| ▲ | ch4s3 a day ago |
| A thousand times this. A lot of people are discovering that coding was never the bottleneck in their orgs and don't know what to do differently. |
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| ▲ | phoghed a day ago | parent | next [-] |
| Coding was a huge bottleneck in my bottom dollar offshore contractor infested company, the point where it would have been faster for me to solo projects than work managing a team of them. Their organizations are unfortunately highly optimized to entrench themselves, and no VP’s want to take what from their perspective is a risk to hire expensive onshore contractors or just let someone internal give it a shot. AI has been a huge disruption to that status quo though because it enables people like me that were stuck managing these bozos to just do the thing on a timeline that wasn’t feasible before. AI also removed any excuses these people could make for never getting anything done. It exposes clearly for anyone tangentially involved in these projects that the devs often can’t even begin to understand the problems they are trying to solve. With the level of detail that I had to specify things for them to be productive, it’s easier and more effective to just give that (often much less detail tbh) to GitHub Copilot or Claude. It has massively changed the game for me and helps me enjoy my job quite a bit more. |
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| ▲ | em-bee a day ago | parent | next [-] | | Coding was a huge bottleneck in my bottom dollar offshore contractor infested company, the point where it would have been faster for me to solo projects than work managing a team of them. so actually it sounds like coder management was the bottleneck, not coding itself. | | |
| ▲ | phoghed a day ago | parent [-] | | Sure, management is always the bottleneck then. But somehow more coding productivity allowed us peons to outpace bad management and ultimately change their shitty strategy from India to Eastern Europe. Laundered through Accenture, wipro, et al still of course. |
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| ▲ | hobo123 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Sure, quality matters. Many offshore devs would stumble over their own legs. Near shore was much better (Eastern Europe), local German devs even better, and if you got a _good_ dev, they'd easily code at 10x of an average coder. So no wonder AI is a huge improvement over whatever most organizations did to code something up. Corollary: this mostly affected "business" software. Anything interesting meant good devs were already gravitating to it, so the SW would be vastly higher quality (think many Silicon valley shops). | |
| ▲ | le-mark 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > With the level of detail that I had to specify things for them to be productive, It’s funny because when I managed an offshore team I did the same thing. And just like with llm I stopped looking at their code. It was a waste of time asking them to fix it because they’d just fix slop with slop. At least llms understand concurrency and don’t introduce data races! |
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| ▲ | bsenftner a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| The communication skills to create the synchronized understandings necessary for teams of any moderate size to operate in concert is not there. Communications are everything when it comes to collaborations at any level, and we as an entire civilization are weak at this aspect. This effective communication necessity. |
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| ▲ | 0xpgm 17 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Many people are good at communicating. Perhaps not all, but many. However, even less are good/interested at playing Machiavellian politics to get things done in work environments. The larger the workplace, the more at stake, the more likely this is how things are done. | |
| ▲ | coffeebeqn a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Also AI don’t seem to make communication better, worse if anything. I’m so sick of the whole team not understanding what is going on with Claude written docs and tickets | | |
| ▲ | notnullorvoid 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | People with AI brain are painful to deal with. They take a small spark of an idea and feed it to an LLM to expand on it and reinforce their assumptions. When challenged on the details they don't have good arguments, because they never actually thought through the problem. If it's not in person communication you just end up debating with an LLM. |
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| ▲ | superxpro12 a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | a lot of what i do with ai is write (gasp) requirements. which is horrifying to engineers for some reason. | | |
| ▲ | bsenftner a day ago | parent | next [-] | | I wonder how much of your requirements would / could be reinterpreted as a dependency graph of logical constraints. I think we may end up with "writing software" to end up being writing such logic + process dependency graphs in plain language. And by extension, given we're talking about people here, committees will form and hammering these out is the new politics. | |
| ▲ | sgt101 a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | it's good to write requirements, but when you have requirements, why not render the code to fulfil them? | | |
| ▲ | ben_w a day ago | parent [-] | | > but when you have requirements, > why not render the code to fulfil them? Because 95% of the time the LLM can turn the requirements into code, faster, cheaper, and with fewer defects on the first attempt, than most humans. | | |
| ▲ | CrimsonCape a day ago | parent [-] | | Your point needs to be emphasized more. Today is the worse AI will ever be, and it's still better than the average person. Recursive self-improvement will make it even better, maybe on orders of magnitude. When you task an AI, it will be able to walk upward abstractly to ask "is this even a good approach." AI's are good for compartmentalized tasks now, but the architectural tasks will probably be improved in the future. | | |
| ▲ | bsenftner a day ago | parent [-] | | I can imagine the meltdown when AI starts telling its users "that is not how it would work best, consider this ____" and they rant on about their need for and constant use of their "I don't care, do what I say" clipboard loaded paste. | | |
| ▲ | Pulcinella 9 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | People say AI is just stolen StackOverflow solutions, but in a few more years frontier models will truly be able to replicate the "Rather than help you, have you heard of the X/Y problem?" experience. | | |
| ▲ | ben_w 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | I generally find they already do that, only they are better at understanding the question and intent and the solutions are better (or at least less often obsolete). |
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| ▲ | ben_w a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | I'm not generally sold on the "worthy successor" or "human disempowerment would be good" arguments (seems like jumping straight to Hard Mode of alignment when we've not even read the tutorial) but this is one of the ways it might be best for the AI to just… disregard what we say and do something else instead. | | |
| ▲ | bsenftner a day ago | parent [-] | | We'll get to a point where the best practices are to "tell AI what you want to do, and allow it to tell you how you're going to do it". |
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| ▲ | sick_of_slop a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | [dead] | |
| ▲ | a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | [deleted] | |
| ▲ | jurgenburgen a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | I love requirements. Slop, not so much. |
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| ▲ | yunwal a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Just because there's a new bottleneck now doesn't mean coding was never the bottleneck. It was for many orgs, and now it's probably not the bottleneck anywhere |
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| ▲ | ch4s3 18 hours ago | parent [-] | | I meant specifically in many place that code was always delivered faster than the org could generate requirements or do anything useful with it, but now the volume make that situation impossible to ignore and slow orgs can no long blame code delivery for slow progress. This was never meant to be a universal claim. |
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| ▲ | sumtechguy a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| That also is dependent on the company and who works there. Some companies are meeting heavy. A meeting for every little decision. Some are not. Some are paperwork heavy and you need to fill out the form to do anything. Coding is like the 4th or 5th on the list of things that get done. Handed to the most jr of devs to 'just figure it out'. Some companies are just not software companies but they have enough of it that they needed but do not care about it. They only care enough to get their hardware out the door. AI in this case only changes when software is done and how. Not all of that other stuff. Such as have you checked in today during your standup and that your story is progressing? |
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| ▲ | ogogmad a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| The more code, the more worry; the more workers, the more theft; the more AI, the more sorcery; the more flesh, the more worms. The ancients knew it all along! |
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| ▲ | barbariangrunge a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| bottlenecks constantly change. every time you fix one, a new one emerges. coding is and isnt the bottleneck depending on your organization at that snapshot in time. It often was, and often was not |
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| ▲ | sshadmand a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
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| ▲ | andrewstuart a day ago | parent | prev [-] |
| >> coding was never the bottleneck What utter twaddle. I’m old enough to remember pre AI programming and it very very much was the bottleneck. |
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| ▲ | ch4s3 18 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I've been writing code for a long time, and have seen time and again that a lot of problems get solved in code far faster than the organization can absorb the change. This is not universally true, but the number of times I built something in a few days or weeks and waited twice as long for half a dozen handoffs is quite memorable. | |
| ▲ | nathanfries a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I think it was indeed the bottleneck, however the assumption that "coding is the bottleneck" was baked into how organizations were measured, optimized, staffed for the last couple of decades. | |
| ▲ | skydhash a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | From "The Mythical Man-month" (1995 ed) For some years I have been successfully using the following rule of thumb for scheduling a software task:
l/3 planning
l/6 coding
l/4 component test and early system test
l/4 system test, all components in hand.
The separation can be blurred if you follow an iterative approach (also explained in the book), but it aligned roughly with my experience. And whenever I helped a colleague in the past, coding was not the problem. It was either the lack of planning (no data modelling, no rough algorithm design), or no test setup (trial and error coding). It was never the coding part. Syntax errors is trivial to solve (with any good editor) and most libraries have good reference docs (not learning the library is an orthogonal matter). | | |
| ▲ | svachalek a day ago | parent | next [-] | | AI practically zeroes out the coding and component test part of the process and massively accelerates the system test. What's left is "planning" which under a modern iterative model apparently includes deployment/distribution and getting/understanding/incorporating feedback. With a fully optimized process, knowing what to build is nearly the entire problem. | | |
| ▲ | skydhash a day ago | parent [-] | | > AI practically zeroes out the coding and component test part of the process and massively accelerates the system test. Have this been measured, not comparatively, but absolutely? Where you plan, but don't code, instead leave the task to an agent (while you do something else), then test the result (maybe a quick look at the code), and ship. Is it sustainable? Or is it for greenfield setup and common ideas (things you would use tooling and snippets before)? > What's left is "planning" which under a modern iterative model apparently includes deployment/distribution and getting/understanding/incorporating feedback. That is not "planning" means. Planning is usually understanding, research, and design. |
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| ▲ | Supermancho a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | That's nice, but not authoritative for ~20 years (since before VMs and AWS). This book was before CI was commonplace. | | |
| ▲ | SoftTalker a day ago | parent | next [-] | | If anything, testing/TDD is a bigger share compared to coding than before. LLMs can write tests too, but it's still something that has to be managed. It meshes with my experience. Coding was never the bottleneck. Understanding what the customer/business wanted or needed was always the vast majority of the time spent on a project. A developer might not have seen that, depending how the organization worked. If you got specs from a manager you might not have been aware that those were 6 months in the making. If most of what you experienced was writing code then that could feel like the bottleneck especially if your manager demanded frequent status reports. | |
| ▲ | bigstrat2003 a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | Doesn't matter. Nothing has fundamentally changed since he wrote it, because the book is more about how people act than technology. |
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| ▲ | k0morebi a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | Say what you want about reducible fractions but that's a pretty nonintuitive way to describe how you divvy up time. Weird to not use percentages or a common denominator... | | |
| ▲ | Taikonerd a day ago | parent [-] | | I think it would be funny if the fractions summed to more than 1. Like the old joke: "the first 80% of the project takes 80% of the time, and the last 20% of the project also takes 80% of the time." |
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| ▲ | ido a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | > old enough to remember pre AI programming So old enough the remember the ancient times back in 2023? | | |
| ▲ | Exoristos 17 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Coding agent results only became generally acceptable sometime this year. | | | |
| ▲ | win311fwg a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | Where did 2023 come from? The Heuristic Compiler, dating back to the early 1960s, is generally considered the first instance of AI programming. Maybe you mistakenly confused AI with a particular AI technology, like LLMs? But even then we had LLM-based code completion tools in 2020. Is 2023 when you became old enough to start remembering things? |
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