Posted by Anon84 5 days ago
- Moving to a newer and more modern test library
- Refactoring my data layer so it's easier to read, based on years of organic changes that need to be baked in and simplified
- Porting some functionality to another language to vastly improve performance
I agree with the overall sentiment, but having an agent at my finger tips who can really crank out large-scale, involved code changes is unclogging quite a few backburnered todos lately for me.
The issue is that sometimes you don't know what the system should do until you build it.
A design is a hypothesis. Most of them are wrong, in subtle or not so subtle ways.
(Also, as a separate issue, having a group in the first place increasingly adds negative value. If it was ever a good idea to design by committee... it's increasingly expensive to do so, in opportunity cost.)
Is this actually true? Maybe in a widget factory. I think it’s an anti-pattern for the new world.
When you look at places that are shipping at insane pace (like Anthropic) the secret is not accelerating the writing down of a roadmap and we’ll groomed backlog, it’s empowering smart individuals to run their own end-to-end product improvement loops.
You can slightly reframe the OP by saying “the bottleneck is product ideas”, but “well formed backlog items” IMO frames it as more structured and hierarchical than it should be.
The insane billion dollar companies ship straight to production because they have PMF so anything and everything gets signal.
The same happened with Facebook and Google. And it was always cautionary advice to mimic these giants. It's a bad idea for all the rest of us.
This is like going to a startup as a senior bigtech engineer - if you can’t ship it becomes clear quite quickly.
Regarding the talent dysmorphia issue - the best way I know of getting people to step up is to give them more agency and more accountability. The new world will require that IMO.
I think Google etc are more a story of how much you can get away with when you have a strong monopoly. Their orgs are not shipping fast, nor good at shipping products. (Google in particular is incredible at infra but laughably bad at consumer products.)
If I was a scribe at the time I’d be thrilled because of all that extra time available to work on beer productivity metrics.
The amount of detail required is less these days and the computer is better at interpreting handwavey explanations but the principle still applies.
Whether code is the bottleneck likely depends on the organization. In mine, code is the bottleneck. AI has pushed it so validation is now the bottleneck. If it is such that the devs are "middlemen" such they can't spec things, then I think whoever can spec things is likely the bottleneck.