I don't think AI will make your processes go faster • Hacker News Board

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

#141

Post by bonesss » Sun, May 17, 2026, 3:28 PM UTC

pjc50 wrote: post #113

shalmanese wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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'"

I read that as a programmer and, lol, you’re right.

I read how that’ll read to VCs coming from Altman and Musk and, ow, the entire stock market just made sense for a second.

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

#142

Post by paulddraper » Sun, May 17, 2026, 3:30 PM UTC

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,…

So the agent needs a “plan” mode where it works with the user and asks questions to define the ask.

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

#143

Post by jillesvangurp » Sun, May 17, 2026, 3:33 PM UTC

chilmers wrote: post #32

It’s amazing to see some people talk with 100% confidence about the macro view of AI assisted development when we have had strong coding agents available for less than a year.

Exactly and the tools weren't even that great for most of that year. They only got properly usable around the end of last year. At least for me. I'd call it more like half a year.

If you don't like the state of technology with AI tools, just wait a few weeks. Things are still changing at a quite rapid pace. The scope of what is possible seems to shift regularly. A lot of what I did in the last weeks was complete science fiction even a year ago.

This article makes a few good points though. AI won't magically make processes faster. You might actually have to change the process. A lot of processes in companies are about people and how they communicate. The more people you have, the more communication you get. It's an exponential. Using AI in that context just adds to the communication noise.

But if you restructure your processes you might get different results. Most companies have not really gone through that process yet. It's too early to call success or failure. And especially non technical people have mostly not yet experienced any agentic tooling at all. We've yet to see how that will change companies. My guess is that some companies will be better at this than others. And we'll see a bit of darwinism play out.

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

#144

Post by bonesss » Sun, May 17, 2026, 3:33 PM UTC

steveBK123 wrote: post #36

shalmanese wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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"…

It's interesting how predictable some of this is. The LLMs turn out fully formed clones of stuff for which there exists copious amounts of code openly searchable on the web doing the exact same thing. LLMs require developer-like specification, task/subtask breakdown and detail where such example code already exists. As a professional prior to LLMs, how many problems that you work on have many existing free solutions…

Well put, and same challenge to a lot of these demos & LoC numbers: if you were a pro prior to LLMs, how many of these demos could you fully recreate if you ignored copyright?

I’ve often reimplemented things at work that exist elsewhere. If I could just copy & paste whole solutions from GitHub and change the branding/naming slightly, I could make curl in an afternoon.

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

#145

Post by reenorap » Sun, May 17, 2026, 3:35 PM UTC

This blog post is nonsensical and the arbitray time boxes aren't realistic. Not all development cycles or features require legal input and I would hazard most don't, even in Big Tech. Documentation takes seconds to generate. Same as tests.

Feature development could take minutes to hours depending on how you iterate it. These days, all we do now is just think of a feature and add it within an hour using AI. We have a process that is a year old now that is fixing bugs that would have taken us hours or days and it spits out a fix in about 10-15 minutes that is 95% accurate. 5% is garbage, but 24 months ago, 95% of it was garbage so the progress is staggering. The longest pole is code review which is all human, but that will all be automated soon.

Not everything will be much faster, but most processes will be 1-3 orders of magnitude faster. To ignore this or find excuses why LLMs/AI won't speed things up or remove the need for large swathes of humans is delusional and cope-ism.

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

#146

Post by ddosmax556 » Sun, May 17, 2026, 3:36 PM UTC

This article assumes that AI only has an impact on the development phase which is certainly not true. It can speed up every part of the step. Including ideation, legal, documentation, development, and deployment.

Ideation: Throw ideas back & forth, cross reference with knowledge bases, generate design documents. Documentation: Generate large parts of docs. Development: Clear. Deployment: Generate deployment manifests, tooling around testing, knowledge around cloud platforms.

Every single step can be done better & faster with AI. Not all of them, but a lot.

Even development. Yes some part of your job involves understanding the problem better than anyone & making solutions. But some parts are also purely chore. If you know you keed a button doing X, then designing that button, placing it, figuring out edge cases with hover & press states, connecting to the backend etc - this is chore that can be skipped. Same principle applies to almost all steps.

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

#147

Post by bonesss » Sun, May 17, 2026, 3:36 PM UTC

faangguyindia wrote: post #68

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,…

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.

Did everyone forget about outsourcing and how outsourcing works?

The dudes in Eastern-Wherever not asking what something means is the scary part. You only find out at the end how deeply confused everyone was when making the thing. You can fix it with attention and management, but then only some projects sometimes are profitably outsourced and you still need competency.

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

#148

Post by mike_hock » Sun, May 17, 2026, 3:37 PM UTC

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,…

> But now we're realizing we need to be more exact with our requirements and define things better.

That's why we write programs in programming languages and not English. Because they are much more efficient at giving precise instructions than natural language.

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

#149

Post by garyfirestorm » Sun, May 17, 2026, 3:37 PM UTC

reenorap wrote: post #145

This blog post is nonsensical and the arbitray time boxes aren't realistic. Not all development cycles or features require legal input and I would hazard most don't, even in Big Tech. Documentation takes seconds to generate. Same as tests. Feature development could take minutes to hours depending on how you iterate it. These days, all we do now is just think of a feature and add it within an hour using AI. We have a…

In my world automotive/mechanical engineering we are also observing how much AI can help you build a mental model, fetch unstructured data and help shape your understanding of the system. Onboarding new engg. figuring out what is what in the system. It could have taken hours before to fetch right info, now we are able to do this in seconds.

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

#150

Post by nnoremap » Sun, May 17, 2026, 3:38 PM UTC

mike_hock wrote: post #148

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,…

> But now we're realizing we need to be more exact with our requirements and define things better. That's why we write programs in programming languages and not English. Because they are much more efficient at giving precise instructions than natural language.

But horribly token inefficient.