361–370 of 490 posts
Here is my take on the same topic: The AI Productivity Paradox: Why the AI Multiplier is Less Than 2x. https://www.forrestthewoods.com/blog/the-ai-productivity-par... My hypothesis is that AI greatly accelerates only a small portion of development. It's pretty effing great at prototypes. But the net acceleration factor is just not that large currently. Opus has been out for ~6 months. If AI were a net 100x multiplier…
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…
Halfway there feels way overblown, and only seems to further devalue to work that devs do. Having clearly written requirements would be fantastic, and even as someone less pro AI even I can see great utility for it here, but its not halfway there to implementation. Not even 25% in all honesty, since edge cases and unforeseen consequences can cause changes to the spec midway through development.
What a naïve article. People don’t write software this way anymore. A Gannt chart? We don’t use those anymore. People have to stop promoting this narrative of the AI doesn’t make you move faster as it’s not helping anybody. I get it. We all worked hard for our skills and it’s really difficult watching them get automated away, but it’s been this way since the printing press assembly lines and the industrial revolution…
At some point the “oh the models only improved recently” won’t work anymore.
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…
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…
All of the above points align with our organization’s experience. But there is one more thing happening as well: we have more people in more roles able to create software solutions for issues that used to be brute forced via physical processes. (We are a small manufacturing business.) While these aren’t big giant enterprise projects that require deep swe experience, they are simple software tools that are improving p…
> 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…
> 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…
It has to be someone's job to push back on the Product Guy's stupid idea and answer all the awkward questions about the not-so-happy path with it. Unfortunately, because of the way we've ended up with this process, that person is often the engineer tasked with building it, without any effective political power to challenge the design process.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sadly I think you’re right. I even shy away from sharing these types of posts at work because it feels like anything that doesn’t mesh with the status quo isn’t received well.
Same here. Anyone being even hesitant about AI is viewed negatively by management
Now the engineers I know that had the same skeptical tone as OP are the ones singing its praises and doing cool shit with it.
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.
If you mean a human has to provide the initial impetus or spec, then no, there is no software in the world entirely written by AI.
If you mean a human provides the impetus or spec and an AI takes care of the rest, this is happening. But it is expensive so this is only really happening at FAANGs and whatnot.