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I don't think AI will make your processes go faster

frederickvanbrabant.com

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Re: I don't think AI will make your processes go faster

#111

Post by hedgehog »

satvikpendem wrote: post #94
phyzix5761 wrote: post #12

I think when LLMs first came out people thought they could just say something like, "Make a Facebook clone". But now we're realizing we need to be more exact with our requirements and define things better. That has always been the bottle neck in software. When I was working we used to get requirements that literally said things like, "Get data and give it to the user". No definition of what data is, where its stored,…

In what I've seen, tickets are much richer in detail now because PMs are using AI (connected to the codebase itself, like Claude Code or Codex) to fill out a template as to what and why the problem is (ie X field exists in the backend not frontend), how and where to get any data (query the backend), and what acceptance criteria is needed (frontend should have the field exposed and "submit" should push the field's dat…

If you do that someone still needs to make sure the details make sense which, from experience, sometimes they will and sometimes they won't. When I open tickets using automation I often back into the ticket from a running implementation that passes tests so the description is at least internally consistent but there are often still issues that need corrected.

Re: I don't think AI will make your processes go faster

#112

Post by parliament32 »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #45

So we have spent 40 years trying to get management and investors to understand that 9 people can't make a baby in one month. There's no point in falling under the illusion that they'll finally get it now. This will all fall on deaf ears. They're convinced they're automating us out of existence when in fact they'll need the services of people who can surf complex systems more than ever. We will be able to do more than…

I'm very much enjoying how Anthropic is basically an anti-advertisement of how things will go if you try to run a company with text generators. The univerally-despised customer support, constant outages, hilarious bugs in CC, and now how badly the bun acquisition backfired..

Re: I don't think AI will make your processes go faster

#113

Post by pjc50 »

shalmanese wrote: post #28
phyzix5761 wrote: post #12

I think when LLMs first came out people thought they could just say something like, "Make a Facebook clone". But now we're realizing we need to be more exact with our requirements and define things better. That has always been the bottle neck in software. When I was working we used to get requirements that literally said things like, "Get data and give it to the user". No definition of what data is, where its stored,…

> I think when LLMs first came out people thought they could just say something like, "Make a Facebook clone". But now we're realizing we need to be more exact with our requirements and define things better. That has always been the bottle neck in software. This was substantially predicted by Fred Brooks in 1986 in the classic No Silver Bullets [1] essay under the sections "Expert Systems" and "Automatic Programming"…

"We've invented the silver bullet from the book 'No Silver Bullets'"

Re: I don't think AI will make your processes go faster

#114

Post by [deleted] »

gib444 wrote: post #81
faangguyindia wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

product people love LLM because it doesn't ask "what does X means? how will it work?" while a programmer will ask, about all cases.

Do they have a point? Can't good marketing teams, backed up by World Class Product people, sell anything we build, more or less?

[deleted]

Re: I don't think AI will make your processes go faster

#115

Post by ivansmf »

The article severely underestimates deployment times for large, world wide services. Usually the strategy is to have a smaller "blast radius" for deployments and going in stages that are also usually time bound ("let it bake"). It also does not account for outages and fixing things you only find in deployment. Programming languages like Python it using injection in Java (e.g. using Guice) either need pristine testing, and all test teams were converted to dev 20 years ago, or have a magical way to destroy all the help compilers and static analysis can give you. So yeah, you take the 4 weeks of development from your 6 month deployment, then add 6 weeks of debugging and retries by using AI. You're welcome that will be 3 million tokens, of which you wrote 1k, the rest was system prompts and "reasoning", which you do not control. This whole AI space is highly fixable, but requires investment no one seems to be willing to do, particularly in areas that were mistakes from the past.

Re: I don't think AI will make your processes go faster

#116

Post by pirates »

et1337 wrote: post #97
skydhash wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience, the complaints are not about the specs and their vagueness. It's more about the political game to get them detailed. If you've not encountered the kind of organizational issues where getting an answer is like pulling teeth, you're kind of lucky.

Oh no, I’ve definitely experienced that, it’s terrible. But that situation makes me wish for more agency (for example, talking to customers directly), whereas it seems to make other engineers wish for less agency (please hand me a complete spec and I will mindlessly translate it to code). That’s what I don’t understand.

some of us couldn’t give a rat’s ass about the customer. One of our customers charges people for paying their own bills via certain methods, which is completely bogus and I remind everyone loudly all the time that they do this. Everyone agrees that this customer sucks to work with, and the less time spent with them the better. The people from the customer’s end suck, they’re not technical, they have in-fighting with their own teams during calls, have decades long errors with their integration that they have never fixed…the list goes on. For this customer and a few others, please give me a spec that I can implement, shove it back across the aisle, and forget about. The absolute last thing I want is to have to talk to them more.

Re: I don't think AI will make your processes go faster

#117

Post by wijej »

well_ackshually wrote: post #106
satvikpendem wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In what I've seen, tickets are much richer in detail now because PMs are using AI (connected to the codebase itself, like Claude Code or Codex) to fill out a template as to what and why the problem is (ie X field exists in the backend not frontend), how and where to get any data (query the backend), and what acceptance criteria is needed (frontend should have the field exposed and "submit" should push the field's dat…

> Honestly, with the first step, it seems the PMs are already halfway there to implementation of the feature so I wonder if in the future they'll just do everything themselves Yes please, I've seen the vibecoded slop PMs put out every day because software engineering is simply not a skill they have, and I'd love to make a LOT of money fixing their crap once it dies in production <3

I’m a former PM who’s now a founder and all the engineers I worked with loved me.

I can tell you right now most pm’s are absolutely useless and glorified project managers who don’t know how to think and get in the way - and don’t know how to enable engineers to be more productive.

Re: I don't think AI will make your processes go faster

#118

Post by wijej »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #26

I actually have data on this. I’ve been building sharc, a Common Lisp port of Hacker News. https://www.github.com/shawwn/sharc If that sounds familiar, it’s because it’s what dang did over the course of several years. It’s taken a few weeks. I started right around May, and now it’s able to render large HN threads (900+ comments) within a factor of five of production HN performance. (Thank you to dang for giving actua…

“ AI can clearly accelerate us. But we need to be disciplined in how we use it,”

Therein lies the paradox. And the problem is, interacting with llm’s is akin to a slot machine.

And on top of that, llm producers want you to view it that way - that’s how they generate revenue and can play games

Re: I don't think AI will make your processes go faster

#119

Post by Mossy9 »

stelonix wrote: post #110
phyzix5761 wrote: post #12

I think when LLMs first came out people thought they could just say something like, "Make a Facebook clone". But now we're realizing we need to be more exact with our requirements and define things better. That has always been the bottle neck in software. When I was working we used to get requirements that literally said things like, "Get data and give it to the user". No definition of what data is, where its stored,…

You're completely right and I thought this would be obvious. I never prompted anything remotely closely to "make a facebook clone". Instead, I make an explanation of how it should work. To give you an example: I need a python script that 1) reads /etc/hosts 2) find values of specific configured hosts (read from a .conf which) eg server1, localhost, etc 3) it'll assign a name to those configs eg if the .conf has [Env1…

Juxt's Allium https://juxt.github.io/allium/ is an interesting entry in this 'pseudo DSL' space to define and store system specifications and requirements. I think it's likely that this sort of 'persistent specifications to help bots work correctly' will be a good approach when things finally cool down a bit.

Re: I don't think AI will make your processes go faster

#120

Post by layer8 »

gib444 wrote: post #81
faangguyindia wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

product people love LLM because it doesn't ask "what does X means? how will it work?" while a programmer will ask, about all cases.

Do they have a point? Can't good marketing teams, backed up by World Class Product people, sell anything we build, more or less?

Even if that were the case, I wouldn’t want to spend my working life building software poorly fit for the purpose, that nevertheless sells due to marketing.
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