It's interesting. I remember around COVID, there were a bunch of startups building 3d printers for concrete housing. Then I looked up the actual cost of construction for a typical house, and only 14% of it was the most visible part (the balloon framing and physical house). Most of the cost is in foundations, plumbing, wiring, and things like insulation, flooring, cabinets, etc.

I guess at Microsoft coding is similar to building a house in that sense. Either that or all big orgs devolve into large amounts of time spent on politics.

90% of my time these days is trying to understand what the wall of claudeslop jira ticket is actually asking for. It's like archeology digging for the original customer issue to work out what is actually wanted underneath paragraphs of root cause load bearing seams.

"The Goal" is a key business book for a reason, but leadership seems to not get the lesson. Or care?

I’m sure they learn it by other names.

The point is that while good to remember, and specifically Fred Brook’s “No Silver Bullet” article about it, there are second order effects.

If coding becomes 100x cheaper, what’s going to happen next? At least to some degree, design and planning was there since coding is expensive. (Not just coding, debugging also got squashed by AI and was an expensive part of the job)

This is why the original comment seems pretty spot on, organizations will learn how to skip more phases, and startups are probably a place where this will be happening faster. (Not clearly though, a lot of big tech are happy tokenmaxxing to try and not stay behind those startups when they come)

I like the "9 women can't birth 1 baby in one month"

Yup we already knew this.

Google had many engineers working on a) failed projects b) people being paid to sit around.

There seems to be this strange belief on here that making something more accessible to everyone will always result in better outcomes. I don’t see this being true of software.

I’m very pro-tech. But nobody can point me to a product built by someone outside of the large tech firms, made by by llm’s that is a great value add to one’s life. Many of those were already created - they’re on the apple App Store for example.

I’m absolutely confident coding speed is irrelevant. A person who has a real vision + strategy and hand written code will beat the team with no vision, strategy and code blasted out by llm’s.

Sure llm’s could augment the former - but you’re missing the point!!

> the most impactful changes

Quite a lot of our bugs in production have been in seemingly less impactful changes. How do you know what's impactful a priori?

> I can have an agent mass-produce security bug fixes

I can't figure out what you're trying to say here. Are you saying that this is acceptable? Because I very much don't think it is. You'll have twice the bugs after you're done, and they'll be inhuman ones that you have little chance of catching.

> But how many changes are actually serious?

I mean, "security bug fixes" are not on your list of serious changes? What is?