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Is this sustainable?

jamiehurst.co.uk

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Re: Is this sustainable?

#81

Post by simonw »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #62
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…

I still don't understand why coding agents are silo'd, and chat history is treated as disposable. Everyone on the team should be able to see all conversations and drop in and steer agents at any time, and chat history should be part of organizational memory. I thought labs would have pushed collaborative steering by now, but I guess people got so TUI pilled they haven't even considered the possibility.

Yeah, I see the chat transcript as an important part of the work, and worth recording.

I've taken to linking to mine in commit messages, e.g. this one: https://github.com/simonw/simonwillisonblog/commit/e781e4eef...

(My favourite feature of the new Codex desktop app is that it has a comprehensive "Copy as Markdown" feature, which I can then paste into a Gist.)

Re: Is this sustainable?

#82

Post by bryanrasmussen »

neuroblaster wrote: post #19
bryanrasmussen wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

black swan is not a reference to the badness of blackness but the unlikelihood of something contradicting volumes of previous data. Thus it can change industry in a good way or a bad way, because the black swan is unprecedented and unpredicted, its consequences and their nature is unsettled.

Traditionally in economics black swan is an unpredictable negative event. The only thing that is unsettled here still is how many more people will lose their jobs and how much cumulative loss prisoner's dilemma will generate. I saw random people on Internet suggesting to piggyback this disaster and dip into the crazy money that it is "generating", but in a zero-sum game somebody has to lose.

As a general rule in human history unpredictable events seem negative when they happen, the greater the unpredictability the greater the negativeness seems to people when it happens because unpredictability tends to destabilize systems set up to deal with predictable things, this however does not mean that the later consequences will remain negative for ever and ever.

All that said however, probably the greatest black swan in terms of unpredictability in human history was that there were two freaking big continents in between Europe and Asia when you try to circumnavigate the globe.

on edit: probably should be "the greater the unpredictability and the more things the unpredictable event connects to the greater the negativeness seems to be", because obviously the platypus while completely unexpected affected basically nothing at all.

Re: Is this sustainable?

#83

Post by therealdrag0 »

throw310822 wrote: post #27
steveBK123 wrote: post #6

> The result, in my case, is that I code more than I have in years. Three years ago I coded maybe once a fortnight, mostly throwaway PoCs to demonstrate concepts. Now I code most days of the week, in between other work. This kind of senior engineering role really depends on the type/size of an org. I've had jobs like this on & off and generally don't stick around for long. There have always been high-impact hands-on-…

There's also this part: > Three years ago [...], the process was familiar: write a proposal, get feedback, iterate, build a small PoC to demonstrate value, get a team assigned to take it to MVP , ship something fully featured and integrated with the rest of the platform six to twelve months later . This to me smells of large, slow, very political organisation where actual work gets done at glacial pace. The increase…

It’s not corporate slop, its risk avoidance. Now leaders are so enchanted with productivity they are willing to lower the risk avoidance bar. “Move fast and break things” is meta now. It was before too, but AI is giving it a fresh breath.

Re: Is this sustainable?

#84

Post by materielle »

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.

There’s going to be lots of documentation. It will be AI generated and no human will ever read it. But there will be a lot of it.

Re: Is this sustainable?

#85

Post by mswphd »

neuroblaster wrote: post #69
tomjakubowski wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I understand it, it's something unpredictable and high-consequence, not necessarily negative. The origins are in Hume's problem of induction. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_induction

Unpredictable positive events usually just don't get attention. Something good just happened, okay, that's good. People just don't pay attention. Technically black swan might not be negative, but for all practical reasons, "black swan event" is what people call impactful unpredictable negative events and they expect those events to be negative. In other words, it is a synonym for "a disaster" of sorts, only "economic…

they do get attention, but generally people don't dwell on how unpredictable they were. Operation Warp Speed got covid vaccines out within ~1 year. Initial predictions were more in the >= 5 years time range. Fast covid vaccines were very much a "white swan" event, but reporting around it wasn't "this is so unlikely to have worked out" etc.

Re: Is this sustainable?

#86

Post by fcse »

I think the implications for our industry are truly fundamental. I work at a large European IT company and am transforming existing product teams into an agentic SDLC pipeline. Typically, I need five days to set things up, followed by one or two days of coaching per month. We were able to reduce the size of the team I’m currently working with from 37 to 9 members. Colleagues whose sole value lies in their ability to code and who cannot contribute any domain expertise are no longer necessary. The impact on our profession and the next generation is terrible, revolutionary. In my opinion, no one is really giving much thought to what is currently happening socially within our industry. I try to write down my thoughts on this from time to time. https://ajagara.com/en/blog/agile-wie-wir-es-kennen-verschwi...

Re: Is this sustainable?

#87

Post by throw310822 »

therealdrag0 wrote: post #83
throw310822 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's also this part: > Three years ago [...], the process was familiar: write a proposal, get feedback, iterate, build a small PoC to demonstrate value, get a team assigned to take it to MVP , ship something fully featured and integrated with the rest of the platform six to twelve months later . This to me smells of large, slow, very political organisation where actual work gets done at glacial pace. The increase…

It’s not corporate slop, its risk avoidance. Now leaders are so enchanted with productivity they are willing to lower the risk avoidance bar. “Move fast and break things” is meta now. It was before too, but AI is giving it a fresh breath.

Yeah, and it could have been (and in many place has been) like this all the time, LLMs or not. That was my point. The change is not due to the (albeit very real) help given by LLMs, it's due to a change of attitude in management. Magically this person who used to write code once every two weeks now has time to fully focus on coding, again.

Re: Is this sustainable?

#88

Post by therealdrag0 »

throw310822 wrote: post #87
therealdrag0 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not corporate slop, its risk avoidance. Now leaders are so enchanted with productivity they are willing to lower the risk avoidance bar. “Move fast and break things” is meta now. It was before too, but AI is giving it a fresh breath.

Yeah, and it could have been (and in many place has been) like this all the time, LLMs or not. That was my point. The change is not due to the (albeit very real) help given by LLMs, it's due to a change of attitude in management. Magically this person who used to write code once every two weeks now has time to fully focus on coding, again.

Ya. And strangely for me it’s the opposite. I went from 50% coding to 10% because coding is so much faster and it’s easier to delegate to more junior engineers. Seems like a codebases needs to be VERY technically deep to justify spending a senior+ engineers time coding all day, as opposites to problem solving and design.

Re: Is this sustainable?

#90

Post by simonw »

mupuff1234 wrote: post #74
CuriouslyC wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still don't understand why coding agents are silo'd, and chat history is treated as disposable. Everyone on the team should be able to see all conversations and drop in and steer agents at any time, and chat history should be part of organizational memory. I thought labs would have pushed collaborative steering by now, but I guess people got so TUI pilled they haven't even considered the possibility.

What will chat history give you that the output of that chat won't?

The same kind of value as a good commit history over just the finished code.
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