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Every layer of review makes you 10x slower

apenwarr.ca

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Re: Every layer of review makes you 10x slower

#151

That's exactly why I think vibecoding uniquely benefits solo and small team founders. For anything bigger, work is not the bottleneck, it's someone's lack of imagination. https://capocasa.dev/the-golden-age-of-those-who-can-pull-it...

Yes there's more red tape the larger you get but there's also working product(s) that when they're broken you stop making money.

See recent Amazon outages caused by vibe/slop/movefast coding practices with little review.

Re: Every layer of review makes you 10x slower

#152
post #22

But you can’t just not review things! Actually you can. If you shift the reviews far to the left, and call them code design sessions instead, and you raise problems on dailys, and you pair programme through the gnarly bits, then 90% of what people think a review should find goes away. The expectation that you'll discover bugs and architecture and design problems doesn't exist if you've already agreed with the team wh…

This falls for the famous "hours of planning can save minutes of coding". Architecture can't (all) be planned out on a whiteboard, it's the response to the difficulty you only realize as you try to implement. If you can agree what to build and how to build it and then it turns out that actually is a working plan - then you are better than me. That hasn't happened in 20 years of software development. Most of what's pl…

“Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth" - Mike Tyson

Re: Every layer of review makes you 10x slower

#153
post #101

from article: 1. Whoa, I produced this prototype so fast! I have super powers! 2. This prototype is getting buggy. I’ll tell the AI to fix the bugs. 3. Hmm, every change now causes as many new bugs as it fixes. 4. Aha! But if I have an AI agent also review the code, it can find its own bugs! 5. Wait, why am I personally passing data back and forth between agents 6. I need an agent framework 7. I can have my agent wri…

I've been begging left and right, and I've yet to see a single example of this agent-written high-quality quickly-shipped code.

I'm guessing a lot of the high-x productivity boost is from a cycle of generating lots of code, having bug reports detected or hallucinated from that code, and then generating even more code to close out those reports, and so on

Re: Every layer of review makes you 10x slower

#154
post #22

But you can’t just not review things! Actually you can. If you shift the reviews far to the left, and call them code design sessions instead, and you raise problems on dailys, and you pair programme through the gnarly bits, then 90% of what people think a review should find goes away. The expectation that you'll discover bugs and architecture and design problems doesn't exist if you've already agreed with the team wh…

This falls for the famous "hours of planning can save minutes of coding". Architecture can't (all) be planned out on a whiteboard, it's the response to the difficulty you only realize as you try to implement. If you can agree what to build and how to build it and then it turns out that actually is a working plan - then you are better than me. That hasn't happened in 20 years of software development. Most of what's pl…

I've worked waterfall (defense) and while I hated it at the time I'd rather go back to it. Today we move much faster but often build the wrong thing or rewrite and refactor things multiple times. In waterfall we move glacially but what we would build sticks. Also, with so much up front planning the code practically writes itself. I'm not convinced there's any real velocity gains in agile when factoring in all the fiddling, rewrites, and refactoring.

> Most of what's planned falls down within the first few hours of implementation.

Not my experience at all. We know what computers are capable of.

Re: Every layer of review makes you 10x slower

#155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps due to FOMO outbreak[1], upper management everywhere has demanded AI-powered productivity gains, based on LoC/PR metrics, it looks like they are getting it. 1. The longer I work in this industry, the more it becomes clear that CxO's aren't great at projecting/planning, and default to copy-cat, herd behaviors when uncertain.

Software engineers are pushed to their limits (and beyond). Unrealistic expectations are established by Twitter "I shipped an Uber clone in 2 hours with Claude" forcing every developer to crank out PRs, managers are on the look out for any kind of perceived inefficiency in tools like GetDX and Span. If devs are expected to ship 10x faster (or else!), then they will find a way to ship 10x faster.

I always found it weird how most management would do almost anything other than ask their dev team "hey, is there any way to make you guys more productive?"

Ive had metrics rammed down my throat, Ive had AI rammed down my throat, Scrum rammed down my throad and Ive had various other diktats rammed down my throat.

95% of which slowed us down.

The only time ive been asked is when there is a deadline and it's pretty clear we arent going to hit it and even then they're interested in quick wins like "can we bring lunch to you for a few weeks?", not systemic changes.

The fastest and most productive times have been when management just set high level goals and stopped prodding.

Im convinced that the companies which seek developer autonomy will leave the ones which seek to maximize token usage in the dust in the next tech race.

Re: Every layer of review makes you 10x slower

#156
post #22

But you can’t just not review things! Actually you can. If you shift the reviews far to the left, and call them code design sessions instead, and you raise problems on dailys, and you pair programme through the gnarly bits, then 90% of what people think a review should find goes away. The expectation that you'll discover bugs and architecture and design problems doesn't exist if you've already agreed with the team wh…

That's partly the point of the article, except the article acknowledges that this is organizationally hard:

> You get things like the famous Toyota Production System where they eliminated the QA phase entirely.

> [This] approach to manufacturing didn’t have any magic bullets. Alas, you can’t just follow his ten-step process and immediately get higher quality engineering. The secret is, you have to get your engineers to engineer higher quality into the whole system, from top to bottom, repeatedly. Continuously.

> The basis of [this system] is trust. Trust among individuals that your boss Really Truly Actually wants to know about every defect, and wants you to stop the line when you find one. Trust among managers that executives were serious about quality. Trust among executives that individuals, given a system that can work and has the right incentives, will produce quality work and spot their own defects, and push the stop button when they need to push it.

> I think we’re going to be stuck with these systems pipeline problems for a long time. Review pipelines — layers of QA — don’t work. Instead, they make you slower while hiding root causes. Hiding causes makes them harder to fix.

Re: Every layer of review makes you 10x slower

#157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This falls for the famous "hours of planning can save minutes of coding". Architecture can't (all) be planned out on a whiteboard, it's the response to the difficulty you only realize as you try to implement. If you can agree what to build and how to build it and then it turns out that actually is a working plan - then you are better than me. That hasn't happened in 20 years of software development. Most of what's pl…

I've worked waterfall (defense) and while I hated it at the time I'd rather go back to it. Today we move much faster but often build the wrong thing or rewrite and refactor things multiple times. In waterfall we move glacially but what we would build sticks. Also, with so much up front planning the code practically writes itself. I'm not convinced there's any real velocity gains in agile when factoring in all the fid…

> I've worked waterfall and while I hated it at the time I'd rather go back to it. Today we move much faster but build the wrong thing or rewrite and refactor things multiple times.

My experience as well. Waterfall is like - let's think about where we want this product to go, and the steps to get there. Agile is like ADHD addled zig zag journey to a destination cutting corners because we are rewriting a component for the third time, to get to a much worse product slightly faster. Now we can do that part 10x faster, cool.

The thing is, at every other level of the company, people are actually planning in terms of quarters/years, so the underlying product being given only enough thought for the next 2 weeks at a time is a mismatch.

Re: Every layer of review makes you 10x slower

#158

> Code a simple bug fix 30 minutes > Get it code reviewed by the peer next to you 300 minutes → 5 hours → half a day Is it takes 5 hours for a peer to review a simple bugfix your operation is dysfunctional.

nobody will immediately jump on your code review

Sure, but five hours is a lot of time, and a small fix takes little to review.

So, 1 hour? Sure. Two hours? Ok. But five hours means you only look at your teammates code once a day.

It's ok for a process where you work on something for a week and then come back for reviews but then it's silly to complain about overhead.

Re: Every layer of review makes you 10x slower

#159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This falls for the famous "hours of planning can save minutes of coding". Architecture can't (all) be planned out on a whiteboard, it's the response to the difficulty you only realize as you try to implement. If you can agree what to build and how to build it and then it turns out that actually is a working plan - then you are better than me. That hasn't happened in 20 years of software development. Most of what's pl…

I've worked waterfall (defense) and while I hated it at the time I'd rather go back to it. Today we move much faster but often build the wrong thing or rewrite and refactor things multiple times. In waterfall we move glacially but what we would build sticks. Also, with so much up front planning the code practically writes itself. I'm not convinced there's any real velocity gains in agile when factoring in all the fid…

Comparing the same work done between agile and waterfall I can accept your experience of what sounds like an org with unusually effective long term planning.

However the value of agile is in the learning you do along the way that helps you see that the value is only in 10% of the work. So you’re not comparing 100% across two methodologies, you’re comparing 100% effort vs 10% effort (or maybe 20% because nobody is perfect).

Most of the time when I see unhappiness at the agile result it’s because the assessment is done on how well the plan was delivered, as opposed to how much value was created.

Re: Every layer of review makes you 10x slower

#160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds horrible. I don't know how people stand to work in those conditions.

Why does it sound horrible to have your code reviewed quickly? There is no reason for reviews to wait a long time. 4 hours is already a long time, it means you can wait to do it right before you go home or after lunch.

Why would I care if my code is reviewed quickly? If the answer is some variant of "I get punished if I don't have enough changes merged in fast enough," that's not helping. From the other side, it's having someone constantly breathe down your neck. Hope you don't get in a flow at the wrong time and need to break it so Mr. Lumbergh doesn't hit you up on Teams. It just reeks of a culture of "unlimited pto," rigid schedules, KPI hacking, and burnout.
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