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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

#191

Post by paulhebert »

zxornand wrote: post #165
satvikpendem wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The PMs validate it, why do you think they don't read over it to make sure it fits what they want? You might say "well they're lazy, look why they didn't write enough detail to start off with" but for lots of people, reviewing something to make sure it's close to what they want and then tweaking it is much easier than writing it from scratch. It's the equivalent of writer's block and is why a common advice given to w…

I think validating a fully generated novel of a ticket, is much harder than thinking through the problem in the first place and creating your own ticket. We see it with code too right? It’s harder to review code than to write it. On top of that the LLM can work so fast that the amount of things that need validating grows! This is where humans get lazy and the problems come in IMO. Whether its a PM not validating thei…

I agree. I hate getting tickets like this because they’ve often gone down the wrong path and I have to work backwards to understand the actual problem and the right way to solve it

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

#192

Post by whatever1 »

It definitely made the process of testing features with the users 10x faster. You can iterate, test and throw away bad ideas much much faster.

The proper implementation and design still take time, but still faster in systems with a lot of available resources online.

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

#193

Post by fn-mote »

pkoird wrote: post #156
ddosmax556 wrote: post #146

This article assumes that AI only has an impact on the development phase which is certainly not true. It can speed up every part of the step. Including ideation, legal, documentation, development, and deployment. Ideation: Throw ideas back & forth, cross reference with knowledge bases, generate design documents. Documentation: Generate large parts of docs. Development: Clear. Deployment: Generate deployment manifests…

Precisely. People don't realize that it's all numbers. Given average IQ of people involved in a project is 140, an AI with an IQ of 150 can replicate each and every such individuals in the pipeline. People saying AI can't do this or AI can't do that should come to terms with the fact that this IQ gap is monotonously increasing.

This is bizarre to me on so many fronts.

1: When was the last time you worked on a project where you thought the average IQ was 140? I don’t even think I have worked on a project where the maximum IQ was 140.

2: Who thinks the IQ of people on the project determines its success? There’s so much more to it than just “high capability team members” (to give IQ a generous interpretation).

3: (math joke) A sequence like (AI IQ - Human IQ) can be negative and monotonicly increasing and still never reach 0.

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

#194

Post by xeromal »

alt227 wrote: post #190
xeromal wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can give an anecdote. I'm a backend engineer for a service that I would consider pretty high horsepower. We get about 30k sign ups and trillions of events a day. I haven't touched the front end with a 10 foot pole since college. I got the opportunity to rewrite our aging login page just as a fun experiment. I sat down with one of our analysts and we just went to town in a zoom trying out stuff with claude until we…

> a marked improvement in our user engagement in a day. Do you have any idea what has caused this engagement improvement and indeed do you actually have any metrics or is it hearsay? It is much easier to knock something up in a day as you have done, but often the reason manual things take longer is they are based on actual testing and research which takes longer than a day however you do it. The manual way gives you…

No, we did a actual test using our existing testing framework. We have shitloads of metrics to know when a user gets stuck, when they give up, which login path they took, etc.

This wasn't a half assed test but a legitimate effort to improve something that we never prioritized

We had a legitimate 25% reduction in users giving up logging in in a system that has millions of users.

We ran a 50-50 AB test for several weeks to confirm the data and then turned it on completely

edit: If you haven't already read my post, I'd also like to say that the benefit AI gives us is that I worked on something I never get to work on, the analyst got to try a hunch he always had, and we got to see it go live in a day. If it didn't' work out, we were out a day of work which beats the few weeks of an effort prior to AI that we would spend on something just to find out it didn't work.

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

#195

Post by batshit_beaver »

jnovek wrote: post #153
wijej wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

lol Just lol. Is this what you guys mean by productivity boost? Comical. LLM’s aren’t all that great - it’s more that most orgs are horribly inefficient. Like it’s amazing how bad they are. That’s why Elon succeeded with spacex - he saw how horrible inefficient the industry was. And used that thinking to take a gamble and it’s paid off.

> most orgs are horribly inefficient Considering that that’s been a running complaint for like 50 years, it doesn’t seem like project management is going to get better on its own at this point. So, yes, an LLM does represent a productivity boost in that area.

The problem is that organizations are inefficient in such a way that extra output from white collar workers doesn't translate to improved org-wide performance in a positively correlated, linear fashion.

When the org is misaligned, mismanaged, has poor customer feedback loops, bad product market fit, too much bureaucracy, etc etc no amount of AI slop is going to make a meaningful impact on its bottom line. In fact, it will likely do the opposite through combination of exponentially increasing complexity, combined with worker force deskilling, layoffs, and rising token prices. Real bottleneck is and always has been communication & alignment.

It might make the employees _happier_ in the interim though, which, I believe, is what we're predominantly seeing during this AI mania. People fed up with the bullshit jobs of rewriting the same service for the 5th time in 2 years or creating TPS reports weekly just for their manager to throw them directly in the trash are absolutely giddy that they no longer have to do this manually. I think we need to question the economic value of these jobs in the first place, though.

I've worked at big tech prior to LLMs becoming a thing, and consistently saw projects of 20-50 people carried by 2-3 individuals that actually understood what needed to be done. I don't think this ratio will be any better with genAI, and I also don't think that tokenmaxxing has any meaningful correlation with impact. Bullshit jobs (and questionable personal projects) just get done faster now. Yay, I guess.

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

#196

Post by moron4hire »

dakolli wrote: post #176

I just spent a few days cleaning up someone's web app they created with Claude Code. There was more than 30k lines of DEAD code, and I was able to cut the code that was actually being used down by ~30-40%. If I just wrote this app myself It would have taken a day or two. LLMs are not helpful, they make everything worse. They make you worse, or reduce you to average at best. I really just don't see what ya'll are seei…

Same, exact experience here.

This one non-technical PM guy at work used Codex to develop a project I was expecting would fall on my plate. He asked me to do a code review on it. What it produced was riddled with SQL injection vulns and the UI was complete garbage.

Off of that example, the key stakeholders on my project are demanding I start vibe-coding everything. I raised the security flag and now they are saying, "well, now we have a prototype and real development can continue," but it's clearly just to mollify me and make me shut up, because no such development effort on that other project has been planned, scheduled, budgeted, etc. They are kind of just sitting around on it, hoping they can get everyone distracted long enough to sneak it out the way it is.

"But he did it in a week!" Yeah, it would have taken me only a week to make whatever of value actually was in that project. The reason our software projects at our company take longer than a week is not because of code, it's because we have an IT department that blocks production deployment of everything unless you literally get the president of the company to make them do it. That's not a repeatable process that every project can leverage.

There was another project another more-technical-but-not-a-developer guy (he knows how to use MS Access) did in Claude Code where, yes, Claude could read a bunch of PDFs he got from the client, get the salient details out, made an Access database out of it, and made a static HTML website out of it to make those documents easier to search and navigate. But again, the UI was complete, unadulterated garbage. And, the best part, he spent several weeks on just getting Claude to reliably process the entire set of documents. He never could quite get it to end-to-end do the entire process. It kept missing documents and reprocessing the same ones over and over again. A for-loop to iterate over a directory of files would have taken 2 minutes to code by hand and he got stuck on it for over a month.

AI will speed us up, my ass.

Look, if AI means I never have to open another PowerPoint from a client to read a "quad chart" on one particular slide to get the data I need to do my project because my client doesn't understand that PowerPoint is not a data transmission format, fine. I'll be happy with just that: AI vision as a library I can call out to from my code, just like we've been trying to do with OCR but traditional OCR sucks at the job. But there's a bigger drumbeat than that and it ends in dilettantism and laying off the junior analyst and developer staff. I will be no party to that.

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

#197

Post by pron »

angarg12 wrote: post #189

> This exact thing is what software developers have been begging for since the beginning of the profession: Receiving a detailed outline of the problem and what the end result should look like. > This is often the part that slows down software development. Trying to figure out what a vague, title only, feature request actually means. But that is exactly what Software Engineering is!. It's 2026 and the notion that you…

> It's 2026 and the notion that you can get detailed enough requirements and specifications that you can one-shot a perfect solution needs to die.

It's 2026 and the idea that even with detailed-enough requirements you can one-shot even a workable (let alone perfect) solution also needs to die. Anthropic failed to build even something as simple as a workable C compiler, not only with a perfect spec (and reference implementations, both of which the model trained on) but even with thousands of tests painstakingly written over many person-years. Today's models are not yet capable enough to build non-trivial production software without close and careful human supervision, even with perfect specs and perfect tests. Without a perfect spec and a perfect human-written test suite the task is even harder. Maybe in 2027.

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

#198

Post by stingraycharles »

angarg12 wrote: post #189

> This exact thing is what software developers have been begging for since the beginning of the profession: Receiving a detailed outline of the problem and what the end result should look like. > This is often the part that slows down software development. Trying to figure out what a vague, title only, feature request actually means. But that is exactly what Software Engineering is!. It's 2026 and the notion that you…

Yeah I agree, such a fundamental aspect of software engineering is translating ambiguous “asks” into specific requirements. We now have a tool to convert those requirements directly into code.

And yes, architecture and how to actually implement the designs are also part of the requirements.

The code is just the implementation, the actual problem that needs solving is one abstraction level higher.

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

#199

Post by skydhash »

shalmanese wrote: post #21

This is all substantially correct and gives us hints as to where to focus for AI to make the processes go faster. Eg: I had a product manager say to me that he envisions a future where any meeting with stakeholders that does not result in an interactive prototype by the end of the meeting would be considered a failure. This feels directionally correct to me. The other thing I expect to see is Vibecoding being the "Ex…

> he envisions a future where any meeting with stakeholders that does not result in an interactive prototype by the end of the meeting would be considered a failure.

Just learn something like balsamiq. You don't need code to build out a prototype. Just like you don't need actors and a camera when a few sketches can capture a scene.

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

#200

Post by SirHumphrey »

pron wrote: post #197
angarg12 wrote: post #189

> This exact thing is what software developers have been begging for since the beginning of the profession: Receiving a detailed outline of the problem and what the end result should look like. > This is often the part that slows down software development. Trying to figure out what a vague, title only, feature request actually means. But that is exactly what Software Engineering is!. It's 2026 and the notion that you…

> It's 2026 and the notion that you can get detailed enough requirements and specifications that you can one-shot a perfect solution needs to die. It's 2026 and the idea that even with detailed-enough requirements you can one-shot even a workable (let alone perfect) solution also needs to die. Anthropic failed to build even something as simple as a workable C compiler, not only with a perfect spec ( and reference imp…

Most software is much simpler than a c compiler.
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