Absolutely matching the gut feel I've had lately. We've always been pretty good at producing bad code very fast. All of the other stuff - dependency management, learning what's valuable, ownership & boundaries, context switching costs, etc... have always been the bottlenecks and it's just more obvious now.
The bottleneck was never the code
91–100 of 446 posts
Re: The bottleneck was never the code
#92It's hilarious to me to see the same kind of engineer, who throughout my career have constantly bitched and moaned about team meetings, agile ceremonies, issue trackers, backlogs, slack, emails, design reviews, and anything else that disrupted the hours of coding "flow state" they claimed as their most essential and sacred activity to be protected at all costs, suddenly, and with no hint of shame, start preaching abo…
Looks like this comment is touching a nerve. This community is progressing from "AI can't write code", to "Well, AI can write code but it's not really about the code". I wonder where the goalposts will be moved next?
Is it even a problem that so called goal posts are moved?
That's life.
Life changes and us along with it.
"Who Moved My Cheese?"
Re: The bottleneck was never the code
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
The community portion that unironically think AI is good enough now, are mostly managers and non/semi-technical people, and engineers who do not engage in critical or complex problems. HN has always been too much of the velocity-alignment-synergy class of professional talkers; it's just so much more obvious now that they feel emboldened in false confidence.
There's some of that, but more often it's developers whose arguments are a year behind the frontier models or, just as common, they're dramatically overstating their abilities. It's an inherent tension that every discipline has to wrestle with. The most experienced developers are in the best position to evaluate where LLMs are, but those who are the loudest about their own abilities generally aren't in this camp. Hum…
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Re: The bottleneck was never the code
#94the bottleneck was never the software, that is the ship we ride,
people, are part of a team focused on a goal, they work together because they believe in that the ship is worth riding on and will reach its destination,
the ship should carry food people want,
team decides what food will be consumed,
captain tries first the food,
if food is good and people want it, people buy more
Re: The bottleneck was never the code
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well it is hypocritical. Hypocrisy is an action or statement that is contrary to a stated value or principle. Just because your values or principles changed doesn’t make you a suddenly no longer a hypocrite, it just admits that your former opinions are no longer tenable. I’ve noticed this push to try to clothe hypocrisy in made up virtues like intellectual curiosity and mental plasticity a lot lately. All I can think…
Old value: Producing high value software. How to do it? Focus on writing code. New value: Producing high value software. How to do it? Focus on writing specs for code / identifying needs. I expect there are a lot of hypocrites in the mix, scared for their job. But this isn't a fundamentally hypocritical position - agents are changing the game for how software gets produced and the things that were important as recent…
Sorry, did people not identify needs when developing "high value software" before? That doesn't seem true to me at all. I took a "Needs Assessment" course in my class of '09 undergrad...
Re: The bottleneck was never the code
#96The bottleneck has always been the human element. I too used to be one of those up-my-own-ass engineers who thought the most important part of my work was the machine, and it wasn’t until I began actually listening to others and their problems that I realized my function was far more than mere technology scaffolding. That said, I’m also increasingly aware that puts me in a minority group. I got to see this first hand…
> name calling, insults, screaming
Never experienced this at a job in 30+ years, and that includes my first jobs in fast food. If you experience this at work, find another job. This isn't normal. It's extremely dysfunctional in fact.
Re: The bottleneck was never the code
#97It's hilarious to me to see the same kind of engineer, who throughout my career have constantly bitched and moaned about team meetings, agile ceremonies, issue trackers, backlogs, slack, emails, design reviews, and anything else that disrupted the hours of coding "flow state" they claimed as their most essential and sacred activity to be protected at all costs, suddenly, and with no hint of shame, start preaching abo…
Looks like this comment is touching a nerve. This community is progressing from "AI can't write code", to "Well, AI can write code but it's not really about the code". I wonder where the goalposts will be moved next?
LLMs have been getting a lot better at coding.
If the "goalposts" represent what people generally think LLMs are capable of, they should be moving, right?
And complex, multi-part, long term efforts like building software and software companies always have numerous obstacles. When one is cleared, you wouldn't expect there to be no more, would you?
Your tone is complaining, but I just see people working in reality.
Re: The bottleneck was never the code
#98It's hilarious to me to see the same kind of engineer, who throughout my career have constantly bitched and moaned about team meetings, agile ceremonies, issue trackers, backlogs, slack, emails, design reviews, and anything else that disrupted the hours of coding "flow state" they claimed as their most essential and sacred activity to be protected at all costs, suddenly, and with no hint of shame, start preaching abo…
I would say in general the amount of persons who pivot like that is low.
Similarly, the amount of open source people who previously maintained a hardliner programming meritocracy stance and now pivoted to AI and market AI is exclusively limited to those whose companies are working on AI products. The good ones in that space are decidedly less than 1% of all good ones.
Re: The bottleneck was never the code
#99It's hilarious to me to see the same kind of engineer, who throughout my career have constantly bitched and moaned about team meetings, agile ceremonies, issue trackers, backlogs, slack, emails, design reviews, and anything else that disrupted the hours of coding "flow state" they claimed as their most essential and sacred activity to be protected at all costs, suddenly, and with no hint of shame, start preaching abo…
It's 100% denial/ego. I've been a contractor longer than I'd like and it's the exact same response I see when I join a new team. The team complains they have too much work and can't get anything done, so their manager pulls me in. Suddenly, they don't want to give anything up. I'm actually in the middle of this right now. The team "is swamped" yet somehow, they are able to argue that almost everything I can handle is best handled by them and they don't need help. Fine by me, I'll sit around and get paid. But it smells exactly the same. They don't want to admit that A - they are replaceable and their work isn't that unique and B - they are the bottleneck, not the process or workload.
Re: The bottleneck was never the code
#100From the article:
> Jevons Paradox: when something gets cheaper, you tend to use more of it, not less.
That's a butchering of Jevons paradox. What's stated is not a paradox, but a very natural effect. Obviously usage of something goes up when it gets cheaper.
What Jevons paradox actually describes is the situation where usage of a resource becomes more efficient (which means less of it is needed for a given task), but still the total usage of that resource increases.