I don't think AI will make your processes go faster

    > ...but that doesn’t mean it’s generating the correct code.

Something I'm observing is that now a lot of the pressure moves to the product team to actually figure out the correct thing to build. Some product teams are simply not used to this and are YOLO-ing prototypes now, iterating, finding out they built and shipped the wrong thing, and then unwinding.

Before, when there was the notion that "building is expensive", product teams would think things through, do user interviews up-front, actually do discovery around the customer + business context + underlying human process being facilitated with software.

This has shortened the cycle to first working prototype, but I'd guess that in the longer scale, it extends the time to final product because more time is wasted shifting the deliverable and experience on the user during this process of discovery versus nailing most of the product experience in big, stable chunks through design.

At the end of the day, there is a hidden cost to fast iterative shifts on the fundamental design of the software intended for humans to use and for which humans are responsible for operation. First is the cost on the end users who have to stop, provide feedback, and then retrain on each cycle. Second is that such compounding complexities in the underlying implementation as product learns requirements and vibe-codes the solution creates a system that becomes very challenging for humans to operationalize and maintain.

Ultimately, I think the bookends of the software development process are being neglected (as author points out) to the detriment of both the end users and the teams that end up supporting the software. I do wonder if we're entering an "Ikea era" of software where we should just treat everything as disposable artifacts instead.

I have a colleague who vibes the shit out of his part, and it results in large commits that take a lot of time to understand, and that makes cooperation practically impossible. LLMs are not team players.

> AI is unveiling how the bureaucracy is the slow part.

Computing has been doing that for decades. If your process is fucked, computers make it fucked faster.

It’s just that now, we have entire generations alive that have never seem a world without digital computers. ~LLMs~ AI is a fun new lever in some uses so clearly it is finally the hammer that will drive the screws and bolts for us, with less effort on our part!

They just have to learn from experience. It’s what you do when you can’t be bothered to learn the lessons of the past.

Large corporations with orthodox methodologies will take time to extract the best benefits from AI. Small teams, which still remember the original Agile Manifesto, will soar and overtake their competitors.

I’m not convinced. I’ve been using AI pretty heavily for about 18 months and agents for a little over 6 months.

I’m currently working on a data migration for an enormous dataset. I’m writing the tooling in go, which is a language I used to be very familiar with, but that I hadn’t touched in about 12 years when I started this. It definitely helped me get back into go faster.

But after the initial speed up, I found myself in the last 10% takes the other 90% of the time phase. And it definitely took longer for me to wrap my head around the code than it would have if I’d skipped the AI. I might have some overall speed up, but if so it’s on the order of 10-20%. Nothing revolutionary.

I have been able to vibe code a few little one off tools that have made my life a little easier. And I have vibe coded a few iPad games for my kids for car trips, but for work I still have to understand the code and reading code is still harder than writing it.

This is also not from lack of trying , I spent $1000 last week during a company wide “AI week”. Mostly on trying to get AI to replicate my migration tooling, complete with verification agents, testing agents, quality gates, elaborate test harnesses etc…

I’d let Claude (opus 4.7 max effort) crank away overnight only to immediately find that had added some horrible new bug or managed to convince the verification agent that it wasn’t really cheating to pass my quality tests.

What I learned from last week is that we are so far away from not needing to understand the code that everyone who says otherwise is probably full of shit. Other people who I trust who have been running the same experiments have told me the same thing.

Until and unless we get to that point, it’s always going to be a 10-50% speed up (if that).