4 ms·

> or the boilerplate, libraries, build-tools, and refactoring If your dev group is spending 90% of their time on these... well, you'd probably be right to fire

by jmull 7mo ago

> or the boilerplate, libraries, build-tools, and refactoring If your dev group is spending 90% of their time on these... well, you'd probably be right to fire someone. Not most of the developers but whoever put in place a system where so much time is spent on overhead/retrograde activities. Something that's getting lost in the new, low cost of generating code is that code is a burden, not an asset. There's an ongoing maintenance and complexity cost. LLMs lower maintenance cost, but if you're generating 10x code you aren't getting ahead. Meanwhile, the cost of unmanaged complexity goes up exponentially. LLMs or no, you hit a wall if you don't manage it well.

linsomniac 7mo ago
>There's an ongoing maintenance and complexity cost. My company has 20 years of accumulated tech debt, and the LLMs have been pretty amazing at helping us dig out from under a lot of that. You make valid points, but I'm just going to chime in with adding code is not the only thing that these tools are good at.
bluefirebrand 7mo ago
> LLMs lower maintenance cost Even the most enthusiastic AI boosters I've read don't seem to agree with this. From what I can tell, LLMs are still mostly useful at building in greenfield projects, and they are weak at maintaining brownfield projects
- helge9210 7mo ago
  From my experience greenfield /brownfield is not the best dichotomy here. I observed, how same tooling is generating meaningless slop on greenfield project and 10kLoC of change (leading to an outage) on existing project in one hands and building a fairly complex new project and fixing a long (years) standing bug with a two lines patch in the other. And I have more examples, where I, personally, was on the both sides of the fence: defined by my level of the same problem understanding, not by the tooling.
MathMonkeyMan 7mo ago
> Not most of the developers but whoever put in place a system where so much time is spent on overhead/retrograde activities. Dude that's everybody in charge. You're young, you build a system, you mold it to shifting customer needs, you strike gold, you assume greater responsibility. You hire lots of people. A few years go by. Why can't these people get shit done? When I was in their shoes, I was flying, I did what was needed. Maybe we hired second rate talent. Maybe they're slacking. Maybe we should lay them off, or squeeze them harder, or pray AI will magically improve the outcome. Come on, look in the mirror.

by jmull 7mo ago

linsomniac 7mo ago

>There's an ongoing maintenance and complexity cost. My company has 20 years of accumulated tech debt, and the LLMs have been pretty amazing at helping us dig out from under a lot of that. You make valid points, but I'm just going to chime in with adding code is not the only thing that these tools are good at.

bluefirebrand 7mo ago

> LLMs lower maintenance cost Even the most enthusiastic AI boosters I've read don't seem to agree with this. From what I can tell, LLMs are still mostly useful at building in greenfield projects, and they are weak at maintaining brownfield projects

helge9210 7mo ago
From my experience greenfield /brownfield is not the best dichotomy here. I observed, how same tooling is generating meaningless slop on greenfield project and 10kLoC of change (leading to an outage) on existing project in one hands and building a fairly complex new project and fixing a long (years) standing bug with a two lines patch in the other. And I have more examples, where I, personally, was on the both sides of the fence: defined by my level of the same problem understanding, not by the tooling.

MathMonkeyMan 7mo ago

> Not most of the developers but whoever put in place a system where so much time is spent on overhead/retrograde activities. Dude that's everybody in charge. You're young, you build a system, you mold it to shifting customer needs, you strike gold, you assume greater responsibility. You hire lots of people. A few years go by. Why can't these people get shit done? When I was in their shoes, I was flying, I did what was needed. Maybe we hired second rate talent. Maybe they're slacking. Maybe we should lay them off, or squeeze them harder, or pray AI will magically improve the outcome. Come on, look in the mirror.