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The bottleneck was never the code

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Re: The bottleneck was never the code

#81

Post by [deleted] »

vehemenz wrote: post #69
kusokurae wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The community portion that unironically think AI is good enough now, are mostly managers and non/semi-technical people, and engineers who do not engage in critical or complex problems. HN has always been too much of the velocity-alignment-synergy class of professional talkers; it's just so much more obvious now that they feel emboldened in false confidence.

There's some of that, but more often it's developers whose arguments are a year behind the frontier models or, just as common, they're dramatically overstating their abilities. It's an inherent tension that every discipline has to wrestle with. The most experienced developers are in the best position to evaluate where LLMs are, but those who are the loudest about their own abilities generally aren't in this camp. Hum…

[deleted]

Re: The bottleneck was never the code

#82

Post by NothingAboutAny »

nayroclade wrote: post #15

It's hilarious to me to see the same kind of engineer, who throughout my career have constantly bitched and moaned about team meetings, agile ceremonies, issue trackers, backlogs, slack, emails, design reviews, and anything else that disrupted the hours of coding "flow state" they claimed as their most essential and sacred activity to be protected at all costs, suddenly, and with no hint of shame, start preaching abo…

I've had seniors tell me my entire career that writing code was the easiest part of their jobs.

Re: The bottleneck was never the code

#83

Post by renegade-otter »

nayroclade wrote: post #15

It's hilarious to me to see the same kind of engineer, who throughout my career have constantly bitched and moaned about team meetings, agile ceremonies, issue trackers, backlogs, slack, emails, design reviews, and anything else that disrupted the hours of coding "flow state" they claimed as their most essential and sacred activity to be protected at all costs, suddenly, and with no hint of shame, start preaching abo…

Just because you use LLMs doesn't mean you don't need the "flow". Reading code SUCKS, getting into the flow is harder than ever.

Unless you sign off on a Looks Good to Me PR and go loiter by the kombucha machine. Then you have other problems.

Re: The bottleneck was never the code

#85

Post by stego-tech »

The bottleneck has always been the human element. I too used to be one of those up-my-own-ass engineers who thought the most important part of my work was the machine, and it wasn’t until I began actually listening to others and their problems that I realized my function was far more than mere technology scaffolding.

That said, I’m also increasingly aware that puts me in a minority group. I got to see this first hand in a recent org where their codebase and product design hadn’t meaningfully evolved in nearly thirty years. NAT was a “game changer” to them - and one they refused to implement without tons of extraneous testing they would deliberately undermine, stall, and sabotage so they didn’t have to modernize their code accordingly. It was easier for the developers and stakeholders to preserve their own status quo rather than entertain alternatives, to the point of open hostility (name calling, insults, screaming, and a few threats) to anyone suggesting otherwise.

The human element has always been, and always will be the bottleneck. Stakeholders who don’t contribute updated or accurate datasets to automation systems, or who hold back development to preserve personal status and power, or who otherwise gum up the works on purpose to game their own careers.

That’s not to make the argument of “replace all humans with machines”, mind you. Just stating that an organization that incentivizes bad behavior will be slowed down versus ones that incentivize collaborative outcomes, and AI is just going to turbocharge that by removing the friction associated with code creation and shifting that elsewhere.

Re: The bottleneck was never the code

#86

Post by Eldt »

kusokurae wrote: post #64
kenforthewin wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looks like this comment is touching a nerve. This community is progressing from "AI can't write code", to "Well, AI can write code but it's not really about the code". I wonder where the goalposts will be moved next?

The community portion that unironically think AI is good enough now, are mostly managers and non/semi-technical people, and engineers who do not engage in critical or complex problems. HN has always been too much of the velocity-alignment-synergy class of professional talkers; it's just so much more obvious now that they feel emboldened in false confidence.

I've been paying attention to that line of division and came to the same conclusion. We're seeing the "tiers" diverge as AI becomes more capable. As the saying goes, you don't know what you don't know.

Re: The bottleneck was never the code

#87

Post by jayd16 »

odie5533 wrote: post #38
Antibabelic wrote: post #33

What kind of projects are people working on, where understanding what features the management wants is the only difficult part and the rest can just be "typed out" (or, today, offloaded to an LLM)? If that's what you do, then I'm not surprised so many people on HN think LLMs can replace them.

I've found the more senior you get, the code seems more fungible, and the process seems more important and difficult.

Isn't that just ascribing difficulty to the parts of the process you're closer to?

Re: The bottleneck was never the code

#88

Post by moralestapia »

robertlagrant wrote: post #80
moralestapia wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it is written there, and GP was quite specific: >the same kind of engineer, who throughout my career have constantly bitched and moaned about team meetings, agile ceremonies, issue trackers, backlogs, slack, emails, design reviews, and anything else that disrupted the hours of coding "flow state" they claimed as their most essential and sacred activity Seems pretty clear to me.

I doubt the GP has gone back through their career and checked on each person who thought there were too many meetings have now all made the switched they're being accused of, though.

Why does that matter?

Re: The bottleneck was never the code

#89

Post by dyauspitr »

jugg1es wrote: post #17

I think veteran engineers have always known that the real problems with velocity have always been more organizational than technical. The inability for the business to define a focused, productive roadmap has always been the problem in software engineering. Constantly jumping to the next shiny thing that yields almost no ROI but never allowing systemic tech debt to be addressed has crippled many company's I have work…

It’s part of the problem but AI also can crush this on pure lines of code and functionality alone. It can put out 100,000 lines of somewhat decent code in a day. That usually takes months or years of manual coding for a team.

Re: The bottleneck was never the code

#90

Post by SoftTalker »

jugg1es wrote: post #17

I think veteran engineers have always known that the real problems with velocity have always been more organizational than technical. The inability for the business to define a focused, productive roadmap has always been the problem in software engineering. Constantly jumping to the next shiny thing that yields almost no ROI but never allowing systemic tech debt to be addressed has crippled many company's I have work…

> The inability for the business to define a focused, productive roadmap has always been the problem in software engineering.

Agreed, and I also agree that most developers come to this realization with time and experience. When you have a clear understanding of business rationale, scope, inputs, and desired outputs, the data models, system design and the code fall out almost naturally. Or at least are much more obvious.

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