11–20 of 62 posts
AI assisted development is the generalists dream Althought it still hasn't solved procrastinating the next plan prompt
Most of the time, the person saying that is wrong.
But this isn’t really about AI enthusiasm or AI scepticism. It’s about industrialisation. It has happened over and over in every sector, and the pattern is always the same: the people who industrialise outcompete those who don’t. You can buy handmade pottery from Etsy, or you can buy it mass-produced from a store. Each proposition values different things. But if you’re running a business that depends on pottery, you’d better understand the economics.
So which is it?
Will an industrialised process always outcompete a pre-industrial process? Or do they not compete at all, because they value different things?
I am so so tired of this turn of phrase in LLM created content. I guess I don't know for sure whether this article was LLM written but I suspect so. Or, scarier still we are changing our own writing to match this slop.
Found this really well written. I really enjoyed reading it, and found myself agreeing with a lot of it. I wish the author wrote more about the day 2 problem cases with AI built applications. It somewhat matters what the programming language is, the architecture and design for debugging and reasoning verification when we want to alter the system specification. Basically as a Dev, or "Owner" of the application, we are…
They allude to it, but I think one of the new skills that will be valuable is reasoning about systems where you don't know the code. This is what “owners” and managers who don’t touch code do today.
"That’s not a forecast. That’s the current state." Something about this sentence sequence looks vaguely familiar...
Why do we estimate stories? Because developer time is expensive and someone has to budget for it.
Why do we prioritise features in backlogs? Because we can’t build everything and we need to choose what’s worth the cost.
Why do we agonise over whether to refactor this module or write that debug interface? Because the time spent on one thing is time not spent on another.
We have compilers: either it compiles or it doesn’t.
We have test suites: either the tests pass or they don’t.
Planning. Estimating. Feature prioritisation. Code review. Architecture review. Sprint planning. All of it is downstream of the assumption that writing code is the expensive part.
... type systems, linters, static analysis. Software gives us verification tools that most other domains lack.
> This isn’t a minor detail, it’s the core constraint that shaped virtually every habit and institution in our industry. I am so so tired of this turn of phrase in LLM created content. I guess I don't know for sure whether this article was LLM written but I suspect so. Or, scarier still we are changing our own writing to match this slop.
Towards the end this article contradicts itself so severely I don't think a human wrote this. But this isn’t really about AI enthusiasm or AI scepticism. It’s about industrialisation. It has happened over and over in every sector, and the pattern is always the same: the people who industrialise outcompete those who don’t. You can buy handmade pottery from Etsy, or you can buy it mass-produced from a store. Each propo…
Towards the end this article contradicts itself so severely I don't think a human wrote this. But this isn’t really about AI enthusiasm or AI scepticism. It’s about industrialisation. It has happened over and over in every sector, and the pattern is always the same: the people who industrialise outcompete those who don’t. You can buy handmade pottery from Etsy, or you can buy it mass-produced from a store. Each propo…
And why are they talking about Etsy as if it doesn't bring in $2+ billon in revenue?
And yes, sometimes it's nice to support a local lemonade stand. For my family's income, I know which segment I'd feel more confident to work for..
And electricity comes from the outlet and milk from the supermarket.
At the moment billons of dollars of investor money heavily subsidizes the AI services, let's wait for the price when those companies need to generate profit