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I don't get the obsession with more code. Whatever happened to good development practices? Many of which, if followed allow LLMs to work more efficiently ironically enough. I would rather hear that you've fixed bugs that have stumped your dev team for years, and have had next to no outages, to me that's more valuable than just slopping features out the door.

I think the HN crowd overestimates the quality of software. There is a (very) long tail of truly abysmal software that people are forced to use all the time. The reason it gets to be abysmal is because it’s often back-office admin software that helps people file forms for, say, logistics paperwork or school district expense tracking. AI-native engineering teams can create dramatic improvements for that long tail because the people running that software are either incompetent or checked out, and a pull towards average quality by AIs would yield great improvement.

none of these types of pieces of content focus on what was created for users, its always about how sky high their "shipping" metrics are (PRs merged, LoC, etc). it makes it extremely hard for me to care, as they all boil down to "im a dev who made some loops on loops on loops that writes a lot of code and spends a lot of tokens."

i will say, at least this article says "we merge 5x more and our revert rate has stayed the same." so thats at least a metric i can start to respect

The “more features != better” is still a valid principle IMO, and AI doesn’t help with that. Probably is making it worse.

Perhaps it shows that it does not matter how good your engineering is, or if you have sped up feature development 10x, if the shop is not providing value then who cares?

You're thinking about this at the wrong level. This org has made the decision to be AI-native. They aren't A/B testing being AI-native vs not being AI-native. That's the kind of thing "the market" does; if a company's markup is higher than another's it can attract more investment or its equity can trade for higher pricing on public markets.

I don't think it makes sense to A/B test "AI-native" vs other regimes of development unless you are a large, decentralized company like an F5 company or a Big Tech. How will a team of 25 (the size of the company if you read the thread) have enough output to even A/B test the difference?

They probably did not even think about asking customers.

since when does an engineering org care about revenue or customer satisfaction? Most software devs have no idea how the business they work for operates and think their direct deposit every two weeks is a fundamental law of nature. Also, many software devs are anti-customer and think customers are wrong even when the customer is talking to them one-on-one describing their needs in plain english.

LOC has no impact on revenue whatsoever. We've known about that for decades.

I've gone through a few recruiter screens lately and the number of people who mention "number of deploys per day" as a metric they are proud of causes my eyes to roll.

What can you possibly be doing as a product that justifies you releasing 60 times in a working day?

It's certainly better than the old models of releasing on a quarterly cadence with the test team and all that, but it feels like the metric has become the goal when you are releasing that often.

That's why I'm sceptical about the value of ai in software development. Much more can now be done but I don't see costumers paying more for it. The only way it can work is by laying off software engineers and saving money on their salaries.

> If you're willing to buy that will be possible, then my guess is that it will occur in the form of small scale startups and actual mavericks rather than someone trying to run an existing business who will simply be too risk adverse to go all in when the time comes. Some guy in his basement is more likely to leverage AI "properly" to build an actual "AI-native" engineering org because that person won't have much to lose.

FWIW I think the company writing this post is one of those small scale startups. But that being said, you're not the only one who thinks this. A decent amount of VCs and funds think that only smaller, newer companies have the potential to be truly AI native because there's too much organizational inertia in an existing business in keeping its existing human processes and so only a newer company can achieve the true "scaling potential" or using AI to scale without human labor.

I think this is all fair, but somewhat just semantics.

Most engineers are working in "normal" engineering orgs, but can feel the ground underneath them shifting, and companies believe that if they are caught flat footed, they will be out competed in the marketplace, so they are all trying to make sure they are adopting it at least in a way that lets them keep pace if not accelerate revenue.

If you are not impacted by economic incentives, you can continue to not care about this transitional state, but most people do.

Reminds me of a few things, like being a meat proxy, as well as books like Company of One or Million Dollar One Person Business, and these were published before AI so right now we will see companies with only one founder and hundreds to thousands of AI agents. There already was that drug delivery company with the one founder but apparently a lot of their revenue was fraudulent. Still, it proves the point that it is possible.

IMO most modern engineering practices are cargo culture. I’m sure in 10 years we look back on today the same way we’d look back on the days before version control was common. We are in the emailing files around stage of development

> differ to the AI

defer to the AI

> I feel it falls well short of what a proper, forward-thinking "AI-native" engineering org would actually look like. That is, the author is presenting this as kind of a radical departure from normal engineering, but I just see it as normal engineering with more AI. I don't see that as AI-native.

A company which proclaims they are "AI-native" isn't actually interested in engineering, they are trying to ride the hype wave. Companies who care about engineering just... do engineering, and don't make a big deal out of whether they are chasing trends.

AI native shouldn't imply idiotic. And designing your execution approach around a strategy based on a technology that doesn't exist is idiotic.

If you follow this logic, we get to the true "AI-native" engineer which is ecstatically floating in a bath of dopamine-stimulating liquid, while AI reads their brain pattern and instantly builds everything they didn't even form a full thought about.

"If that sounds outlandish, that's because it is. We don't have such capable AI systems yet."

I think the biggest shift is in predictability. Will something be done today, next week, or next month - nobody knows. Will we converge on a bug free state? not sure.

So far AI works great at fast moving work which you will probably recode or throw away in a month or two anyway (e.g. a startup) but is weak at maintaining a large code base that you rely on. At least part of this is cultural, as the cost of misalignments between team members can be quickly translated into broken software.

Have been at it since Nov 23rd 2025 with a first commit with Opus 4.5 - it was rough at first but after about year well worth it. You can also tell where so many just get stuck in the mud due to lack of direct experience with all the engineering silos (from bare metal sys admin to QA eng silos outside of standard software engineering core) it takes to roll out a new kind of technology company while scaling a new kind of commercialization model, also managed by AI and AI native from the ground up.

Been moving our 17-person engineering team to adopt ai and this comment summarizes all of my findings perfectly.

This specifically summarizes a huge gap I think some people have around ai:

> Architecture matters more than ever, but it is easier than ever to fix.

You can prompt away to your heart’s content, but if you’re not pushing it in the right direction architecturally, you’re bound to face frustration eventually.

The most successful way I’ve found to convert those leaning anti-AI or AI-skeptical on my team is just showing them how much tech debt I can clean up with AI. They get excited to pitch in, and they see that it does actually benefit them in some meaningful ways. That set of endpoints that’s been neglected for years? Let’s stop complaining about them and DO something about them, today. I’ve actually seen life be blown into some devs who were coasting for a while. It’s an interesting time.

This guy knows what's up. Favourite comment.

It really depends on the kind of product you're working on. A lot of developers (and managers and business leaders) assume that their workflows will apply to other kinds of products; and are often very wrong.

For example: A few days ago I saw a quote that over 90% of current Y-Combinator startups vibecode their products. The problem is the author misunderstands context: Startups sacrifice quality for time to market. In other cases, if you're building something that isn't technically challenging, (because it's 80% similar to many other products out there,) you can probably vibecode it.

In contrast, if you're doing something technically challenging, it's to your benefit to be a lot more hands-on. I recently started getting excellent reviews from copilot of my hand-written code. (Or, I should say, the hand-written parts of an AI-assisted pull request.)

The people / orgs that can actually codify their strong software engineering principles and practices into "a harness"[1] are the people / orgs that find success with these tools.

The rest are just marketers.

[1] Whatever that means to them

Yes

> no way I am going to ship the code as written without actually reading through it

Interestingly agents can help, not replace, this process

These tools will make us more productive, they will disrupt (have disrupted) our industry, but they will not replace us because they cannot

Thanks, this is exactly right. AI is useful insofar it can be made to conform to engineering principles.

well, i did go check out the company spawn from the article. its certainly interesting how hands off their process is and how much they ship, but holy shit the games were fucking horrible. there was a direct WoW ripoff (right down to the assets) that was unplayable, a racing simulator where my controls stopped working 10 second in, and some sort of RPG that i started and just never loaded. so i will take what they are saying with the heaviest possible grain of salt.

Oh it's Jacob - I used to work w/ him on his acquired startup, Pluto. He was very AI-pilled; I'm not surprised at the results. I remember wading through the AI-generated Python he had written. I think Pluto had something like 500k or 700k lines after 18mo. Everything was duplicated; there was no reuse of anything. Dozens of features, which mostly worked, not all did.

As a product that I would regularly use, Pluto missed the mark for me. As a SWE in 2023, I couldn't meet Jacob's mentality. Today, it's how a lot of us ship software.

I didn't love the product but I have to respect the process: he was able to sell his company. For some, what he did is success.

So as a user I can basically deploy code through bug reports? Sounds like a prompt injection nightmare.

This is amazing and somewhat insane. It's more like they are building an organism with an immune system than a code base. Interesting that they say only Fable works for them.

This is a complete and utter disaster. They are making spam games. Like miniclips but for spam. A semi functional website to make what is basically youtube playables.

And it's devouring tens of millions. I know what tens of millions can make in the video game industry, it can keep a small team of good devs and designers and artists making something special that's _really_ enjoyed by tens of thousands of people.

We don't want more games, we want more great games. This will never, ever, make great games.

https://www.spawn.co

Look on ye mighty, and despair. I really don't care how this sausage was made because the only thing you need to know is that it shouldn't ever have been made.

Was thinking of that exact article while I was reading this, we must be following the same folks. Highly recommend folks reading it, even if it feels insane in some regards it's a fascinating look at what the limits of this stuff could be and I found myself with a lot of new ideas to consider after reading it. Interesting times.

Edit - after writing "we must be following the same folks" I realized that you are, in fact, Simon Willison - I saw this article because you posted about it on X, haha.

What's their revenue?

Do players like it?

Will the history of gaming remember this game?

Or it’s a fabrication of some kind. Some times people lie to make themselves look good. Or the omit important details.

This works as we've been doing it since Opus 4.5 (Nov 2025) with every user request, feature and bug. It's the future without a doubt. The feedback loops evolve and get stronger depending on how well you fine-tune or train your system to optimize on its own.

That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever read. Spaffing millions per month on this slop is the kind of thing people suffering from AI psychosis do. There is no way you need “thousands of agents” to build any product.

The more agents you throw at something, the more they collide. Those collisions generate more slop, which requires further slop processing agents.

so if there's no user reports and fable isn't shipping in the middle of the night, then it's an outage?

> A default that made Savi think longer on every message, landed at 10:22pm and reverted by 10:40pm: that's not right, undo it it's too slow and not jazz.

I giggled on that one. It feels like children playing having a job. If they pay that much for tokens they have to have at least 80k customers paying 50$ a month. Seems huge for something like that. Or they have a lot of investors. Anyway does not feel like something going anywhere.

Are they even making 3M per month?

Isn't there a point where you're shipping too fast that the product hasn't even caught on enough yet to know what to build?

I looked at some of the games and it just looks like a Roblox clone

This from that tweet stood out to me: "In general, we've seen that OpenAI's models game their own checks"

In the past when working on agentic stuff I've observed models gaming checks aggressively, to the point that when we were validating log files to see what the agent had done, the agent responded by editing the log files to pass validation. I can only imagine how bad that kind of behavior is at scale, and it sounds like they ran into it.

"We consider it an outage if we don't ship every hour" is the dumbest thing I've ever read.

I really mean this. Does it benefit the business? Does it benefit the users? When you optimize for the wrong thing, you inevitably fail.

Categorically, if you ship more bugs per engineer, you fix more bugs per engineer.

Won't there also be a point were you're shipping so fast that that in itself deteriorates UX? What if a page literally changes every time I reload? What if it changes mid-checkout process and the deal I agreed to 5 seconds ago does not exist anymore?!

I have come to realize that code (and I think possibly productivity in general) being expensive was always a feature. I am sure that a few great ideas did get lost to obscurity due to lack of access to resources to build them out. However, we now have an absolute deluge of complete and utter shite.

Yep and there is no real demand for slop engineers are producing anyways.

yeah shipping widgets and shit, not real features

This assumes that it’s more profitable for these labs to compete with their own customers, rather than increasing the productivity for their customers and - assuming this increase justifies it - increasing their profits.

I don’t think it will ever reach such a point.

   > You can become CTO with this lack of business fundamentals, and a basic misunderstanding of systems engineering?

(in fact it may be a requisite ...)