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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

#301

Post by humanymous »

kj4211cash wrote: post #7

On the one hand, this is a clean post that explains exactly what a lot of us have been thinking and seeing on the job at large organizations doing tech work. Dear Author, I agree with you 110% and want everybody else to come to understand what you have written. On the other hand, it feels like we've been over this tens of times recently, on HN specifically and IRL at work. Another blog post isn't going to convince le…

Every time these types of posts are discussed at work, the point is always that there's more risk of falling behind (more like FOMO) at pace if others are able to launch or bring new features faster

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

#302

Post by gwern »

xeromal wrote: post #194
alt227 wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a marked improvement in our user engagement in a day. Do you have any idea what has caused this engagement improvement and indeed do you actually have any metrics or is it hearsay? It is much easier to knock something up in a day as you have done, but often the reason manual things take longer is they are based on actual testing and research which takes longer than a day however you do it. The manual way gives you…

No, we did a actual test using our existing testing framework. We have shitloads of metrics to know when a user gets stuck, when they give up, which login path they took, etc. This wasn't a half assed test but a legitimate effort to improve something that we never prioritized We had a legitimate 25% reduction in users giving up logging in in a system that has millions of users. We ran a 50-50 AB test for several week…

This seems consistent with OP. You had a feature where most of his Gantt chart is, in effect, already done: you had a clear problem with a clear well thought out design/solution (with associated documentation) in mind, you had a well setup analytics process for deployment and followup... you really had everything except that big fat chunk in the middle labeled 'coding'. So in your anecdote, an agentic coding LLM really could deliver a huge speedup by doing the remaining 10% or whatever of the work.

This is why LLMs are really great 'knocking off the todo/wishlist' of things you always meant to do. The problem, as far as broader discussions of 'productivity multipliers' or 'total factor productivity' go is that there's a certain perverse diminishing returns to such wishlist items (if each item was all that important, why didn't it get done before?), they generally only apply to a small part of a large complicated whole (what % of your ecosystem/business/community as a whole is the login page, as pleasing and profitable as that fix is relative to the investment? Probably not a big %), and they are also finite (what happens when you have worked through your backlog of lowhanging fruit?).

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

#305

Post by satvikpendem »

ejejje wrote: post #267
satvikpendem wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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]

Two hour old account just to make comments like this, it will get flagged. Next time use your main account.

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

#306

Post by BoxedEmpathy »

nijave wrote: post #101
p2detar wrote: post #8

> Yes, AI can generate code quickly (whether that’s a good thing is open for debate), but that doesn’t mean it’s generating the correct code. No, the code is actually almost always correct. The way it’s added is probably not what you’re going to like, if you know your code base well enough. You know there’s some ceremony about where things are added, how they are named, how much comments you’d like to add and where e…

>No, the code is actually almost always correct That's not my experience, especially when the inputs are bugs or performance issues. It frequently hallucinates and misdiagnosis without a guiding hand. However, it can still RCA and analyze well and improve efficiency if you keep an eye on what it's doing and push it the right direction. > If you were to give human developers the same amount of feature/scope documentat…

What tools are you using? What settings? What process? What's your code review like?

I think this varies a lot. I find with a c++ project I'm working on that the LLM needs a lot of guardrails and guidance, and still gets a lot wrong. But with a vite/js project it often one shots complex and intricate changes in large codebases.

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

#307

Post by [deleted] »

ianbutler wrote: post #279
pron wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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/eng…

> 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. I never claimed they could! I just view this as a successful experiment. I don't think anthropic was making that claim with their experiment either. It feels reflexive to the moment to argue against that claim, but I tend to operate with a bit more nuance than…

[deleted]

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

#308

Post by pron »

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…

> 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.

Of course. The point is that a full, detailed spec isn't enough (even in the rare situations it does exist, like for a C compiler). At least for the moment, you need expert humans to supervise and direct the agents.

Vibe coders usually also let the agents write the tests, which mean that the only independent human validation of the software is some cursory manual inspection. That also obviously isn't enough to validate software.

> One shot doesn't work even with humans - after all, this is exactly what killed waterfall as a methodology.

You can one-shot a C compiler with humans. LLMs' software development ability is impressive and helpful, but it is not human-level yet, even if at some tasks the agents are better than most human programmers. And while many waterfall projects failed, many succeeded (although perhaps not as efficiently as they could have). So far I don't believe agents have been able to produce any non-trivial production software autonomously.

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

#309

Post by satvikpendem »

BugsJustFindMe wrote: post #299
satvikpendem wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Deserving and having are two different things, that doesn't mean they can't be criticized either way. By the same logic bad devs and bad dev practices can also be criticized.

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

#310

Post by satvikpendem »

zxornand wrote: post #254
satvikpendem wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The tickets are not "novel"-length, they are about a few bulleted lists of the sections I mentioned above. In that case it is indeed way easier to review that a ticket only saying "do X with Y data." Reviewing code is harder than reviewing text because code does something and has interdependencies and therefore must be correct in its function, do not mix the two. This is like saying an editor reviewing an article or…

Most real tickets are more complicated than “Do x with Y data” and also have many interdependencies throughout the business

Most? That's doubtful especially when a lot of tickets are simply CRUD which are fine being generated by an LLM. Those that are more complex require more review and interdependency management, sure, but to say that that is most tickets is simply not correct.
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