Joined 14 years ago
Other comments in this thread show that your mileage may vary. But we spend so much money on Claude Code and give it so many responsibilities that we deserve at least some undeniable proof that it’s bringing value.
Where is the evidence that this new type of prompting is better on real life examples?
> the same input can map to more tokens—roughly 1.0–1.35× depending on the content type
Does this mean that we get a 35% price increase for a 5% efficiency gain? I'm not sure that's worth it.
Shameless plug: I wrote one. https://marmelab.com/blog/2026/01/21/agent-experience.html
Although I will never use anything of what I learned from this article, I feel a better person since I’ve read it.
In one of the alternate universe I like to imagine, AI slop doesn’t exist and the Internet is filled with gorgeous pieces like this one.
The reason we pay a subscription is because the company that built the software knows our business, knows how to get in touch with the decision maker, and knows how to market their product as something desirable. The actual software has little influence in that decision.
On the contrary, I think the price of SaaS subscriptions will go up as a result of AI. Because the only customers who will switch to a cheaper (or home made) alternative are the ones for whom the software is a commodity. These customers used to form the long tail of subscriptions, usually on the lower tier. When the entry pricer disappears, and the software editor has to generate a high return for their investors, the only way to keep profitability is to increase the price for the other tiers.
Think about how to provide your SaaS service to users of ChatGPT or Claude.ai (not only coding tools like VSCode). At one time, the user will need to allow the SaaS service to interact with their agent, and will have to authenticate in the SaaS service so that the agent can act on their behalf. This is all baked in the MCP spec (through OAuth) [1], and scripting can't beat that.
That's why the Extensions/Applications marketplaces of consumer AI assistants like ChatGPT Apps [2] are a thin layer on top of MCP.
Another domain where MCP is required is for Generative UI. We need a standard that allows third-party apps to return more sophisticated content than just text The MCP spec now encloses the MCP Apps specification [3], which is exactly that: a specification for how third-party apps can generate UI components in their response. On the other hand, scripting will only let you return text.
[1]: https://modelcontextprotocol.io/specification/2025-03-26/bas... [2]: https://help.openai.com/en/articles/11487775-apps-in-chatgpt [3]: https://github.com/modelcontextprotocol/ext-apps
I wonder how long the open-source ecosystem will be able to resist this wave. The burden of reviewing AI-generated PRs is already not sustainable for maintainers, and the number of real open-source contributors is decreasing.
Side note: discovering the discussions in this PR is exactly why I love HN. It's like witnessing the changes in our trade in real time.
I love reading the posts in this thread. It seems the waterfall vs Agile debate is still vivid in the HN community, which surprises me.
I know that developers have different experiences with SDD, and there is no one-size-fits-all methodology anyway. It's interesting to read the feedback of people who really like it, especially when they describe their background and the type of project they use it for.
In my experience, SDD doesn't bring any value as I'm already using Plan mode before going to implementation. I have also never seen instances of a coding agent doing exactly what I had in mind in the first try (except for very simple cases), so there must be iterations, which defeats the purpose of the Big Design Up Front.
Finally, I really think coding agents pave the path for a new way to develop digital products, more productive and closer to the users' expectations. But I doubt that SDD lies anywhere in this path.
