3 ms·

Yep. It's ridiculous to talk about 10x or 5x or 2x anything in any but the smallest companies. All this talk about programmer velocity is micro-optimizing somet

by Sharlin 8mo ago

Yep. It's ridiculous to talk about 10x or 5x or 2x anything in any but the smallest companies. All this talk about programmer velocity is micro-optimizing something that's not a bottleneck.

K0balt 8mo ago
I’ve been thinking a lot about this. I think that AI software automation tools are disproportionately more useful in greenfield work done by small or tiny organizations. By an order of magnitude, maybe 2 in some cases. What that means is anyone’s guess, but it seems like it should result in a Cambrian explosion of disruptive new companies, limited in scope by the idea space. The thing about small teams is, with a few exceptions, the biggest challenges are typically funnels for users and product-market fit, overcoming and exploitation of network effects, etc… so even in small orgs, if you make 30 percent of the problem 4x faster/smaller you still have the other 70 percent which is now 92.5% of the problem. This applies even more acutely in larger organizations… so for them, 99 percent of the problem remains. Intangibles in an organization like reluctance, education, and organizational inertia fill the gap left by software acceleration, and in the end you only see tiny gains, if any. What really happened, on an organizational scale, is that software development costs went down. We wouldn’t expect a wage collapse in coding to foment an explosive revolution in company profitability or dynamism. We shouldn’t expect those things of LLM assistance. We should look at it as a reduction in cost with potentially dangerous side effects if not managed carefully, with an especially big reduction in r&d development costs.
scuff3d 8mo ago
Literally the most useful LLMs have been to me is dealing with the pile of corporate bullshit we have to put up with day to day. For example, we have to plan 8 to 12 sprints in advance. Full acceptance criteria, story points, and slotted into a sprint with points balanced across the team. Of course this is utterly useless, anything past the second sprint is going to be wrong, but they want it done. LLMs got me through that in a few hours instead of a few days.
- zombot 8mo ago
  Making the bullshit cheaper to inflict only means that soon you will be graced with even more of it. Bullshit expands until capacity for it is exhausted.
zombot 8mo ago
As if that weren't enough, LLM coding "productivity" is measured in lines of code, of all things.

by Sharlin 8mo ago

Yep. It's ridiculous to talk about 10x or 5x or 2x anything in any but the smallest companies. All this talk about programmer velocity is micro-optimizing something that's not a bottleneck.

K0balt 8mo ago

I’ve been thinking a lot about this. I think that AI software automation tools are disproportionately more useful in greenfield work done by small or tiny organizations. By an order of magnitude, maybe 2 in some cases. What that means is anyone’s guess, but it seems like it should result in a Cambrian explosion of disruptive new companies, limited in scope by the idea space. The thing about small teams is, with a few exceptions, the biggest challenges are typically funnels for users and product-market fit, overcoming and exploitation of network effects, etc… so even in small orgs, if you make 30 percent of the problem 4x faster/smaller you still have the other 70 percent which is now 92.5% of the problem. This applies even more acutely in larger organizations… so for them, 99 percent of the problem remains. Intangibles in an organization like reluctance, education, and organizational inertia fill the gap left by software acceleration, and in the end you only see tiny gains, if any. What really happened, on an organizational scale, is that software development costs went down. We wouldn’t expect a wage collapse in coding to foment an explosive revolution in company profitability or dynamism. We shouldn’t expect those things of LLM assistance. We should look at it as a reduction in cost with potentially dangerous side effects if not managed carefully, with an especially big reduction in r&d development costs.

scuff3d 8mo ago

Literally the most useful LLMs have been to me is dealing with the pile of corporate bullshit we have to put up with day to day. For example, we have to plan 8 to 12 sprints in advance. Full acceptance criteria, story points, and slotted into a sprint with points balanced across the team. Of course this is utterly useless, anything past the second sprint is going to be wrong, but they want it done. LLMs got me through that in a few hours instead of a few days.

zombot 8mo ago
Making the bullshit cheaper to inflict only means that soon you will be graced with even more of it. Bullshit expands until capacity for it is exhausted.

zombot 8mo ago

As if that weren't enough, LLM coding "productivity" is measured in lines of code, of all things.