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

frederickvanbrabant.com

261–270 of 490 posts

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

#261

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…

> Then devs can copy paste this Jira ticket content into the LLM agent of choice

Super glad to have gotten out when I did...

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

#262

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,…

Even purely from an information theory perspective it was obvious “make me a Facebook clone” was not going to work. The more you compress the information prompt the more detail you lose.

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

#263
post #216

Honest question: Does anyone know about any quantitative study or analysis on productivity gains using code assistants? Asking for numbers comparing between the "pre AI era" and now. Also, I have the impression that LLMs bring some gains or benefits for individuals but not relevant enough at the organization level.

Followup question: Does anyone know about any quantitative study or analysis on productivity without using code assistants? (as a baseline)

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

#264
post #235

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 I'm guessing they've tried (or been induced to try by upper management), but given up because they don't know how to debug any problems that arise due to the LLM working itself into a corner. Coding-agent LLMs act a lot like junior devs. And ju…

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

#265

I just spent a few days cleaning up someone's web app they created with Claude Code. There was more than 30k lines of DEAD code, and I was able to cut the code that was actually being used down by ~30-40%. If I just wrote this app myself It would have taken a day or two. LLMs are not helpful, they make everything worse. They make you worse, or reduce you to average at best. I really just don't see what ya'll are seei…

Same, exact experience here. This one non-technical PM guy at work used Codex to develop a project I was expecting would fall on my plate. He asked me to do a code review on it. What it produced was riddled with SQL injection vulns and the UI was complete garbage. Off of that example, the key stakeholders on my project are demanding I start vibe-coding everything. I raised the security flag and now they are saying, "…

I'm not even a front end guy, and have little experience with UI/UX, but its wild how easily decision makers are impressed with UI spit out by an LLM. This era of anybody being able to make a dashboard with Claude Code has made me really appreciate the amount of sweat that designers and devs put into a good user experience.

I agree with it being great for OCR, the most impact LLMs have had for me are structured outputs I can call from a function: "extract X value from this ambiguously structured document and return json that can my code can deserialize into Y type." However, how many people are doing something similar and spinning up $500k in GPUs just to avoid writing regex.

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

#266
post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> most orgs are horribly inefficient Considering that that’s been a running complaint for like 50 years, it doesn’t seem like project management is going to get better on its own at this point. So, yes, an LLM does represent a productivity boost in that area.

The problem is that organizations are inefficient in such a way that extra output from white collar workers doesn't translate to improved org-wide performance in a positively correlated, linear fashion. When the org is misaligned, mismanaged, has poor customer feedback loops, bad product market fit, too much bureaucracy, etc etc no amount of AI slop is going to make a meaningful impact on its bottom line. In fact, it…

Correct most people should be fired.

In the long run these highly inefficient firms are going to get destroyed by people who have a vision and can do what 100+ firms are doing and package it together as one solution that is far superior on dimensions that matter to firms.

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

#267
post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

lol Just lol. Is this what you guys mean by productivity boost? Comical. LLM’s aren’t all that great - it’s more that most orgs are horribly inefficient. Like it’s amazing how bad they are. That’s why Elon succeeded with spacex - he saw how horrible inefficient the industry was. And used that thinking to take a gamble and it’s paid off.

Not sure what your point is, LLMs don't have to be all that great to still show a productivity boost and especially if the organization is inefficient, then even more so.

[flagged]

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

#268
post #105

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…

lol Just lol. Is this what you guys mean by productivity boost? Comical. LLM’s aren’t all that great - it’s more that most orgs are horribly inefficient. Like it’s amazing how bad they are. That’s why Elon succeeded with spacex - he saw how horrible inefficient the industry was. And used that thinking to take a gamble and it’s paid off.

The idea that PM tickets are now much improved because they paste their unbaked wrong "idea of what the ticket is" into ChatGPT to expand into a 500 word behemoth is hilarious.

At least when the PM still wrote it you could outright tell it was bullshit and made no sense. Now that is just obfuscated.

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

#269
post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's 2026 and the notion that you can get detailed enough requirements and specifications that you can one-shot a perfect solution needs to die. It's 2026 and the idea that even with detailed-enough requirements you can one-shot even a workable (let alone perfect) solution also needs to die. Anthropic failed to build even something as simple as a workable C compiler, not only with a perfect spec ( and reference imp…

Sorry where are we seeing that it failed? It compiled multiple projects successfully albeit less optimized. " It lacks the 16-bit x86 compiler that is necessary to boot Linux out of real mode. For this, it calls out to GCC (the x86_32 and x86_64 compilers are its own). It does not have its own assembler and linker; these are the very last bits that Claude started automating and are still somewhat buggy. The demo vide…

> where are we seeing that it failed?

Anthropic said the experiment failed to produce a workable C compiler:

- I tried (hard!) to fix several of the above limitations but wasn’t fully successful. New features and bugfixes frequently broke existing functionality.

- The compiler successfully builds many projects, but not all. It's not yet a drop-in replacement for a real compiler.

(source: https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/building-c-compiler)

Software that cannot be evolved is dead software. That in some PR communications they misrepresented their own engineer's report is beside the point.

> It compiled multiple projects successfully albeit less optimized.

150,000x slower (https://github.com/harshavmb/compare-claude-compiler) is not "less optimised". It's unworkable.

> Like I think people don't realize not even 7 months ago it wasn't writing this at all.

There's no doubt that producing a C compiler that isn't workable and is effectively bricked as it cannot be evolved but still compiles some programs is great progress, but it's still a long way off of auonomously building production software. Can today's LLM do amazing things and offer tremendous help in software development? Absolutely. Can they write production software without careful and close human supervision? Not yet. That's not disparagement, just an observation of where we are today.

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

#270
post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, the task is very different, but also it will be months to a year until we know the results of the bun experiment.

I don't know how it could fail - Bun loses popularity among devs? Is it an objective metric? From what I understand, Node.js remains dominant across the industry as a whole, with Deno and Bun mostly used by startups. Anthropic can always fire the Opus/Mythos token machine gun on any problem (bugs, features, security) to ensure PR success, and there would be plenty of AI-sphere startups already drinking the kool-aid t…

> Anthropic can always fire the Opus/Mythos token machine gun on any problem (bugs, features, security) to ensure PR success,

Can they, though? They tried and failed to do it in their C compiler experiment. The experimenter wrote: "I tried (hard!) to fix several of the above limitations but wasn’t fully successful. New features and bugfixes frequently broke existing functionality."

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