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Engineering management after the cost of code collapsed

karimjedda.com

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Re: Engineering management after the cost of code collapsed

#41

Post by VeninVidiaVicii »

baron3dl wrote: post #22

What is the right, best software organization in the current era of AI coding? This question is critical and wholly unanswered in comprehensive research along the same axis as Accelerate (2018, Forsgren, Humble, Kim). There are a lot of (excruciatingly) long-form posts about what folks are pioneering but not a whole lot of follow up about what failed. Where are the short posts on the negative space? How did halving y…

Hard to say what caused what, but the internet seems to mistake verbosity for authority, and so does AI.

Re: Engineering management after the cost of code collapsed

#42

Post by bitlad »

raverbashing wrote: post #31
marginalia_nu wrote: post #29

Code was very rarely the bottleneck in the first place. If programmer productivity was something we actively optimized for, we wouldn't have crammed programmers like sardines in warm and noisy open floor offices with 2000 ppm CO2 levels and then further constantly interrupt them with emails and slack pings and meetings all day long, Jira rigmarole wouldn't make up a significant portion of what they did, programmers w…

> Code was very rarely the bottleneck in the first place. I disagree. Kinda What AI has made much simpler is that you don't have to waste time checking docs and have the best autocomplete system by a long shot - this was a bottleneck unless you were doing Java or some other language with "perfect" AC What AI made "kinda easier": solving for usual problems. The stuff you would search Stack Overflow, or think a couple…

I disagree. Coordinating 100 folks to align on a problems statement with "agile" and sprints was always the biggest bottleneck. Difference in opinion, internal politics is always a bottleneck.

I think now, code is the bottleneck. Just because you can generate million lines of code, people with different skill level think they are accomplishing the task, testing, merge conflicts, trust has become the bottleneck.

Re: Engineering management after the cost of code collapsed

#44

Post by lukan »

dbingham wrote: post #36

I think most of this is correct, in spite of potentially being built on a bad assumption. The assumption is that LLMs should be writing the code and human engineers reviewing and verifying the LLM output. And that this pushes the cost of producing down. And I fundamentally disagree with that. Every time I ask LLMs to write code, even with Opus 4.8 (haven't tried it with Opus 5 yet), what I get ends up being totally r…

" But understanding is truly gained during the writing loop. The understanding you gain from pure reading or code review is marginal compared to the understanding you gain while writing."

Debugging code step by step is how I understand complicated code.

Re: Engineering management after the cost of code collapsed

#48

Post by convolvatron »

raffraffraff wrote: post #40

My take, as a non-coder (well, not software engineering, I write 'code' but it's infra, and utilities in go/bash/pythong)... I work at a company where the biggest problems are not 'writing code', they are: - Organising teams - Designing the system - Prioritisation of work The fuckups that we make on a daily bases are not 'code errors' they are failures in THOSE three things. I'll go into detail if anyone cares.

don't forget 'actually making decisions'

Re: Engineering management after the cost of code collapsed

#49

Post by dwayneII »

dbingham wrote: post #36

I think most of this is correct, in spite of potentially being built on a bad assumption. The assumption is that LLMs should be writing the code and human engineers reviewing and verifying the LLM output. And that this pushes the cost of producing down. And I fundamentally disagree with that. Every time I ask LLMs to write code, even with Opus 4.8 (haven't tried it with Opus 5 yet), what I get ends up being totally r…

I write code in Go in an established codebase. 90% of the time the LLM gets a basic api/feature right and fully e2e tested as long as I give it enough business context in the prompt. The other 10% of the time I have to do some follow up prompts to either change the behaviour or change the approach of a given step in the flow or just to point out that the wrong pattern was used and please rather use our codebase standard. I haven’t actually hand-written code in well over a year. Is this way faster? Absolutely. Does it lead to better code? Yes, because I have time to write all the regression tests that keep the behaviour as I wanted it when others come bungling around.

Re: Engineering management after the cost of code collapsed

#50

Post by doug_durham »

happytoexplain wrote: post #30

Code was never expensive.

Code was always expensive. Entire industries of design tools cropped up simply to avoid writing the wrong code since it is so expensive. There are entire journals dedicated to this. Organizations are fixated on making sure that the right code is written since the cost of getting that wrong is so great.
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