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Posted by fagnerbrack 2 hours ago

Explaining to business people why building software is still hard(www.manager.dev)
48 points | 42 commentspage 2
LastTrain 1 hour ago|
We’re in the self driving car stage right now. A Waymo can drive itself but the belts and suspenders involved are more expensive than a normal car.
aDyslecticCrow 41 minutes ago||
> We’re in the self driving car stage right now

Are we though? Despite the massive growth of the "AI industry", have the self-driving cars gotten much better than the steady snails-pace we've had for two decades?

We've gotten better at data-processing; but that was only half of making a car move around safely on a road.

high_na_euv 1 hour ago||
More expensive?
mikestew 1 hour ago||
Not OP, but… It can drive itself…mostly (the “belt”). And when it doesn’t, you need remote drivers (the “suspenders”) to get it unstuck. I don’t need that with the car I drive myself, and it probably won’t be needed with self-driving cars (waaaay in the future, IMO).
joshdavham 1 hour ago||
This is definitely getting my favorite. I’m also going to shamelessly steal this house analogy.

Thanks for writing this!

scottyah 1 hour ago||
I've been using it for years. "Let's decide where we want the plumbing to go before pouring the slab", or "let's not focus on where the couch will go before we paint the walls". Or when a 'genius cowboy dev' discovers a super fast way to get from the 2nd floor to the kitchen by cutting a hole in the floor despite all the leaks it causes and how many other people have to work around the change.
davidhegarty 1 hour ago||
The house analogy is great. The extreme is the Winchester Mystery house.

…which is always how I explain legacy code.

vanschelven 2 hours ago||
TBH I think we still need to explain this to ourselves first.
jmclnx 2 hours ago||
My experience over many decades is this:

* If a business person thinks a change or new program is very easy to do, it is really a very hard project.

* If a business person thinks the change or new program us hard to do, usually it is a trivial project.

For me, this has been true for well over 40 years. I never use any kind AI for my work, it did not exist before I retired.

etothepii 1 hour ago||
This is is relatable but I think the issue is that they are uncorrelated.

If it's easy and the business thinks it's easy it gets done. If it's hard and the business thinks it's hard it doesn't.

zvr 1 hour ago|||
XKCD Tasks (from 12 years ago, to the day!) https://xkcd.com/1425/
tristor 1 hour ago||
My experience matches this also. My observation is that most business people think things they know they don't know are hard, and things that they think they do know are easy. My additional observation is that AI tools make business people think they know a lot more things, so they consider a lot more things easy, when they are not. AI tools are a machine that makes business people Dunning-Kruger-max.
sublinear 1 hour ago||
It's the rest of the owl.
pianopatrick 1 hour ago|
To me stories like this seem like just a moment in time.

Like in 1 to 5 years, vibe coding without looking at the code will likely be a lot better.