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Is this sustainable?

jamiehurst.co.uk

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Re: Is this sustainable?

#41

Post by simonw »

This piece is really good:

> The cost of building has collapsed, but the cost of aligning organisationally has not. If anything, it's gone up. When three different teams can each produce a working solution to the same problem in the time it used to take to write a proposal, the bottleneck moves from engineering to coordination.

We're still figuring out how to productively use coding agents as individuals, the next challenge is figuring out how to productively use them within teams. Coding agents reduce one bottleneck - producing working code - but that just moves the bottlenecks elsewhere.

(Note I said "working" code and not "good" code, that's a whole other thing.)

Re: Is this sustainable?

#42

Post by carlosjobim »

imtringued wrote: post #39
carlosjobim wrote: post #34

Thinking that memorizing insane code rules is being skilled in making software is like thinking that memorizing all the generals' birth days is being skilled in warfare. Before AI, trying to program even a simple thing was an exercise in frustration from rules that had only been put in place by programmers to protect their own jobs and make it as difficult as possible for a normal person to develop. Oh! You mixed tab…

I've never had a problem mixing tabs or spaces in any language that supported this, which is basically most languages. I've spent the last three weeks working out a spec and didn't even start the development process yet. The idea that the syntax of the language would ever be a bottleneck sounds ridiculous to me. The gate keeping allegations are also incomprehensible. The vast majority of developers are working on mak…

> The idea that the syntax of the language would ever be a bottleneck sounds ridiculous to me.

Great! Then you can pick any man of the street and show him some code, and he will understand the syntax intuitively and start coding? Dollar signs, semicolons, brackets and === and the difference between "" and ''. It's all self explanatory.

Driving a motorized vehicle was a highly specialized task in the beginning. You had to prime fuel, adjust carb needles, maybe tighten a chain after a day of driving. Manufacturers did all they could to make vehicles as easy as possible for the users, so that they can focus on actually driving, and not fighting against the machine. Look at where cars are today - anybody can drive without needing any skills relating to the machine. AI is doing the same for programming, which is great.

Now a common man can make software without learning thousands of different arbitrary rules.

Re: Is this sustainable?

#43

Post by skydhash »

carlosjobim wrote: post #34

Thinking that memorizing insane code rules is being skilled in making software is like thinking that memorizing all the generals' birth days is being skilled in warfare. Before AI, trying to program even a simple thing was an exercise in frustration from rules that had only been put in place by programmers to protect their own jobs and make it as difficult as possible for a normal person to develop. Oh! You mixed tab…

> memorizing insane code rules is being skilled in making software

That’s on the level of complaining about having to learn music theory to play the piano, or to learn grammar to write a report. Or having to learn the road rules to drive a car on the street.

Re: Is this sustainable?

#44

Post by nathanielks »

NewLogic wrote: post #37
nathanielks wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Instead there’ll be a much stronger focus on teams of generalists, or combined teams of specialists from different fields, working on a feature or product end to end. > Coordination has in my experience always been the big bottleneck in getting anything done I work at a large enterprise you've heard of. They're currently re-organizing the product area to remove currently-static two pizza teams into an amorphous blo…

Where does the feature go for long term ownership? That throws you build it you own it out the window. We are going to get more time for documentation and handover right, right? Engineers are famous for generating good documentation.

All fantastic questions I wish we had an answer for

Re: Is this sustainable?

#45

Post by the_sleaze_ »

Npovview wrote: post #10
officialchicken wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same here - there's no real insight, no key takeaways, nothing useful. It's just a bunch of anecdotes and drivel hidden in self-promotion.

Sometimes these AI posts and same-y takeaway points are like murmurations of birds flocking.

Murmurations is a beautiful way of describing these

Re: Is this sustainable?

#46

Post by skydhash »

carlosjobim wrote: post #42
imtringued wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never had a problem mixing tabs or spaces in any language that supported this, which is basically most languages. I've spent the last three weeks working out a spec and didn't even start the development process yet. The idea that the syntax of the language would ever be a bottleneck sounds ridiculous to me. The gate keeping allegations are also incomprehensible. The vast majority of developers are working on mak…

> The idea that the syntax of the language would ever be a bottleneck sounds ridiculous to me. Great! Then you can pick any man of the street and show him some code, and he will understand the syntax intuitively and start coding? Dollar signs, semicolons, brackets and === and the difference between "" and ''. It's all self explanatory. Driving a motorized vehicle was a highly specialized task in the beginning. You ha…

Can you pick any man of the street and show him some text in a foreign language and get him to translate it? Especially with a foreign script? Can you write in japanese? or Persian? You had to go to school to learn how to write, you were not born with that knowledge.

A programming language is way easier than learning a foreign natural language. I believe the issue you struggle with is formal logic, not the syntax. Not everyone is trained to think formally (and some may find it arduous).

Re: Is this sustainable?

#47

Post by 1dom »

> When I returned from five months of paternity leave in early 2024, the org needed someone at my level to lead GenAI work in developer experience and I was the available person. It wasn't a bet so much as an opportunity I recognised when it showed up. I took enough time to satisfy myself that this wave was different from previous hype cycles before I committed, but once I did, I had to drop most of the rest of my work on developer experience to make space for it. For a while I was the only engineer at any seniority dedicated to this, and the depth I built up happened by necessity as much as by design.

Followed by....

> Senior engineers in AI-forward orgs are doing more leveraged, more hands-on, more meeting-heavy work simultaneously, with the human-focused parts of the role paying for it. The build cost collapsed, the alignment cost rose, the thinking time disappeared, and the productivity gains got captured by output volume rather than output quality. I

What is the job of a senior/lead engineer if not to take the uninformed hype chasing of the senior business, and deploy it in a way that makes things better?

I can't help but feel this senior engineer is talking far too casually about how - under their watch as senior AI engineer chap - engineers spend more time on throwaway code, have less personal development/1-to-1s, and didn't improve code quality. They haven't even mentioned the added financial token cost.

The only thing standing in the way of greedy hype chasing CEOs and a post apocolyptic wasteland is engineers taking their crazy requests and not making the world worse, and it sounds like the author has failed here. I think it's very positive and frank to share their experience, but I'm surprised they don't seem to see their role in it.

Re: Is this sustainable?

#48

Post by Sharlin »

All right… So, the cost of technical work has gone down, surely leaving more time for things like coordination, leadership, and thinking on a more operational level, right?

> The cost of building has collapsed, but the cost of aligning organisationally has not. If anything, it's gone up.

…Oh.

> What gave way is the human-focused work. Mentoring is the clearest example. I have less time for 1-2-1s than I did three years ago, and that isn't an accident, it's a choice I've made under pressure.

Ohh.

> The other thing that gave way was thinking time. There's very little of it in my working day now.

Ohhh.

Re: Is this sustainable?

#49

Post by tripleee »

nicbou wrote: post #12

When a long article is topped by an AI-generated image, it makes me wonder if I should bother reading. Did a human write this?

It's the same thing that's been AI-rehashed 10,000 times already - did you read one of those?

Re: Is this sustainable?

#50

Post by Sharlin »

simonw wrote: post #41

This piece is really good: > The cost of building has collapsed, but the cost of aligning organisationally has not. If anything, it's gone up. When three different teams can each produce a working solution to the same problem in the time it used to take to write a proposal, the bottleneck moves from engineering to coordination. We're still figuring out how to productively use coding agents as individuals, the next ch…

The vibe I got from the article was that now that technical work is faster, bosses expect everything else to be proportionally equally accelerated, even though LLMs either don’t help at all at those workloads or actively make things worse.
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