Live data from Hacker News

Development speed is not a bottleneck

pawelbrodzinski.substack.com

31–40 of 153 posts

Re: Development speed is not a bottleneck

#31

It's completely absurd how wrong this article is. Development speed is 100% the bottleneck. Just to quote one little bit from the piece regarding Google: "In other words, there have been numerous dead ends that they explored, invalidated, and moved on from. There's no knowing up front." Every time you change your mind or learn something new and you have to make a course correction, there's latency. That latency is ju…

> It's completely absurd how wrong this article is. Development speed is 100% the bottleneck.

The current trend in anti-vibe-coding articles is to take whatever the vibe coding maximalists are saying and then stake out the polar opposite position. In this case, vibe coding maximalists are claiming that LLM coding will dramatically accelerate time to market, so the anti-vibe-coding people feel like they need to claim that development speed has no impact at all. Add a dash of clickbait (putting "development speed" in the headline when they mean typing speed) and you get the standard LLM war clickbait article.

Both extremes are wrong, of course. Accelerating development speed is helpful, but it's not the only factor that goes into launching a successful product. If something can accelerate development speed, it will accelerate time to market and turnaround on feature requests.

I also think this mentality appeals to people who have been stuck in slow moving companies where you spend more time in meetings, waiting for blockers from third parties, writing documents, and appeasing stakeholders than you do shipping code. In some companies, you really could reduce development time to 0 and it wouldn't change anything because every feature must go through a gauntlet of meetings, approvals, and waiting for stakeholders to have open slots in their calendars to make progress. For anyone stuck in this environment, coding speed barely matters because the rest of the company moves so slow.

For those of us familiar with faster moving environments that prioritize shipping and discourage excessive process and meetings, development speed is absolutely a bottleneck.

Re: Development speed is not a bottleneck

#32

You 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 alwa…

It’s infecting expectations I’ve noticed as well. The thing LLM coding tools expose very plainly if someone wasn’t already aware is that management would rather ship with bugs or missing features - no matter how many - as long as the “happy path” works.

The vibe coders can deliver on happy path results pretty fast but I already have seen within 2 months it starts to fall apart quick and has to be extensively refactored which ends up ultimately taking more time than if it was done with quality in mind in the first place

And supposedly the free market makes companies “efficient and logical”

Re: Development speed is not a bottleneck

#33
post #27

It's completely absurd how wrong this article is. Development speed is 100% the bottleneck. Just to quote one little bit from the piece regarding Google: "In other words, there have been numerous dead ends that they explored, invalidated, and moved on from. There's no knowing up front." Every time you change your mind or learn something new and you have to make a course correction, there's latency. That latency is ju…

When they say dev speed they mean the coding the AI can do. It's agreed that testing, evaluating, learning and course correcting are what takes the time. That's the entire point being made.

Sure, but the actual lag from "I have an idea worth trying" to "here's a working version people can interact with" is one of the larger pieces of latency in that entire process.

You can't test or evaluate something that doesn't work yet.

Re: Development speed is not a bottleneck

#34
lol.... development speed and quality are both the bottleneck my dude. But if you have enough speed, you can fix quality issues as you are able to test and fix things faster.

You have even CEO of car companies that get fired because they mess this up. Or even the Sonos company lost a lot of value, and got their CEO fired because they messed up and can't fix it in time.

Speed is not everything. Developing the right features (what users want) and Quality are the most important things, but development speed allows you to test features and fix things fast and course correct.

Re: Development speed is not a bottleneck

#35

You 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 alwa…

The difference between Software Engineers (or Developers) vs Programmers; with the latter designation being a stretch for some.

I think we should we put this title-based distinction to rest.

Whether you call yourself an engineer, developer, programmer, or even a coder is mostly a localized thing, not an evaluation of expertise.

We're confusing everyone when we pretend a title reflects how good we are at the craft, especially titles we already use to refer to ourselves without judgement. At least use script kiddie or something.

Re: Development speed is not a bottleneck

#37
Yeah, “development speed” is almost never the real blocker. I’ve worked on teams where folks shipped code at lightning speed… straight into the wrong direction. Turns out it’s way slower to undo that than to just move carefully with clarity.

Re: Development speed is not a bottleneck

#38

About 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…

I saw two projects in a row in a German Fintech (the one that has AI in its name that forbids usage of AI) go exactly the same way.

Two/three months to code everything ("It's maximum priority!"), about four to QA, and then about a year to deploy to individual country services by ops team.

During test and deploy phases, the developers were just twiddling thumbs because ops refused to allow them access and product refused to take in new projects due to possibility of developers having to go back to code.

It took the CEO to intervene and investigate the issues, and the CTO's college best friend that was running DevOps was demoted.

Re: Development speed is not a bottleneck

#40
The article sort of glosses over this, but to me the real question is delivering value over the long run. This takes patience and tenacity not just from developers but also from management. Making a product that lasts and that evolves and that delivers for your clients is definitely a lot more challenging (and finally rewarding) than vibe-coding an MVP in a couple of weeks. I have the impression that in that regard AI coding tools are quite inadequate and don't really deliver the value they purport to.
Post reply on HN