Development speed is not a bottleneck
pawelbrodzinski.substack.com
Development speed is not a bottleneck
1–10 of 153 posts
Re: Development speed is not a bottleneck
#2For tons of software out there, but not all, development time is minuscule compared to the life cycle.
Re: Development speed is not a bottleneck
#3What these LLMs enable is fixing the foundations. If you considered writing a novel database, operating system, or other foundational piece of software two years ago, you had to be mad. Now you still do, but at least you got a chance.
I can highly recommend these talks to get your eyes slightly opened to how stuck we are in a local minima.
Re: Development speed is not a bottleneck
#4You have the unbelievably productive programmers - we all know their names, we use the code they wrote every day. Then you have the programmers who want to be there and will try everything they can to be there - except gain depth of knowledge. They tend to be shallow programmers. If you give them a task and spell it out, they can knock out code for it at a really good pace and wow upper management. But they will always lack the ability to take a task not spelled out and complete it. Vibe-coding is like sugar and crack mixed together for these people.
Re: Development speed is not a bottleneck
#5Development is always a bottleneck. Writing lines of code usually isn’t. I end up pumping out more leetcode during an interview than I do during a week or two on real products. No one has meaningfully measured lines of code as a metric of productivity since my career began in the mid-2000.
Re: Development speed is not a bottleneck
#6This is just so, so wrong. LLMs change the surface of what's "hard" to do in a coding exercise. Many a project has so much boiler plate, edge cases, etc. that months+ can be taken up dealing with what is ultimately a very boring activity. Add on time to assimilate APIs, bug test, etc. This stuff does matter.
Re: Development speed is not a bottleneck
#7About a decade ago, I was the sole developer for a special project. The code took 2 weeks to complete (a very simple Java servlet + JDBC app) but an entire year to actually deliver due to indecisive leadership, politics, and extremely overzealous security policies. By the time it was successfully deployed to prod, I had been chewed out by management countless times, who usually asked questions like “how on Earth can it take so long to do this one simple thing??”.
Re: Development speed is not a bottleneck
#8The bigger and clunkier the corporation is, the slower the speed of deliveries. And actual development FWIW is somewhere in the range of 1-5% of it all.
Sure, code sweat shops have very different % of above, but thats a completely different game altogether.
Re: Development speed is not a bottleneck
#9You can code PRs fast, but CI, review, merge, deployment, monitoring, all takes just as long as it did before. The inner loop is shrinking; the outer loop is the real bottleneck
Re: Development speed is not a bottleneck
#10This is just so, so wrong. LLMs change the surface of what's "hard" to do in a coding exercise. Many a project has so much boiler plate, edge cases, etc. that months+ can be taken up dealing with what is ultimately a very boring activity. Add on time to assimilate APIs, bug test, etc. This stuff does matter.
It reads like the author never debugged a program. Development speed is not just the time to write code, but also test, stabilize and debug it, with most of the latter being a risk that might cost you a lot much later. If your engineers have to take a two hour or two day or two week timeout to debug issues from weeks, months, or years back, then that really costs as development time.
Vibe coding is going to make this so much worse; the tech debt of load-bearing code that no one really understands is going to be immense.