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I don't think AI will make your processes go faster
241–250 of 490 posts
Re: I don't think AI will make your processes go faster
#242Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
Sorry where are we seeing that it failed? It compiled multiple projects successfully albeit less optimized. " It lacks the 16-bit x86 compiler that is necessary to boot Linux out of real mode. For this, it calls out to GCC (the x86_32 and x86_64 compilers are its own). It does not have its own assembler and linker; these are the very last bits that Claude started automating and are still somewhat buggy. The demo vide…
Yeah I think people are really underestimating what LLMs can do even without specs.
As an example, I did an exploratory attempt to add custom software over some genuinely awful windows software for a scientific imaging station with a proprietary industrial camera. Five days later Claude and I had figured out how to USB-pcap sample images and it's operationalized and smoothly running for months now. 100% of the code written by Claude, it's all clean (reviewed it myself) pretty much all I did was unstuck it at a few places, "hey based on the file sizes it looks like the images are being sent as a 16-bit format")
For day to day work, I'll often identify a bug, "hey, when I shift click on this graphical component, it's not doing the right thing". I go tell Claude to write a RED (failing) integration test, then make it pass.
Zero lines of code manually written. Only occasionally do I have to intervene and rearchitect. Usually thus involves me writing about ten lines of scaffold code, explaining the architectural concept, and telling it to just go
Re: I don't think AI will make your processes go faster
#243Earlier quoted context omitted.
A workable C compiler is a ~10-50KLOC program, and a fairly simple one at that (batch, with no concurrency or interaction). That Anthropic's swarm of agents wrote 100KLOC before failing is a symptom of the problem. It's certainly possible that many programs are in the sub 5KLOC range, but it's definitely not "most software". Plus, almost no software has this level of detailed spec, ready-made tests, and a selection o…
A bit off topic, but see how Anthropic publicity stunts went from "Claude C Compiler" with 100K LOC to the recent Bun Rust rewrite with 1M LOC (10x!) in just 3 months. I get that it's "novel" creation vs porting, but given that they reported that the C compiler cost them $20k in API costs, the Bun rewrite must be at least $200k, maybe even closer to a million. Pure madness.
Asking an LLM tp change programming language of an implementation is completely different from asking it to code from spec. It's orders of magnitude simpler in practice. I converted some 60kloc of Java to C++ and it works. There were some issues where the Java implementation used runtime reflection because that needs creative workarounds and not all of the C++ translations worked on the first try. And that was my first serious attempt at a task with an LLM. I could likely do better now. An important task simplification here is that a well designed codebase can be converted in small pieces and then joined back together. So the total amount of code converted becomes an irrelevant metric.
Re: I don't think AI will make your processes go faster
#244Earlier 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.
I second this
Re: I don't think AI will make your processes go faster
#245I'm sure this take will age well.
Re: I don't think AI will make your processes go faster
#246> "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?
> And then, a follow-up: what is actually the bottleneck at most companies? What causes "requirements gathering" to take long?
Complexity.
In my experience (medium size businesses, i.e. 200 million to 2 billion annual revenue) we're trying to understand how a complex set of systems and business processes and different businesses (external partners) interact and then trying to morph all of that into a shape that now has capability X layered on top or in the middle.
Here's a concrete example, business X that makes their own products and has retail stores as well as an ecom site wanted to add the ability to put complementary items built by other companies on the website and have them drop shipped from the vendors to the consumers. The final solution involved 21 different interfaces between 4 different systems (ecom system, store system, omni channel system, external drop ship mgmt system) as well as a new internal system to manage this activity. It's takes a significant amount of time to understand and solve for all of the low level details.
Re: I don't think AI will make your processes go faster
#247Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most software is much simpler than a c compiler.
Not really. I can make a c compiler in a couple weeks just by looking up open source libraries and copying them. I can't make any software that people will pay me money to use without taking months/years of development, research, expiramentation and iteration. Just because the original people who invented compilers had to be genius, doesn't mean anyone has to spend much time or thought in copying that work now.
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Re: I don't think AI will make your processes go faster
#248[flagged]
This is an obvious bot. I hate this crap.
Re: I don't think AI will make your processes go faster
#249> 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…
I'm seeing decision-makers / people who write requirements starting to use AI as well in my day to day. As before, my job is to read, understand and test those requirements against the real world as I understand it. But same with code. Software engineering for the past (at least) 20 years has had a core focus of "don't trust anyone", this hasn't changed and this takes a lot of time and effort still.
The problem is that instead of trying to figure out what they really want/need, now we're trying to figure out what they really wanted or needed before it got obfuscated by the babble-machine.
Re: I don't think AI will make your processes go faster
#250Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, the task is very different, but also it will be months to a year until we know the results of the bun experiment.
I don't know how it could fail - Bun loses popularity among devs? Is it an objective metric? From what I understand, Node.js remains dominant across the industry as a whole, with Deno and Bun mostly used by startups. Anthropic can always fire the Opus/Mythos token machine gun on any problem (bugs, features, security) to ensure PR success, and there would be plenty of AI-sphere startups already drinking the kool-aid t…
It could fail due to maintenance burden. There is a lot of code now that no one wrote.