Posted by todsacerdoti 3 days ago
Waiting to see anyone show even a month ahead of schedule after 6 months.
AI can't keep up because its context window is full of yesteryear's wrong ideas about what next month will look like.
We've been having a go around with corporate leadership at my company about "AI is going to solve our problems". Dude, you don't even know what our problems are. How are you going to prompt the AI to analyze a 300 page PDF on budget policy when you can't even tell me how you read a 300 page PDF with your eyes to analyze the budget policy.
I'm tempted to give them what they want: just a chatter box they can ask, "analyze this budget policy for me", just so I can see the looks on their faces when it spits out five poorly written paragraphs full of niceties that talk its way around ever doing any analysis.
I don't know, maybe I'm too much of a perfectionist. Maybe I'm the problem because I value getting the right answer rather than just spitting out reams of text nobody is ever going to read anyway. Maybe it's better to send the client a bill and hope they are using their own AIs to evaluate the work rather than reading it themselves? Who would ever think we were intentionally engaging in Fraud, Waste, and Abuse if it was the AI that did it?
Ah, but they'll love it.
> I don't know, maybe I'm too much of a perfectionist. Maybe I'm the problem because I value getting the right answer rather than just spitting out reams of text nobody is ever going to read anyway. Maybe it's better to send the client a bill and hope they are using their own AIs to evaluate the work rather than reading it themselves? Who would ever think we were intentionally engaging in Fraud, Waste, and Abuse if it was the AI that did it?
We're already doing all the same stuff, except today it's not the AI that's doing that, it's people. One overworked and stressed person somewhere makes for a poorly designed, buggy library, and then millions of other overworked and stressed people spend most of their time at work finding out how to cobble dozens of such poorly designed and buggy pieces of code together into something that kinda sorta works.
This is why the top management is so bullshit on AI. It's because it's a perfect fit for a model that they have already established.
That, or its a discovery of why what I wanted is impossible and it's back to the drawing board.
It's nice to not be throwing away code that I'd otherwise have been a perfectionist about (and still thrown away).
So, yeah, they probably think typing is a huge bottle neck and it’s a huge time saver.
How about learning to touch type? Clearly code manipulation is not the hard part of writing software so all the people finding efficiency improvements in that tooling and skill set would be better served doing something else with their time? I find it instructive that the evergreen dismissal of one persons enthusiasm as unimportant rarely says what exactly they should be investing in instead.
Fine for just you. Not fine for others, not fine for business, not fine the moment you star count starts moving.
Congratulations, you invented end-to-end testing.
"We have yellow flags when the build breaks!"
Congratulations! You invented backpressure.
Every team has different needs and path dependencies, so settles on a different interpretation of CI/CD and software eng process. Productizing anything in this space is going to be an uphill battle to yank away teams' hard-earned processes.
Productizing process is hard but it's been done before! When paired with a LOT of spruiking it can really progress the field. It's how we got the first CI/CD tools (eg. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CruiseControl) and testing libraries (eg. pytest)
So I wish you luck!
This article attempted to outline a fairly reasonable approach to using AI tooling, and the criticisms hardly seem related to it at all.
now AWS guy doing it !
"My team is no different—we are producing code at 10x of typical high-velocity team. That's not hyperbole - we've actually collected and analyzed the metrics."
Rofl
"The Cost-Benefit Rebalance"
In here he basically just talks about setting up mock dependencies and introducing intermittent failures into them. Mock dependencies have been around for decades, nothing new here.
It sounds like this test system you set up is as time consuming as solving the actual problems you're trying to solve, so what time are you saving?
"Driving Fast Requires Tighter Feedback Loop"
Yes if you're code-vomiting with agents and your test infrastructure isn't rock solid things will fall apart fast, that's obvious. But setting up a rock solid test infrastructure for your system involves basically solving most of the hard problems in the first place. So again, what? What value are you gaining here?
"The communication bottleneck"
Amazon was doing this when I worked there 12 years ago. We all sat in the same room.
"The gains are real - our team's 10x throughput increase isn't theoretical, it's measurable."
Show the data and proof. Doubt.
Yeah I don't know. This reads like complete nonsense honestly.
Paraphrasing: "AI will give us huge gains, and we're already seeing it. But our pipelines and testing will need to be way stronger to withstand the massive increase in velocity!"
Velocity to do what? What are you guys even doing?
Amazon is firing 30,000 people by the way.
Can you point me to anyone who knows what they're talking about declaring that LOC is the best productivity metric for AI-assisted software development?
Can you point me to where the author of this article gives any proof to the claim of 10x increased productivity other than the screenshot of their git commits, which shows more squares in recent weeks? I know git commits could be net deleting code rather than adding code, but that's still using LOC, or number of commits as a proxy to it, as a metric.
Yes, I'm also reading that the author believes commit velocity is one reflection of the productivity increases they're seeing, but I assume they're not a moron and has access to many other signals they're not sharing with us. Probably stuff like: https://www.amazon.science/blog/measuring-the-effectiveness-...
and this guy didn't survive there for a decade by challenging it