101–110 of 136 posts
My employer is encouraging AI adoption across the board, to the point of basically making tokenmaxing part of performance KPIs. I think they're pushing headlong into disaster, but they are not the kind of people to take advice, or admit mistakes. I use AI coding tools both at work and in my hobby projects. It very clear to me they're nuclear-powered footguns, and we have a long, long way yet in developing practices,…
Although code quality may sometimes suffer, no one can deny the productivity gains AI brings to software development.
You absolutely can deny long term productivity gains. Pre AI it took 100 engineers 5 years to get into a legacy code situation. Once you’re in a legacy code situation it’s very hard to add new features and your code is full of bugs. Fortunately most old companies with legacy code are making loads of money so they can pay the increased development costs to add features to their legacy code. Now with AI five engineers…
In my startup, I am currently in consideration for doing this exact thing. The interesting part is it's not really the AI that's causing the issue. It's the ease of my developer to make a mess, either with messy code or feature bloat. After figuring out the exact product we need with some very quick development cycles with AI, we now have some problems that I can't keep under control because of AI. So, currently unde…
Yeah I see the same thing. Also shows up when people produce an “analysis” largely driven by AI and they haven’t really thought it through. They/we are outsourcing their thinking.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The question was whether some companies forego LLMs in favour of human authoring
The original question was certainly specific to coding. It's right in the title.
In my startup, I am currently in consideration for doing this exact thing. The interesting part is it's not really the AI that's causing the issue. It's the ease of my developer to make a mess, either with messy code or feature bloat. After figuring out the exact product we need with some very quick development cycles with AI, we now have some problems that I can't keep under control because of AI. So, currently unde…
> the goal is both a happy team and well functioning software. software first. team second. team happiness is important as a miserable team will hamper productivity and quality. but the team’s happiness is secondary to their overarching reason d’être — the software. if there were no need for the software, the team wouldn’t need to exist. so that goal should take precedence. YMMV
You may have it backwards.
In my startup, I am currently in consideration for doing this exact thing. The interesting part is it's not really the AI that's causing the issue. It's the ease of my developer to make a mess, either with messy code or feature bloat. After figuring out the exact product we need with some very quick development cycles with AI, we now have some problems that I can't keep under control because of AI. So, currently unde…
> the goal is both a happy team and well functioning software. software first. team second. team happiness is important as a miserable team will hamper productivity and quality. but the team’s happiness is secondary to their overarching reason d’être — the software. if there were no need for the software, the team wouldn’t need to exist. so that goal should take precedence. YMMV
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> the goal is both a happy team and well functioning software. software first. team second. team happiness is important as a miserable team will hamper productivity and quality. but the team’s happiness is secondary to their overarching reason d’être — the software. if there were no need for the software, the team wouldn’t need to exist. so that goal should take precedence. YMMV
You should really look at studies on how happy employees are much more productive than unhappy ones. And the trend continues way above the bare minimum of not being miserable.
there's usually more than two priorities. and i agree with you that a team's wellbeing is important. it should be up there in priorities.
i'm just pointing out that a team that accepts being happy, focussing on the software as more important than their own happiness might do better than a team who are trying to focus on their happiness at the same level of priority as the quality of the software.
Not for code, but my wife is a doctor and has gone from using AI scribes back to manually typing out notes and has multiple friends who've done the same. Turns out the gains were eroded by having to check the work and turn verbose prose into an actual note.
Exactly. It fascinates me when I'm emailed long AI transcripts of meetings with the disclaimer "generated by AI. Be sure to check for accuracy". Like, did somebody seriously think through the meaning and implication of that disclaimer and still write it?
I'm running a startup and we deliberately don't use AI for development. We only use it for review. We're working in a really deep area where having full understanding of our code is more important than speed. Besides, in this area, clients getting one whiff of AI code would be an immediate deal-killer
> Besides, in this area, clients getting one whiff of AI code would be an immediate deal-killer If you implement AI code review suggestions then you're using AI code, just the hard way. Also I don't see why your clients would be ok with having AI review and influence your code. Seems hypocritical, or like you're trying to cheat them.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think we're way past this point tbh, software development is just the latest area that's being "bullshittified" ;) (also let's be honest, building yet another CRUD app - eg what 99% of software devs actually do, is not "creating value" - with or without AI)
Where they created value wasn't just the CRUD app but developing their skills, supporting communities that asked and answered questions to build public knowledgebases. They adapted to painfully repetitive tasks by developing tools that made expressing common ideas simple. In losing the pain of repetition, we lost the incentive towards abstraction. The forces in opposite directions cancelled out, creating growth for A…