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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

#321

Post by timacles »

neversupervised wrote: post #86

It’s completely wild to me that lifelong programmers come into contact with agentic coding and come to the conclusion that their jobs are safe for one reason or another. AI will definitely be able to write entire software, inclusive of figuring out requirements and asking the right questions. It’s not that far already. Why is it that everyone looks at weaknesses of a technology that didn’t exist a couple years ago in…

> it’s not that far already

Do you have examples of (almost) entire software written by AI?

AI excels at make toy versions of software, prototypes and skeletons.

The closest things to fully functioning software created by AI that exists are all done by people that are experts in that particular field, ie software engineers.

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

#322

Post by ajam1507 »

Philip-J-Fry wrote: post #278
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…

I don't agree. I regularly get pieces of work someone product guy has thought up in an afternoon. They only care about the happy path, and sometimes only part of the happy path. I work for a global company that has to abide by rules and regulations in each country we operate in. The product guy thinks up some feature, we implement the feature, then we're told "actually, we legally aren't allowed to do this in 90% of…

This seems more like a failure of management and process than a problem inherent to autonomy.

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

#323

Post by Eiriksmal »

gwern wrote: post #302
xeromal wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 real…

I ask myself these same questions every workday. Are you cooking any new articles on this topic, Gwern? Reading your (thoroughly researched) thoughts often helps me clarify my own.

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

#324

Post by batshit_beaver »

ejejje wrote: post #266
batshit_beaver wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If only it was that simple. The reason these inefficient companies continue to exist is due to regulatory capture and monopolistic behavior. Competing with them doesn't just require better efficiency.

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

#325

Post by auggierose »

ianbutler wrote: post #313
pron wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The experiment failed to produce a workable C compiler despite 1. the job not being particularly hard, 2. the available specs and tests are of a completely higher class of quality than almost any software, not to mention the availability of other implementations that the model trained on. You can call that a success (as it did something impresssive even though it failed to produce a workable C compiler) but my point…

That's great and all, but that's not the point I was making and you're engaging rather uncharitably on it. So when you view it from the perspective of capability increase it's rather impressive. Note the slope of progress which this experiment was to show. Edit: Maybe uncharitably is too strong, but we're talking past each other.

pron made this statement:

> 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.

and brought up the failed anthropic experiment as proof of that. Yes, you are talking past each other, but that is not pron's fault. It is your fault.

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

#326

Post by vips7L »

tombert wrote: post #253
lr4444lr wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't imagine SWEs will be reduced to SDETs anymore than attorneys will be reduced to spell-checkers on AI powered case briefs. I am a very AI-forward person, but hallucinations are becoming more pernicious than ever even as they get less frequent, especially if the code actually works. A human absolutely has to guide these processes at a macro level for sustainability for SaaS as it evolves with business needs. Ma…

I've noticed even more than the "hallucinations", just the code is generally quite bad. At least with concurrent and distributed systems stuff (which is really all I know nowadays), it is great at getting a prototype, but the code is generally mediocre-at-best and pretty sub-optimal. I don't know if it's because it is trained on a lot of mediocre and/or buggy code but for concurrency-heavy stuff I've been having to r…

The code is quite terrible, but no one has ever cared about code quality, at least in my experience. All they’ve ever cared about is that “it works”. It’s why an army of juniors always write most of the code.

I had this same discussion at work the other day. I had an 80k line generated project dropped on my plate. It doesn’t use anything built into the web framework or orm. It’s a maintenance nightmare.

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

#328

Post by daxfohl »

juanre wrote: post #273
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…

I completely agree. It's more than 40 years since I wrote my first program, and I've never seen software that was first specified and then written and all was good. The most difficult part of any non-trivial engineering is understanding the problem, and the first versions of a piece of software are how you reach that understanding. That's why I do not think that AI-powered "software factories" will ever work. It's wa…

Yeah and any detailed design is still likely to skip over "obvious" things like "only admin users can use admin features". Both the PM and the engineering team will understand this implicitly. But with AI, you never can tell if it's going to make that inference, or just create admin users and admin APIs with no relation between them. These are also the bugs that can most easily slip through, because the reviewer wouldn't even think to look for it.

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

#329

Post by ianbutler »

auggierose wrote: post #325
ianbutler wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's great and all, but that's not the point I was making and you're engaging rather uncharitably on it. So when you view it from the perspective of capability increase it's rather impressive. Note the slope of progress which this experiment was to show. Edit: Maybe uncharitably is too strong, but we're talking past each other.

pron made this statement: > 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. and brought up the failed anthropic experiment as proof of that. Yes, you are talking past each other, but that is not pron's fault. It is your fault.

Eh fair enough!

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

#330

Post by BoxedEmpathy »

ryanmcbride wrote: post #286

Been having conversations like this with a client I've worked with. They get approved by corporate for us to use claude and ask how much faster we'll be able to move with it. I tell them "Us engineers will probably be able to deliver some of our stuff faster but it won't have even a slight effect on the actual deliverable because we've never been the bottle neck", it's the fact that the process to get an S3 bucket al…

This matches my experience. My previous position was at a FAANG and sometimes getting a VPN link setup for a new host would take a month of approvals.

Writing actual code was maybe 10-20% of what I did. Most of it was meetings, design review, authorization requests, etc

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