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I think this comparison isn’t quite correct. The downside with carpentry is that you only ever produce one of the thing you’re making. Factory woodwork can churn out multiple copies of the same thing in a way hand carpentry never can. There is a hard limit on output and output has a direct relationship to how much you sell.

Code isn’t really like that. Hand written code scales just like AI written code does. While some projects are limited by how fast code can be written it’s much more often things like gathering requirements that limits progress. And software is rarely a repeated, one and done thing. You iterate on the existing product. That never happens with furniture.





Exactly.

How much is coding actually the bottleneck to successful software development?

It varies from project to project. Probably in a green field it starts out pretty high but drops quite a bit for mature projects.

(BTW, "mature" == "successful", for the most part, since unsuccessful projects tend to get dropped.)

Not that I'm not AI-denier. These are great tools. But let's not just swallow the hype we're being fed.


There could be factories manufacturing your own design, just one piece. It won't be economical, but can be done. But parts are still the same - chunks and boards of wood joined together by the same few methods. Maybe some other materials thrown into the mix. With software it is similar: Different products use (mostly) the same building blocks, functions, libraries, drivers, frameworks, design patterns, ux patterns.



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