There's no such thing as a small software team anymore • Hacker News Board

Re: There's no such thing as a small software team anymore

#181

Post by pheymann » Sat, Aug 22, 2026, 5:34 AM UTC

The potential I see with LLMs is that a single team or even IC can now deliver whole feature end to end. Having just more services only means I get bogged down in PR review by other teams. Or I lose time waiting on them to do the change. In other words, any gain I got I lose tenfold because of inter-team coordination.

I think if you want to see delivery speed up focusing on what a team can own is more relevant than if you have merge conflicts.

Re: There's no such thing as a small software team anymore

#182

Post by sokoloff » Sat, Aug 22, 2026, 9:17 AM UTC

jcelerier wrote: post #180

sokoloff wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I’m sure there’s a sliver of usage outside, I’d wager most emacs org mode usage is firmly inside what the average human would consider a nerd niche.

well yes, that's what i'm saying. most people that interact with a computer use notion, a small percentage obsidian, and a fraction of that emacs org mode or other similar tools. I use zim-wiki but I don't expect most people to do the same, just like I don't expect most musicians to learn lilypond

Ah. I misread your list. I missed the "over" as a contrasting conjunction, in part because there are plenty of non-nerd [albeit perhaps scripted-by-one] usages of imagemagick and ffmpeg, so I didn't readily detect it was a list A and a list B.

There was enough there; I missed it.

Re: There's no such thing as a small software team anymore

#183

Post by jamesfinlayson » Mon, Aug 24, 2026, 12:12 AM UTC

jatora wrote: post #160

jamesfinlayson wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a software engineer I don't think my quality of life has been improved - I now get gigantic patches to review (and I know the people writing them haven't reviewed or tested their own patches so even worse) and my tester is now drowning in big garbage patches that are taking longer to test, so my work isn't progressing either.

Yikes. Sounds like your workflow needs a ton of work if your SWE QoL hasnt improved. that's pretty wild that youd not be optimizing

I have seen improvements for myself but overall it's made thing worse. While it is a HR problem (lazy employees will always be lazy, clueless manager will never deal with issues), AI has really amplified the problems. Previously, lazy employees would do their trickle of crappy work - now it's a firehose of crappy work.