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

frederickvanbrabant.com

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

#121

Post by LtWorf »

stelonix wrote: post #110
phyzix5761 wrote: post #12

I think when LLMs first came out people thought they could just say something like, "Make a Facebook clone". But now we're realizing we need to be more exact with our requirements and define things better. That has always been the bottle neck in software. When I was working we used to get requirements that literally said things like, "Get data and give it to the user". No definition of what data is, where its stored,…

You're completely right and I thought this would be obvious. I never prompted anything remotely closely to "make a facebook clone". Instead, I make an explanation of how it should work. To give you an example: I need a python script that 1) reads /etc/hosts 2) find values of specific configured hosts (read from a .conf which) eg server1, localhost, etc 3) it'll assign a name to those configs eg if the .conf has [Env1…

That's easily more spec than script.

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

#122

Post by popcorncowboy »

stelonix wrote: post #110
phyzix5761 wrote: post #12

I think when LLMs first came out people thought they could just say something like, "Make a Facebook clone". But now we're realizing we need to be more exact with our requirements and define things better. That has always been the bottle neck in software. When I was working we used to get requirements that literally said things like, "Get data and give it to the user". No definition of what data is, where its stored,…

You're completely right and I thought this would be obvious. I never prompted anything remotely closely to "make a facebook clone". Instead, I make an explanation of how it should work. To give you an example: I need a python script that 1) reads /etc/hosts 2) find values of specific configured hosts (read from a .conf which) eg server1, localhost, etc 3) it'll assign a name to those configs eg if the .conf has [Env1…

> You're completely right

I mean, no comment

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

#123

Post by JackSlateur »

shay_ker wrote: post #107

> "requirements were always the bottleneck" > "faster typing won't make you faster"..... I understand a Deloitte consultant has specific incentives. But let's first try to answer a baseline question: why do some companies have thousands of software engineers? What do they all do? And then, a follow-up: what is actually the bottleneck at most companies? What causes "requirements gathering" to take long?

What do they do ? Give power to their management ? "I am responsible for 50 people, I am important". "I managed over 250, I am important, give me money".

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

#125

Post by OptionOfT »

resters wrote: post #103
OptionOfT wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except... no one validates the generated tickets, and it's full of inaccuracies. And then someone copy pastes it into Claude and now those inaccuracies become part of the code and tests.

This failure is human laziness, not an issue with the technology. People who use AI because they are trying to avoid doing work fall into a completely different category than people using AI as a force multiplier and for skills/capabilities enhancements / quality improvement.

It's also the only way to get those massive increases in productivity.

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

#126

Post by lr4444lr »

satvikpendem wrote: post #94
phyzix5761 wrote: post #12

I think when LLMs first came out people thought they could just say something like, "Make a Facebook clone". But now we're realizing we need to be more exact with our requirements and define things better. That has always been the bottle neck in software. When I was working we used to get requirements that literally said things like, "Get data and give it to the user". No definition of what data is, where its stored,…

In what I've seen, tickets are much richer in detail now because PMs are using AI (connected to the codebase itself, like Claude Code or Codex) to fill out a template as to what and why the problem is (ie X field exists in the backend not frontend), how and where to get any data (query the backend), and what acceptance criteria is needed (frontend should have the field exposed and "submit" should push the field's dat…

I can't imagine SWEs will be reduced to SDETs anymore than attorneys will be reduced to spell-checkers on AI powered case briefs.

I am a very AI-forward person, but hallucinations are becoming more pernicious than ever even as they get less frequent, especially if the code actually works. A human absolutely has to guide these processes at a macro level for sustainability for SaaS as it evolves with business needs.

Maybe for one and done systems with no maintenance/no updates/no security patches you can reduce humans to SDETs, but systems like that are more the exception than the norm.

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

#127

Post by layer8 »

hirako2000 wrote: post #93
utopiah wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree, I think the visuals, Gantt charts, are precisely the kind of "PM speak" that can be understood. Sure it won't solve anything as long as C-suite and investors do innovation signaling but that itself can only last so long.

I think the point is that clarity has been published many times. Humanity knows how to solve starvation. Clear routes were laid out long ago. The work is in adoption.

The alternative viewpoint is that if there weren’t people who continue to try to advocate for a better world, the world we’d live in would be even worse.

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

#128

Post by wijej »

rpdillon wrote: post #54
sillysaurusx wrote: post #26

I actually have data on this. I’ve been building sharc, a Common Lisp port of Hacker News. https://www.github.com/shawwn/sharc If that sounds familiar, it’s because it’s what dang did over the course of several years. It’s taken a few weeks. I started right around May, and now it’s able to render large HN threads (900+ comments) within a factor of five of production HN performance. (Thank you to dang for giving actua…

I've had a handful of software projects in my career land essentially on the day I predicted, sometimes several months out, and the commonality across all of those projects was that the specification was crystal clear. Two of them were actual ports of an existing piece of software over to a new system. And so any time we had a question about the implementation, we could look at the existing version and immediately ha…

I think the role of llm’s is once you have a rich enough understanding of what you want - you can speed run to build it. And then perhaps re-build to cover the issues created by the llm.

Problem for model producers is - the revenues they get from this mode of work is tiny relative to what they need.

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

#129

Post by whstl »

phyzix5761 wrote: post #12

I think when LLMs first came out people thought they could just say something like, "Make a Facebook clone". But now we're realizing we need to be more exact with our requirements and define things better. That has always been the bottle neck in software. When I was working we used to get requirements that literally said things like, "Get data and give it to the user". No definition of what data is, where its stored,…

This was already a reality for a years.

In several companies I have seen product managers joining teams and failing to even have minor requirement ready for months during “onboarding” of the PM. And then code being ready but taking months to release because DevOps is busy or QA can’t find time.

The pace of release of software has been disconnected from the coding part for the longest time, and we have been quiet about it.

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

#130

Post by Etheryte »

shay_ker wrote: post #107

> "requirements were always the bottleneck" > "faster typing won't make you faster"..... I understand a Deloitte consultant has specific incentives. But let's first try to answer a baseline question: why do some companies have thousands of software engineers? What do they all do? And then, a follow-up: what is actually the bottleneck at most companies? What causes "requirements gathering" to take long?

Isn't the answer to both questions straightforward? Real life is complex and has nearly infinite degrees of freedom. This means it's hard to approximate in software. Over time, real life, your understanding of it and your approximation (the software) all change. Keeping the approximation accurate enough that it's useful takes considerable effort since now you need to understand both the real life and the previously existing approximation of it.
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