For the last few months I have been partially helping out an AI startup get a handle on its product. Their lead developer had left a year ago, leaving a fairly complex and over engineered codebase.
I realised last night how much of my time, attention, and energy I had been putting into the project.
Whenever I find myself waking up and my automatic thought process goes to a particular project, I regularly need to assess whether that project is worth of my ever decreasing time.
The problem is – as with almost all software projects at the moment, is that unless you are able to integrate AI coding tools with it to develop new features faster, you are falling behind.
The reality is that the combination of automation tools + ‘vibe coding’ + ‘senior engineer experience’ can outpace and rebuild most systems from scratch very quickly now. The cost of software development is now significantly less although the increase in technical debt from AI generated code will be substantially higher than normal.
Sunk Cost Bias
With the right attitude, you can take lessons from most experiences in life. When an individual or company has invested resources into a project for too long, there’s this thing called sunk cost bias…which is the psychological desire to keep on going on a path because you’ve journeyed so far.
Leave a Reply