Don't Scale Yet, Because of AI
Don't scale yet, because of AIAugust 2, 2026Like most software engineers, I’ve been involved in a lot of codebase rewrites. Rewrites have always been very expensive, multi-month efforts, but this is changing with the advent of AI. In fact, rewriting while keeping existing behavior requires much less human intervention for AI than rapidly building out new features.
- ▪Don't scale yet, because of AIAugust 2, 2026Like most software engineers, I’ve been involved in a lot of codebase rewrites.
- ▪Rewrites have always been very expensive, multi-month efforts, but this is changing with the advent of AI.
- ▪In fact, rewriting while keeping existing behavior requires much less human intervention for AI than rapidly building out new features.
Hacker News (AI / LLM) files mainly under ai. We currently carry 3,624 of its stories.
Story provenance
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Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Nate Loum |
| Canonical URL | https://nloum.github.io/blog/dont-scale-yet-because-of-ai/ |
| Publication time | Tue, 04 Aug 2026 14:52:59 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-08-04T14:55:43.385Z |
| Last seen | 2026-08-04T14:55:43.385Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | Hc_acYHtMFyZ · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Don't scale yet, because of AIAugust 2, 2026Like most software engineers, I’ve been involved in a lot of codebase rewrites. Rewrites have always been very expensive, multi-month efforts, but this is changing with the advent of AI. In fact, rewriting while keeping existing behavior requires much less human intervention for AI than rapidly building out new features. The proof is in the data: Amazon found that AI made Java upgrades 98% faster (estimated against historical data; August 2024) Google found that AI made int32-int64 migrations across the 500M-line Ads codebase 50% faster (estimated; January 2025) Airbnb found that AI made test migrations 92% faster (estimated; March 2025) By contrast: METR found that AI made general feature development 19% slower (July 2025; likely narrowed since…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Nate Loum.
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