What AI coding costs you

What just came to my mind is that the current main selling point of AI, is coder productivity. Some anecdotal experiences from a small agile team:

We had 1 week sprints and our PO had sometimes trouble to prepare enough work for the next sprint. We had 4 week sprints and we often ended up pulling tickets from the next sprint. There was often a mismatch in pace. (Quite funny, the time we had found a balance, management ordered all teams to have the same sprint lengths. They couldn't deal with all the asynchronous, overlapping sprint starts/ends. They choose to forfeit our productivity for theirs.)

So productivity isn't all about coders, it's also about owners / managers / shareholders supplying work. This kind of work is much about communication with several involved parties and researching usecases and features in a very specific context. LLMs can help with parts of it, but at one point there will be a flood of excessive, unverified generic reports and LLMs that again condense them with all the inaccuracies, that managers/owners may drown in a fuzzy mess of LLM bureaucracy. Nuances and importance will get lost in excess.

We often had rather large stories that simply had a small set of bulletpoints, because we already communicated everything in person and they were just reminders for the most important stuff. The importance here is that this reflected the teams agency how we solve things. An LLM can probably not at all provide that currently, as they are always excessive and try to add "helpful" details. They simply cannot pick up social norms and agreements, and prompting them correctly is in my opinion very hard or too time consuming.

LLM assisted coding or vibe coding is all the hype. But I have the feeling that the big realization sets in once all supporting processes are convoluted with AI noise, the peers that used to collaborate are detached and social conflicts and misunderstandings escalate.

I wish we reach a point were we expect (as a matter of online etiquette) upfront disclaimers on predominantly AI-generated articles, so that we can save a few seconds and directly get our agents to read and summarize them.

Even when it's not slop, the verbosity of poorly edited AI-generated content is a micro-agression against readers. The prompter expects readers to read what they couldn't be bothered to properly edit.

Pushing AI-slop code without review, and without explicit warnings is a macro-agression against your colleagues, collaborators, and future agents. You are expecting everybody around you to maintain/ refactor, what you couldn't be botherered to review.

One of the things I have started to realize whilst building apps using AI is that you get a bit indulgent when it comes to features. So in my toy project I wanted all sorts of quality of life bells-and-whistles. If this were a proper enterprise application there would have a been a review and priortization process where the merits would be weighted against the cost. In this case the cost is tokens, so fraction of FTE cost. So I just type and it builds. Whilst this is satisfying I am getting the unnerving sense its not going to be good for me (or the toy app) in the long run.

This is actually a big advantage of using AI.

Using simple mature tech stacks following best practices makes your product much better.

Developers have a strong desire to reinvent the wheel and it wastes so much time.

Innovative should only be attempted in your product domain if you are trying to make a successful company.

Writing code by hand and managing the mental model of its execution and architecture is one of the few remaining joys of my day job, apart from delivering a good product people want and use and being helpful. Even the small things, the tedious chores of refactoring or scaffolding that initial bit of CRUD boilerplate are steps that matter to me. The callouses matter. The tedium matters. These moments of pain and drudgery inform me on what to do differently next time in a way I worry I would not appreciate otherwise, were specific tools thrust upon me.

I remain because I remain hopeful the pendulum will swing the other way someday.