4 ms·

> The bottleneck isn’t code production, it is judgment. It always surprises me that this isn't obvious to everyone. If AI wrote 100% of the code that I do at w

> The bottleneck isn’t code production, it is judgment. It always surprises me that this isn't obvious to everyone. If AI wrote 100% of the code that I do at work, I wouldn't get any more work done because writing the code is usually the easy part.

add-sub-mul-div 9mo ago
I'll stare at a blank editor for an hour with three different solutions in my head that I could implement, and type nothing until a good enough one comes to mind that will save/avoid time and trouble down the road. That last solution is not best for any simple reason like algorithmic complexity or anything that can be scraped from web sites.
- aaroninsf 9mo ago
  No shade on your skills, but for most problems, this is already false; the solutions have already been scraped. All OSS has been ingested, and all the discussion in forum like this about it, and the personal blog posts and newsletters about it; and the bug tracking; and theh pull requests, and... and training etc. is only going to get better and filtering out what is "best."
  - al_borland 9mo ago
    A vast majority of the problems I’m asked to solve at work do not have open-source code I can simply copy or discussion forums that already decided the best answer. Enterprise customers rarely put that stuff out there. Even if they did, it doesn’t account for the environment the solution sit in, possible future integrations, off-the-wall requests from the boss, or knowing that internal customer X is going to want some other wacky thing, so we need to make life easy on our future selves. At best, what I find online are basic day 1 tutorials and proof on concept stuff. None of it could be used in production where we actually need to handle errors and possible failure situations.
    - jmtulloss 9mo ago
      Obviously novel problems require novel solutions, but the vast majority of software solutions are remixes of existing methods. I don’t know your work so I may be wrong in this specific case, but there are a vanishingly small number of people pushing forward the envelope of human knowledge on a day-to-day basis.
      - ewoodrich 9mo ago
        My company (and others in the same sector) depends on certain proprietary enterprise software that has literally no publicly available API documentation online, anywhere. There is barely anything that qualifies as documentation that they are willing to provide under NDA for lock-in reasons/laziness (ERPish sort of thing narrowly designed for the specific sector, and more or less in a duopoly). The difficulty in developing solutions is 95% understanding business processes/requirements. I suspect this kind of thing becomes more common the further you get from a "software company” into specific industry niches.
  - add-sub-mul-div 9mo ago
    The point is that the best solution is based on specific context of my situation and the right judgment couldn't be known by anyone outside of my team/org.
gowld 9mo ago
I don't understand this thinking. How many hours per week did you spend coding on your most recent project? If you could do something else during that time, and the code still got written, what would you do? Or are you saying that you believe you can't get that code written without spending an equivalent amount of time describing your judgments?
- scott_w 9mo ago
  I think OP is closer to the latter. How I typically have been using Copilot is as a faster autocomplete that I read and tweak before moving on. Too many years of struggling to describe a task to Siri left me deciding “I’ll just show it what I want” rather than tell.
- kibwen 9mo ago
  "Writing code" is not the goal. The goal is to design a coherent logical system that achieves some goal. So the practice of programming is in thinking hard about what goal I want to achieve, then thinking about the sort of logical system that I could design that would allow me to verifiably achieve that goal, then actually banging out the code that implements the abstract logical system that I have in my head, then iterating to refine both the abstract system and its implementation. And as a result of being the one who produced the code, I have certainty that the code implements the system I have in mind, and that the system it represents is for for the purpose of achieving the original goals. So reducing the part where I go from abstract system to concrete implementation only saves me time spent typing, while at the same time decoupling me from understanding whether the code actually implements the system I have in mind. To recover that coupling, I need to read the code and understand what it does, which is often slower than just typing it myself. And to even express the system to the code generator in the first place still requires me to mentally bridge the gap between the goal and the system that will achieve that goal, so it doesn't save me any time there. The exceptions are things where I literally don't care whether the outputs are actually correct, or they're things that I can rely on external tools to verify (e.g. generating conformance tests), or they're tiny boilerplate autocomplete snippets that aren't trying to do anything subtle or interesting.
  - 9mo ago
linhns 9mo ago
Well you should be surprised by the number of people who do not know this. Klarna is probably the most popular example where the CEO was all about creating more code, then fired everyone before regretting
- trollbridge 9mo ago
  Klarna, now there's a company that seems to have no idea what direction it's going in. In the past month, they've announced they're going to be at the forefront of Agentic AI for merchants so... agents can figure out what merchants are selling? They're somehow offering stablecoins to institutional investors to use USDC to extend loans to Klarna? And then they're starting some kind of credit-card rewards program with access to airline lounges?
skybrian 9mo ago
I'm retired now, but I spent many hours writing and debugging code during my career. I believed that implementing features was what I was being paid to do. I was proud of fixing difficult bugs. A shift to not writing code (which is apparently sometimes possible now) and managing AI agents instead is a pretty major industry change.
- gopher_space 9mo ago
  Anything you do with AI is improved if you're able to traverse the stack. There's no situation where knowing how to code won't put you above peers who don't. It's like how every job requires math if you make it far enough.
- keyle 9mo ago
  As someone not close to retirement yet, it's a very sad shift.
xnx 9mo ago
Lots of people have good judgement but don't know the arcane spells to cast to get a computer to do what they want.
phantasmish 9mo ago
At my company doubling the writing-code part of software projects might speed them up 5%. I think even that’s optimistic. Imperfectly fixing obvious problems in our processes could gain us 20%, easy. Which one are we focusing on? AI. Duh.
Quothling 9mo ago
I think it depends on the sort of work you do. We had some hubspot integration which hadn't been touched for three years break. Probably because someone at hubspot sunset their v1 api a few weeks too early... Our internal AI tool that I've build my own agents on updated our data transfer service to use the v3 api. It also added typing, but kept the rather insane way of delivering the data since... well... since it's worked fine for 3 years. It's still not a great piece of software that runs for us. It's better now than it was yesterday though and it'll now go back to just delivering business value in it's extremely imperfect form. All I had to do was a two line prompt, and accept the pull request. It probably took 10 minutes out of my day, which was mostly the people I was helping explaining what they thought was wrong. I think it might've taken me all day if I had to go through all the code and the documentation and fixed it. It might have taken me a couple of days because I probably would've made it less insane. For other tasks, like when I'm working on embedded software using AI would slow me down significantly. Except when the specifications are in German.
bibimsz 9mo ago
I thought you were going to point how this phrase (and others) make it painfully obvious this article was written by AI.
saghm 9mo ago
Sometimes people who don't work in software seem surprised that I don't type faster than I do given my line of work, and I explain to them that typing speed is never the bottleneck in the work that I do. I don't pretend to know for sure if this holds true for every possible software job but it's not a concept I've seen surprise many software engineers. This almost seems like the next level of that; they certainly do more than just write code I want faster, but except for problems where I have trouble figuring out how to express what I want in code, they're not necessarily the solution to any problem I have. If they could write exactly what I wanted but faster, I'd probably stop writing code any other way at all because that would just be a free win with no downside even though the win might be small! They don't write exactly what I want though, so the tradeoff is whether the amount of time they save me writing it is lost from the extra time debugging the code they wrote rather than my own. It's not clear to me that the code produced by an LLM right now is going to be close enough to correct enough of the time that this will be a net increase in efficiency for me. Most of the arguments I've seen for why I might want to consider investing more of my own time into learning these tools seem to be based on extrapolation of trends to up to this point, but it's still not clear to me that it's likely that they'll become good enough to reach a positive ROI for me any time soon. Maybe if the effort to actually start using them more heavily was lower I'd be willing to try it, but from what I can tell, it would take a decent amount of work for me to get the point where I'm even producing anything close to what I'm currently producing, and I don't really see the point of doing that if it's still an open question if it will ever close the remaining gap.
- RealityVoid 9mo ago
  > I explain to them that typing speed is never the bottleneck in the work that I do. Never is a very strong word. I'm not a terribly fast typist but I intentionally trained to be faster because at times I wanted to whip out some stuff and the thought of typing it all out just annoyed me since it took too long. I think typing speed matters and saying it doesn't is a lie. At the very least if you have a faster baseline then typing stuff is more relaxing instead of just a chore.
  - lolc 9mo ago

add-sub-mul-div 9mo ago

I'll stare at a blank editor for an hour with three different solutions in my head that I could implement, and type nothing until a good enough one comes to mind that will save/avoid time and trouble down the road. That last solution is not best for any simple reason like algorithmic complexity or anything that can be scraped from web sites.

aaroninsf 9mo ago
No shade on your skills, but for most problems, this is already false; the solutions have already been scraped. All OSS has been ingested, and all the discussion in forum like this about it, and the personal blog posts and newsletters about it; and the bug tracking; and theh pull requests, and... and training etc. is only going to get better and filtering out what is "best."
- al_borland 9mo ago
  A vast majority of the problems I’m asked to solve at work do not have open-source code I can simply copy or discussion forums that already decided the best answer. Enterprise customers rarely put that stuff out there. Even if they did, it doesn’t account for the environment the solution sit in, possible future integrations, off-the-wall requests from the boss, or knowing that internal customer X is going to want some other wacky thing, so we need to make life easy on our future selves. At best, what I find online are basic day 1 tutorials and proof on concept stuff. None of it could be used in production where we actually need to handle errors and possible failure situations.
  - jmtulloss 9mo ago
    Obviously novel problems require novel solutions, but the vast majority of software solutions are remixes of existing methods. I don’t know your work so I may be wrong in this specific case, but there are a vanishingly small number of people pushing forward the envelope of human knowledge on a day-to-day basis.
    - ewoodrich 9mo ago
      My company (and others in the same sector) depends on certain proprietary enterprise software that has literally no publicly available API documentation online, anywhere. There is barely anything that qualifies as documentation that they are willing to provide under NDA for lock-in reasons/laziness (ERPish sort of thing narrowly designed for the specific sector, and more or less in a duopoly). The difficulty in developing solutions is 95% understanding business processes/requirements. I suspect this kind of thing becomes more common the further you get from a "software company” into specific industry niches.
- add-sub-mul-div 9mo ago
  The point is that the best solution is based on specific context of my situation and the right judgment couldn't be known by anyone outside of my team/org.

gowld 9mo ago

I don't understand this thinking. How many hours per week did you spend coding on your most recent project? If you could do something else during that time, and the code still got written, what would you do? Or are you saying that you believe you can't get that code written without spending an equivalent amount of time describing your judgments?

scott_w 9mo ago
I think OP is closer to the latter. How I typically have been using Copilot is as a faster autocomplete that I read and tweak before moving on. Too many years of struggling to describe a task to Siri left me deciding “I’ll just show it what I want” rather than tell.
kibwen 9mo ago
"Writing code" is not the goal. The goal is to design a coherent logical system that achieves some goal. So the practice of programming is in thinking hard about what goal I want to achieve, then thinking about the sort of logical system that I could design that would allow me to verifiably achieve that goal, then actually banging out the code that implements the abstract logical system that I have in my head, then iterating to refine both the abstract system and its implementation. And as a result of being the one who produced the code, I have certainty that the code implements the system I have in mind, and that the system it represents is for for the purpose of achieving the original goals. So reducing the part where I go from abstract system to concrete implementation only saves me time spent typing, while at the same time decoupling me from understanding whether the code actually implements the system I have in mind. To recover that coupling, I need to read the code and understand what it does, which is often slower than just typing it myself. And to even express the system to the code generator in the first place still requires me to mentally bridge the gap between the goal and the system that will achieve that goal, so it doesn't save me any time there. The exceptions are things where I literally don't care whether the outputs are actually correct, or they're things that I can rely on external tools to verify (e.g. generating conformance tests), or they're tiny boilerplate autocomplete snippets that aren't trying to do anything subtle or interesting.
- 9mo ago

linhns 9mo ago

Well you should be surprised by the number of people who do not know this. Klarna is probably the most popular example where the CEO was all about creating more code, then fired everyone before regretting

trollbridge 9mo ago
Klarna, now there's a company that seems to have no idea what direction it's going in. In the past month, they've announced they're going to be at the forefront of Agentic AI for merchants so... agents can figure out what merchants are selling? They're somehow offering stablecoins to institutional investors to use USDC to extend loans to Klarna? And then they're starting some kind of credit-card rewards program with access to airline lounges?

skybrian 9mo ago

I'm retired now, but I spent many hours writing and debugging code during my career. I believed that implementing features was what I was being paid to do. I was proud of fixing difficult bugs. A shift to not writing code (which is apparently sometimes possible now) and managing AI agents instead is a pretty major industry change.

gopher_space 9mo ago
Anything you do with AI is improved if you're able to traverse the stack. There's no situation where knowing how to code won't put you above peers who don't. It's like how every job requires math if you make it far enough.
keyle 9mo ago
As someone not close to retirement yet, it's a very sad shift.

xnx 9mo ago

Lots of people have good judgement but don't know the arcane spells to cast to get a computer to do what they want.

phantasmish 9mo ago

At my company doubling the writing-code part of software projects might speed them up 5%. I think even that’s optimistic. Imperfectly fixing obvious problems in our processes could gain us 20%, easy. Which one are we focusing on? AI. Duh.

Quothling 9mo ago

I think it depends on the sort of work you do. We had some hubspot integration which hadn't been touched for three years break. Probably because someone at hubspot sunset their v1 api a few weeks too early... Our internal AI tool that I've build my own agents on updated our data transfer service to use the v3 api. It also added typing, but kept the rather insane way of delivering the data since... well... since it's worked fine for 3 years. It's still not a great piece of software that runs for us. It's better now than it was yesterday though and it'll now go back to just delivering business value in it's extremely imperfect form. All I had to do was a two line prompt, and accept the pull request. It probably took 10 minutes out of my day, which was mostly the people I was helping explaining what they thought was wrong. I think it might've taken me all day if I had to go through all the code and the documentation and fixed it. It might have taken me a couple of days because I probably would've made it less insane. For other tasks, like when I'm working on embedded software using AI would slow me down significantly. Except when the specifications are in German.

bibimsz 9mo ago

I thought you were going to point how this phrase (and others) make it painfully obvious this article was written by AI.

saghm 9mo ago

Sometimes people who don't work in software seem surprised that I don't type faster than I do given my line of work, and I explain to them that typing speed is never the bottleneck in the work that I do. I don't pretend to know for sure if this holds true for every possible software job but it's not a concept I've seen surprise many software engineers. This almost seems like the next level of that; they certainly do more than just write code I want faster, but except for problems where I have trouble figuring out how to express what I want in code, they're not necessarily the solution to any problem I have. If they could write exactly what I wanted but faster, I'd probably stop writing code any other way at all because that would just be a free win with no downside even though the win might be small! They don't write exactly what I want though, so the tradeoff is whether the amount of time they save me writing it is lost from the extra time debugging the code they wrote rather than my own. It's not clear to me that the code produced by an LLM right now is going to be close enough to correct enough of the time that this will be a net increase in efficiency for me. Most of the arguments I've seen for why I might want to consider investing more of my own time into learning these tools seem to be based on extrapolation of trends to up to this point, but it's still not clear to me that it's likely that they'll become good enough to reach a positive ROI for me any time soon. Maybe if the effort to actually start using them more heavily was lower I'd be willing to try it, but from what I can tell, it would take a decent amount of work for me to get the point where I'm even producing anything close to what I'm currently producing, and I don't really see the point of doing that if it's still an open question if it will ever close the remaining gap.

RealityVoid 9mo ago
> I explain to them that typing speed is never the bottleneck in the work that I do. Never is a very strong word. I'm not a terribly fast typist but I intentionally trained to be faster because at times I wanted to whip out some stuff and the thought of typing it all out just annoyed me since it took too long. I think typing speed matters and saying it doesn't is a lie. At the very least if you have a faster baseline then typing stuff is more relaxing instead of just a chore.
- lolc 9mo ago