I am stuck with an editor based on Eclipse. It’s slow and periodicity pauses or crashes. I am stuck with build jobs that take 15-20 minutes. I am often stuck with web apps that take forever to do a task that should take 50ms max.

The list can go on and on. Every delay is a distraction that shatters my concentration. I still write code at work but I am in management now with dozens of other people and administrative distractions. When the software is slow it become my lowest priority. I don’t care who that impacts because if it really mattered we wouldn’t be held hostage by all this slow syrup of software pulling each of us under.

I really think as code becomes cheap, misalignment between people, teams, and organizations is going to hurt a lot more, especially when everyone is trying to move at break neck speeds.

I also think a big piece of this is human attention and inertia. Aka, why bother doing the hard work to coordinate with others when you can just ship whatever you’re thinking. I think whichever organizations can figure out the human and cultural aspects to this will do phenomenally

Quote from the post article: "To quote Michael Polanyi: we know more than we can tell. Some load-bearing context exists precisely because it was never put into words, and writing it down would change what it is."

Imagine how much knowledge exists only in the heads of software engineers, with code being just a functioning footprint of that "Theory". I know SRE in FAANG who told me that multi-billion system is supported by tribal knowledge within their group, and for years, even pre-AI it was a protection against automation.

FizzBuzz was a litmus test that showed how hopeless the average developer was. Coding interviews were the real test of programming ability. Now we're being told none of that ever mattered for real?

We should just admit that the game has changed (possibly, I'm not 100% convinced). Code WAS the bottleneck and coding ability was the bottleneck, but it may not be going forward.

For him, the bottleneck very much was the code. He still doesn't know any programming.

I want to say that his ability here has been accelerated by orders of magnitude, but without AI he couldn't have done it at all, so it's actually a divide by zero situation.

(Yeah, he could have just learned programming... and audio engineering... and the specifics of JavaScript ... and the web audio API, and the DOM, and WebGL, and his demo would be ready in like, 2030.)

> Impactful software tends to be written by many humans that need to collaborate.

This was definitely true. Is it still true to the same extent/ in the same way? Not obvious...

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.