> The counterargument wasn’t a dismissal. It was a reframe: this is a management problem, not a technology problem. oh wow, what a trustworthy source of information this human written article is.
It’s not ai penned, it’s human authored.
CTOs Agree: Cognitive Debt Is the New Technical Debt
61–70 of 76 posts
Re: CTOs Agree: Cognitive Debt Is the New Technical Debt
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
It has been my experience that nobody wants to hear the software engineer's opinion as to what will improve the product however.
This sounds like dysfunction. As engineers, we're not necessarily any more correct than anyone else. But we do have a seat at the table, and good organizations at least listen.
OK actually thinking about it I have worked at one organization where they did listen, other than startups of course, but even in those the people who had power to implement things tended to consider the ideas of non-programmers more important, which maybe they were.
Not sure how it is doing now about listening to programmers because it was sold off by the parent company and then became really successful and grew a lot, so it is essentially a different company.
I have a feeling it is less likely to listen to things now though.
Re: CTOs Agree: Cognitive Debt Is the New Technical Debt
#63Allowing non-technical PMs to ship code is fine if they’re the one getting called up in the evenings and weekends when it breaks. Maybe it’s a good exercise to show how much has effort must be applied to each commit.
Interesting comment because there are some companies that have a different model where SREs take on call for code that SWEs write. How do they work?
In the original implementation, SREs have the authority to block further releases until the SLOs are green again -- and, if it comes to that, to hand the pager back to SWE until such a time the product can pass a production readiness review again. That requires a lot of trust on both sides, though, the building of which takes both time and deliberate effort, and I don't know how other shops do it.
Re: CTOs Agree: Cognitive Debt Is the New Technical Debt
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
The engineer might not be good at sales or at raising money or at doing taxes or doesn’t have the appetite for risk.
That was true before. Who wants to live on their saving for three years to build a product that might flop and do all the extra accounting and legal stuff. But now it takes 3 months with AI, making a business and charging money has never been easier. Legal is a problem, but AI is a big help there as well.
If you can build a product in three months that customers actually want, somebody else can copy it in two after they saw your version. Why should customers pay a lot of money for that?
Re: CTOs Agree: Cognitive Debt Is the New Technical Debt
#65Re: CTOs Agree: Cognitive Debt Is the New Technical Debt
#66What CTOs did not notice yet is that cheap code exposes inefficiencies elsewhere. Migrating Spring Boot apps from 3.x t 4.x is now easy given all the tooling available. But the administrative load can't be reduced by faster code delivery and that's the new bottleneck.
> Migrating Spring Boot apps from 3.x t 4.x is now easy given all the tooling available.
Is this true now? I used Claude-backed Cline in March to make that migration, and it got SO much wrong, mainly due to the lack of solid documentation and example code for it, I imagine. Probably the project where I've had to fix the most AI mistakes so far (it was incapable of fixing the mistakes itself, it just kept getting it wrong in different ways).
Re: CTOs Agree: Cognitive Debt Is the New Technical Debt
#67> an average AI-assisted non-engineer is probably better than an average unassisted one.
No no no no no no no. Not even vaguely remotely close to being true. Why are managers so delusional
Re: CTOs Agree: Cognitive Debt Is the New Technical Debt
#68Copyright issues don't seem to be addressed by any large language model provider. If an LLM is trained on GPL code then that code has become an intrinsic part of the model (because if it hasn't then what was the value of training on it). So shouldn't that model now also be licensed GPL? And how do I know the LLM output is not reproducing substantial chunks of GPL'd code, making my code GPL?
Or alternatively. LLM is not human. Non human generated content has no copy right protection. Meaning all generative model output is automatically public domain.
I don't understand this argument. When someone uses a tool to create something, they are the copyright holder. Why would it be different when the tool is an LLM?
Re: CTOs Agree: Cognitive Debt Is the New Technical Debt
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
CTOs were told that the companies shares will be sold off if they can't produce AI results, and that the CEO will be deposed for "not having an AI strategy", so they should kindly shut up and go along with the flow.
What’s the point of paying people a ton of money and giving them lots of power if they simply follow a script given to them by others?
To make rich people and their rich friends even richer