That's mostly because of London's financial center, where a lot of foreign money is laundered; the city's GDP is comparable in size with small EU countries like Belgium or Ireland. If you take London out of the equation, what's left has an average GDP of only 30k per capita [0].
A quick comparison with [1] (using 1 GBP ~ 1.30 USD) shows that London would rank #8 in Europe (between Denmark and Norway), while the rest of the UK would come in somewhere around #25, between Spain and Italy.
Sure, if you exclude the wealthiest parts of the country then it does look significantly poorer. Just as if you exclude California then the GDP of the US drops significantly. The point was whether the UK is economically relevant, not whether the economy is ethically sound (which is quite a nebulous question I'm sure you'll agree).
> You're only missing out if that's what you want to do.
Who writes software and doesn't have a list of "I'll fix this one day" issues as long as their arm?
This is honestly one of the things I enjoy most at the moment. There's whole classes of issues where I know the fix is probably pretty simple but I wouldn't have had time to sort it previously. Now I can just point claude at it and have a PR 5mins later. It's really nice when you can tell users "just deployed a fix for your thing" rather than "I've made a ticket for your request" your issue is on the never-ending backlog pile and might get fixed in 5 years time if you're lucky.
Many people don't. You can write a ticket and the PM can deal with it. Not everyone is intimately involved in their job enough to care about stuff like that. And some projects might not last long enough for you to care. You should project your dev experience on everyone, specially as a software development enthusiast.
Claude code makes it so easy to do things the "right way" that it also makes it really easy for you to let scope creep get out of hand. I have a personal project that I haven't deployed yet that in some ways is way overengineered for its purpose. It's hard to blame the tool though, it's always telling me I'm making it more complicated than it needs to be but I don't listen
I've felt this recently. I've often been bad about scope creep. CC makes it so easy.
On the other hand, I can see these tools getting good enough that scope creep doesn't even matter.
ATM I usually get stuck around the review/verification stage. As in, my code works, I have tested that it works, but it is failing CI or someone left a PR comment. And for each comment I'll have to make sure it makes sense, make the change, test again, and get CI passing again.
In my team we have strict rules for scope creep in pull request. Each one needs to introduce a single thing, not a dozen little refactorings. This helps, but not when you're working alone in a personal project. Maybe you can setup your review agent to help with scope creep?
I haven't used it so just spit balling, but surely it depends on the quality of the review? If it picks up lots of issues and prevents downtime then it could work out as worthwhile. What would it cost an engineer with deep knowledge of the codebase to do a similar job? You could spend an hour really digging into a PR, poking around, testing stuff out etc. Im guessing most engineers are paid more than $15-25/hr, not to mention the opportunity cost.
Nothing revolutionary, but there is a small organisation called The Himalayan Database [1] who have recorded (in great detail) climbing expeditions to peaks in the area. The data is available in a downloadable format, but it is a little awkward to browse. I have been working in collaboration with them to build a website for making the database more accessible https://himalayan-database.climbing-history.org/
This is just the reality of the power asymmetry and is exactly the same for small company Vs big company. As a small company your business is just not worth that much to big company, so you choices are accept the terms offered or go elsewhere. Or, in an ideal world, there is a competitor who's found a space in the market offering better terms than big company.
> As such it’s unclear what the prize at the end of the present race to the bottom is.
It's a market worth many billions so the prize is a slice of that market. Perhaps it is just a commodity, but you can build a big company if you can take a big slice of that commodity e.g. by building a good product (claude code) on top of your commodity model.
The revenue slice is there, problem is though in a race to the bottom like we’re in now there isn’t much profit at the bottom. And these companies desperately need profit to justify the gigantic capital spend and depreciation title wave that’s on the horizon. There’s no clear way now things don’t just get really pretty quickly.
Putting it succinctly, these kind of conversations feel weird because it's like asking whether carpenters are faster using power tools or hand tools. If you've used power tools it's obvious they make work a lot faster. Maybe there were some studies around the time power tools were introduced looking at the productivity of carpenters, if those studies had results saying the productivity gains weren't obvious in the data that means you have a problem with your study and the data you have collected (which is totally understandable, measuring imprecise things like productivity accurately is really hard). You have to look at the evidence in front of you though, try telling the guy with a chainsaw that he's actually no more productive than he was when he was using an axe and he'll laugh at you.
The UK has the 6th highest GDP in the world. Pretty high bar if that make you economically irrelevant.
reply