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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

#291

Post by moron4hire »

dakolli wrote: post #265
moron4hire wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 outpu…

They are so bad at UI. I'm not a traditionally trained UI dev, but in the past I've been the solo dev on so many projects that I had to git gud on making at least a clean, functional UI. No crazy animations and "delightful experiences," but I'm skeptical that level of design is necessary for anything outside of consumer apps designed for kids and the child-like. My default, slapped-together UIs for just getting out of the way and getting forward movement are still infinitely better than the inconsistent, buggy, overly decorated UIs the LLMs produce.

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

#292

Post by pvtmert »

Absolutely lovely article.

> Software development is about translating a problem into a solution that a computer can understand and automatically resolve. Preferably in a secure and scalable way.

True, meanwhile software engineering puts optional bit into the requirements bucket. (ie. Secure & Scalable)

---

For the problem description and gathering requirements sentiment; I don't think we'll _ever_ have a 100% proper way of doing this. If we did, we'd basically solve any and all problems in the world.

Nevertheless, I think AI can help with investigating and exploring the problem space. Especially when the problem is an already solved thing that the prompter hasn't gained enough expertise yet.

Moreover, I think (and keep mentioning) we will see different kind of models in the near future. Those would be more specialized per industry, per language (both programming and human languages), even per field.

Those will open up newer areas for employment & job market. Something like an "AI-trainer" but more of a knowledge-worker style. Although this can also be automated with LLMs, the limits on context length/size plus amount of compute required to re-train the models to iterate faster both are quite heavy.

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

#294

Post by YZF »

ianbutler wrote: post #227
pron wrote: 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…

GCC has only like a billion man hours in it?

Assembler and linker are not part of a compiler. They are separate tools. They are also generally much simpler.

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

#295

Post by Izkata »

skydhash wrote: post #271
stelonix wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well I would never write shell because I loathe it's grammar/syntax. I enjoy GUIs and am a heavy mouse user, so the GTK part isn't really an "accidental complexity" but a must have for me. If a LLM can one-shot all the GTK boilerplate it's a win. That's (as shown in my sample prompt) one great thing I've been using LLMs for: making GUIs for arcane Linux-based OS/userland settings that I have no interest in doing "sud…

And that’s fine. I was pointing out that a simpler solution exists. I prefer simple solutions, because I want to test whatever idea I have in real world situation first before I go for a more complete one. Kinda like doodling before committing to do a sketch (or spend weeks doing a painting). > It's been 30+ years, we deserve a better desktop experience That desktop experience would need to be like smalltalk (where i…

There's also a pattern based on the simple solution that used to be more common: One command-line program for updating and querying the current state, and a second GUI one that just acts as a dumb interface for the first one. Even aside from separation-of-concerns purity, there are two more practical benefits: this gives you scriptability (say, automatically choosing an environment on startup) as well as easier support for multiple desktop environments (two different dumb GUI frontends for the actual complexity in the command-line backend, or updating the GUI because of a change in the APIs without worrying about breaking the important logic).

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

#296

Post by rustystump »

pvtmert wrote: post #292

Absolutely lovely article. > Software development is about translating a problem into a solution that a computer can understand and automatically resolve. Preferably in a secure and scalable way. True, meanwhile software engineering puts optional bit into the requirements bucket. (ie. Secure & Scalable) --- For the problem description and gathering requirements sentiment; I don't think we'll _ever_ have a 100% proper…

That last paragraph sounds like a meta vp explaining to the engineers why it is important to log all their keystrokes and eye movements. Pinky promise we wont fire you.

The trend I DO see at least based on JDs is a whole lots of “agents” which are glorified claude code but in the cloud with tools focus on a given industry or domain. If this is what you mean, then you are correct.

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

#297

Post by virgilp »

pron wrote: post #197
angarg12 wrote: post #189

> This exact thing is what software developers have been begging for since the beginning of the profession: Receiving a detailed outline of the problem and what the end result should look like. > This is often the part that slows down software development. Trying to figure out what a vague, title only, feature request actually means. But that is exactly what Software Engineering is!. It's 2026 and the notion that you…

> 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…

I wonder how knowledgeable in compilation was the engineer that attempted this. I'm pretty confident that I could produce a decent C compiler in a few weeks (or less), if given Opus 4.7 + unlimited tokens + a good test suite. (and this is not blind unsubstantiated belief in AI, I've recently rewritten a somewhat sophisticated interpreter in a week with AI; and have worked on several C++ compilers in the past, including a GCC port to a custom DSP, so I have a bit of an idea about what this would take).

But yeah, this is not a "one shot" project, none of it is. One shot doesn't work even with humans - after all, this is exactly what killed waterfall as a methodology.

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

#298

Post by ddosmax556 »

echelon wrote: post #154
ddosmax556 wrote: post #146

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…

The onus isn't on people using AI effectively to prove it to others. In fact, these disagreements and disbeliefs create opportunities and salients in the market.

I know and I agree. It sounds incredibly arrogant but it's frankly is a bid sad to see how much HN is lagging behind AI adaption. It's been 90% noise over the last 3-6 months about problems that aren't truly problems if you really look hard at what AI is capable to do already today. It's mostly ppl & process problems. I could post a comment like the one above below almost every article on AI. But it is what it is. It's an opportunity for anyone who doesn't bite into the cynical tone here for sure.

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

#299

Post by BugsJustFindMe »

satvikpendem wrote: post #223
majormajor wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The PMs validate it, why do you think they don't read over it to make sure it fits what they want? The PM has historically often not had a detailed enough mental model of the implementation to spot the hard parts in advance or a detailed enough mental model of the customer desires to know if it's gonna be the right thing or not. Those are the things that killed waterfall. You can use LLM tools to help you improve b…

Then they're just bad PMs and don't deserve to have the job. That can be said in any profession, devs or lawyers or doctors who blindly accept LLM output without review are bad employees.

> Then they're just bad PMs and don't deserve to have the job.

Nobody "deserves" anything. They do have the jobs though. Thinking that the world isn't full of people doing what they need to do to get by who don't give a shit about fitting a fantasy ideal is wild.

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

#300

Post by zem »

virgilp wrote: post #297
pron wrote: 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…

I wonder how knowledgeable in compilation was the engineer that attempted this. I'm pretty confident that I could produce a decent C compiler in a few weeks (or less), if given Opus 4.7 + unlimited tokens + a good test suite. (and this is not blind unsubstantiated belief in AI, I've recently rewritten a somewhat sophisticated interpreter in a week with AI; and have worked on several C++ compilers in the past, includi…

yeah, the key part is that there be a human in the loop, directing and course-correcting the ai while it produces code in reasonably small and well defined stages.
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