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My PM said they’d written a bunch of tickets for a project yesterday morning that we hadn’t fully scoped yet. I was pleasantly surprised because I can’t complai

My PM said they’d written a bunch of tickets for a project yesterday morning that we hadn’t fully scoped yet. I was pleasantly surprised because I can’t complain if they are going to get ahead of things and start scaffolding tickets. Of course when I went to read them they were 100% slop. The funniest requirement were progress bars for actions that don’t have progress. The tickets were, even if you assume the requirements weren’t slop, at least 15 points a piece. But ok maybe with all of these new tools we can respond by implementing these insane requirements. The real problem is what this article is discussing. Each ticket was also 500-700 words. Requirements that boil down to a single if statement were described in prose. While this is hilarious the problem is it makes them harder to understand. I tried to explain this and they just said “ok fine rewrite them then”. Which I did in maybe 15min because there wasn’t actually much to write. At this point I’m at a loss for how to even work with people that are so convinced these things will save time because they look at the volume of the output.

kasey_junk 1y ago
Ask an llm for a project plan and they’ll happily throw dates around for each step, when they can’t possibly know how long it will take. But project plan dates have always been fiction. Getting there faster is an efficiency win. That said I’ve found that llms are good as interrogators. If used to guide a conversation, research background information and then be explicitly told to tersely outline the steps in something I’ve had very good results.
- danielbln 1y ago
  The date/week estimations in plans are especially funny when you work with an agent and it spits that out. "Week 1, setting up the structure" - uh, no, we're going to do this in 10 minutes.
dimitri-vs 1y ago
The only acceptable response to obvious AI slop - unless it's it's clear it's been heavily reviewed and updated - is to put it back into the AI and ask it for a 1 paragraph summary and work off of that.
waynenilsen 1y ago
The software requirements phase is becoming increasingly critical to the development lifecycle and that trend will continue. I have started writing very short tickets and having claude code inflate them, then I polish those. I often include negative prompts at this point so claude may have included "add a progress bar for xyz" and i simply add "do not" in front of those things that do not make sense. The results have been excellent.
SoftTalker 1y ago
It's disheartening to hear that people get paid six figures to implement things like "progress bars."
- snapcaster 1y ago
  Why? As a frequent consumer of software I love progress bars and I know many others do too. Are you mad other people get paid highly or mad about progress bars? or some combination of both?
  - amanaplanacanal 1y ago
    If progress bars are actually showing information I want, like how much time is left on the operation, they are great! I suspect most are just garbage though.
zahlman 1y ago
> At this point I’m at a loss for how to even work with people that are so convinced these things will save time because they look at the volume of the output. The same way, presumably, that one used to work with people who would say things like "just look how much code this template system generates for us!" unironically.

kasey_junk 1y ago

Ask an llm for a project plan and they’ll happily throw dates around for each step, when they can’t possibly know how long it will take. But project plan dates have always been fiction. Getting there faster is an efficiency win. That said I’ve found that llms are good as interrogators. If used to guide a conversation, research background information and then be explicitly told to tersely outline the steps in something I’ve had very good results.

danielbln 1y ago
The date/week estimations in plans are especially funny when you work with an agent and it spits that out. "Week 1, setting up the structure" - uh, no, we're going to do this in 10 minutes.

dimitri-vs 1y ago

The only acceptable response to obvious AI slop - unless it's it's clear it's been heavily reviewed and updated - is to put it back into the AI and ask it for a 1 paragraph summary and work off of that.

waynenilsen 1y ago

The software requirements phase is becoming increasingly critical to the development lifecycle and that trend will continue. I have started writing very short tickets and having claude code inflate them, then I polish those. I often include negative prompts at this point so claude may have included "add a progress bar for xyz" and i simply add "do not" in front of those things that do not make sense. The results have been excellent.

SoftTalker 1y ago

It's disheartening to hear that people get paid six figures to implement things like "progress bars."

snapcaster 1y ago
Why? As a frequent consumer of software I love progress bars and I know many others do too. Are you mad other people get paid highly or mad about progress bars? or some combination of both?
- amanaplanacanal 1y ago
  If progress bars are actually showing information I want, like how much time is left on the operation, they are great! I suspect most are just garbage though.

zahlman 1y ago

> At this point I’m at a loss for how to even work with people that are so convinced these things will save time because they look at the volume of the output. The same way, presumably, that one used to work with people who would say things like "just look how much code this template system generates for us!" unironically.