to maintain, which is a cost that many companies neglect.
I have a repeated experience that the company leadership dedicated a generous budget to creating new software, but gave nothing to maintaining old software (but insisted that the old software keeps working flawlessly). So some manager down the line had to allocate people like "your salary will come entirely from the budget for X, however you will spend 80% of your time writing X, and 20% of your time maintaining Y, because ther... (read more)