I'm curious why velocity is sooooo important. Every single AI discussion that I've read always always always mentions velocity or development speed as though that somehow is the ultimate goal. Why does it matter if your velocity isn't as fast as everyone else? Maybe taking things slowly might actually be a good thing.
I'm not at all trying to be overly critical or pissy; I'm genuinely curious as to why this is always the gain that AI brings as though it matters (or, rather, this is how it's always stated in one way or another). So I come from a place of confusion when asking this. Why should I care if you can write 100000 or 1000000 lines of code and push out 10 billion commits per minute? (Yes, I am intentionally exaggerating here to prove a point.) If anything, I would argue that increased velocity just brings about recklessness and unnecessary churn instead of accomplishing anything useful.
Velocity is important because we all eventually die.
I've been following Haiku since it was announced. In that time a couple of personal friends have passed on, and a number of family members. In that time children have been born, gone to school, grown into adults, and had children of their own.
Projects that drag on forever make for an interesting artistic statement, but if their goals in any way include utility then velocity is important because time is important.
Not everything has to happen in your or my lifetime. Not everything will happen in our lifetimes. If time is so important, Haiku was never going to work for you anyways on account of it being niche, which adds friction, which adds time. Velocity isn’t going to fix this either
As I mentioned, projects that take a long time make for interesting artistic statements. But if the goal isn't performance art but is utility, then alacrity matters.
Many other niche projects have enjoyed enough velocity to have meaningful utility, in my lifetime. Linux was still niche when I started using it in '94.
Some people enjoy building things. It's not performance art, it's a hobby. Can Haiku not be a hobby for people who enjoy hacking away at BeOS? (You might think I'm splitting hairs here, but performance art is precisely the wrong analogy to use, since performance art is for the benefit of others. Performance art is inherently public and assessable in terms of how it reaches others, unlike hobbies. Performance art is env=PROD.)
Was the purpose of Haiku ever utility? What do you define as utility? If I spend a day building a shelf, does that have more or less utility than buying a shelf from IKEA? What if I like making shelves? What if I like making OSes? Does the shelf (/OS) that I build have less utility than the one from IKEA (/MS)?
In economics, utility is a measure of individual satisfaction. The person who likes tinkering with Haiku is deriving cold hard economic utility from Haiku right now. What should it matter to this person whether you find Haiku web scale and production ready? John Q Public is never going to run Haiku, no matter how much polish you throw at it. Why rush to some goal line that doesn't exist in the first place?
Velocity of LoC isn't important. Velocity of user visible improvements can matter if a project feeds off of usage and popularity. Or at least that velocity matters until the OS is capable enough to satisfy the user base.
I... Don't agree with this. If your users have followed your projects developments even remotely reasonably, you taking a few months to implement something or to figure something out is not a sign that the project is dead. It would be one thing if your project was completely inactive for like 2-3 years.
Haiku OS has gone up to 6y between releases. While not entirely inactive in that time, lurkers who aren't as motivated to dig for signs of life could reasonably conclude the project is inactive.
For example, I'm a big fan of DOSBox. And while the core project still has some code check-in's from time to time, its last release was 7ya. Now I use and follow forks because they're consistently releasing useful features and fixes.
I'm not at all trying to be overly critical or pissy; I'm genuinely curious as to why this is always the gain that AI brings as though it matters (or, rather, this is how it's always stated in one way or another). So I come from a place of confusion when asking this. Why should I care if you can write 100000 or 1000000 lines of code and push out 10 billion commits per minute? (Yes, I am intentionally exaggerating here to prove a point.) If anything, I would argue that increased velocity just brings about recklessness and unnecessary churn instead of accomplishing anything useful.