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This article assumes that AI only has an impact on the development phase which is certainly not true. It can speed up every part of the step. Including ideation
by ddosmax556 5mo ago
This article assumes that AI only has an impact on the development phase which is certainly not true. It can speed up every part of the step. Including ideation, legal, documentation, development, and deployment.
Ideation: Throw ideas back & forth, cross reference with knowledge bases, generate design documents. Documentation: Generate large parts of docs. Development: Clear. Deployment: Generate deployment manifests, tooling around testing, knowledge around cloud platforms.
Every single step can be done better & faster with AI. Not all of them, but a lot.
Even development. Yes some part of your job involves understanding the problem better than anyone & making solutions. But some parts are also purely chore. If you know you keed a button doing X, then designing that button, placing it, figuring out edge cases with hover & press states, connecting to the backend etc - this is chore that can be skipped. Same principle applies to almost all steps.
- echelon 5mo agoThe onus isn't on people using AI effectively to prove it to others. In fact, these disagreements and disbeliefs create opportunities and salients in the market.
- obsidianbases1 5mo agoIndeed. I suspect most effective AI users are quietly making real progress toward their objectives. Anecdotally, I see a lot of problems/solutions content about AI that doesn't reflect at all the challenges I face. But trying to tell people that there are other ways of doing things, especially when it conflicts with token-maxxing, is a lost cause
- ddosmax556 5mo agoI know and I agree. It sounds incredibly arrogant but it's frankly is a bid sad to see how much HN is lagging behind AI adaption. It's been 90% noise over the last 3-6 months about problems that aren't truly problems if you really look hard at what AI is capable to do already today. It's mostly ppl & process problems. I could post a comment like the one above below almost every article on AI. But it is what it is. It's an opportunity for anyone who doesn't bite into the cynical tone here for sure.
- solenoid0937 5mo agoThe HN AI skeptics are just bizarre to me. They are insisting to us that, no, the productivity gains we're experiencing every day, simply don't exist! It's not that they're using the tool wrong, it's that the tool just isn't capable of what we see before our own eyes! I guess our eyes and ears are simply lying to us? And then they ask for how we are managing to make things move faster. When you refuse to breach NDA and give up your competitive advantage on HN, this somehow confirms their belief that AI is useless.
- echelon 5mo ago> When you refuse to breach NDA and give up your competitive advantage on HN I want to know your alpha because that excites me. These people have their heads buried in the sand.
- pkoird 5mo agoPrecisely. People don't realize that it's all numbers. Given average IQ of people involved in a project is 140, an AI with an IQ of 150 can replicate each and every such individuals in the pipeline. People saying AI can't do this or AI can't do that should come to terms with the fact that this IQ gap is monotonously increasing.
- tonyedgecombe 5mo agoMonotonically although I do find the discourse on AI rather monotonous.
- OccamsMirror 5mo agoFunnily enough, though, I think it makes dumb people dumber.
- icedchai 5mo agoI agree. Inexperienced people (not necessarily "dumb") are likely to accept everything at face value, not apply critical thinking skills, and not even check the AI generated output.
- tovej 5mo agoAn AI does not have an IQ.
- gravity2060 5mo agoAll of the above points align with our organization’s experience. But there is one more thing happening as well: we have more people in more roles able to create software solutions for issues that used to be brute forced via physical processes. (We are a small manufacturing business.) While these aren’t big giant enterprise projects that require deep swe experience, they are simple software tools that are improving process and productivity everywhere. It is pretty amazing what happens when your head of shipping can build a bespoke tool to solve a problem that previously they dealt with through burning through a lot of labor hours.
- yieldcrv 5mo agoyeah the Coinbase CEO gleefully pointed that out as well and now the market thinks they are totally incompetent every time some UX quirk is found looks like orgs have to have engineers on for optics. like having a legal staff with no lawyers, or a cybersecurity staff with no IT or certified people. Software has famously not needed state licenses or industry certification, but maybe thats a direction to consider to give utility to company optics.
- xeromal 5mo agoOne of our BAs created a site that tests the effectiveness of copy / layout adjustments. I don't even know exactly what that's called but he's able to do statistical analysis much faster on what works and what doesn't. It's really cool to watch him thrive and I feel like some of the thinkers that were not devs are going to find themselves to be one but in their specific domain in a few years
- Avicebron 5mo agoI would be really interested in the details of these kind of tools that are improving processes and productivity. Are they reasonably documented/audited/put into any sort of version control like a lot of internal tooling? Or are they the kind of the thing that gets whacked together on the fly in a "move spreadsheet data from A to B", "I want a list of people's schedules with custom highlighting" kind of things. Not doubting your productivity increase, I'm just curious how people quantify that when they say it.
- 5mo ago
- RaftPeople 5mo agoI tend to agree with the article. A typical example of trying to add a new significant capability involves many meetings (days, weeks, months, etc. )with the business to understand how their work flows between systems X, Y and Z as well as all of the significant exceptions (e.g. we handle subset A this way and subset B that way, but for the final step we blend those groups together, except for subset C which requires special process 97). Then with that understanding comes the system solutioning across multiple systems that can be a blend of internal system or vendor's system, each with different levels of ability to customize, which pushes the shape of the final solution in different directions. There is certainly value in speeding up coding, but it's just one piece of the puzzle and today LLM's can't help with gathering the domain information and defining a solution.
- wise0wl 5mo agoI've seen proposals for Product Managers to define those conditions themselves by speaking with the LLM. A continuing architectural diagram is constructed and graph is updated until all cases are covered and then the LLM writes the code, writes the validations, pushes to CI environments, runs tests, schedules prod deploy (by looking at company event schedule), gets CAB approval, deploys code, tests in prod, and fixes regressions. I'm not saying this is the correct thing, but companies are implementing it and it is "working". I don't think keeping our head in the sand is helping.
- ijustlovemath 5mo agois it working though? The main outcome we've seen with companies that drink the AI Kool aid en masse is buggy unstable systems. clearly there's a level of rigor that's being missed for ship velocity
- RaftPeople 5mo ago> I've seen proposals for Product Managers to define those conditions themselves by speaking with the LLM. But the LLM is not aware of how the business works and why, so someone needs to work with the business to extract the information. Typically it's not well documented.
- monkeydust 5mo agoThe article pretty much plays out whats happening in our place, heavy use of AI in software development but we dont see us shipping faster, about same or perhaps slower (for other reasons). Its a weird feeling as were waiting for this utopia to kick-in but its not and were cant fully put our fingers on it.
- solenoid0937 5mo agoThe article and the AI skepticism crowd on HN read like the blind leading the blind to me. I'm at a FAANG. My org is moving much more quickly, maybe between 3-10x more quickly than we were pre-AI. We aren't seeing a spike in reliability issues. Things just get done faster. An org as large as mine has no right to move as fast as it does.
- christoph 5mo agoI’ve been back through your post history (not entirely) - you mention multiple times you work at a FAANG - so you work at one of 5 very public companies. You have been asked multiple times by multiple commenters to provide a single example of something that reflects this incredible boost achieved by <massive tech org>, you have ignored every request for this, and I suspect will ignore this one as well. HN is going to die unless we all start calling these constant deceptive practices out. I’ll leave others to parse your history and make their own judgements. “Judge them by their fruits”
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- solenoid0937 4mo agoNot going to break NDA and give up our competitive advantage for HN, sorry! I can tell you it's been useful for us, but thinking about how to use it is an exercise left for the reader.
- arkadiytehgraet 4mo ago
- IanCal 5mo agoAlso things like improving devx - nicer log analysis, speeding up test suites, auto handing some CI failures, improving scripting, tooling etc.
- lomase 5mo ago[dead]
- damowangcy 5mo agoThe main problem is, it's not a one-size-fit-all tool, you need to understand what it speeds up to benefit from the speed up. And if it is a chore, we already have some tools to speed it up, only if it is worth it though. Placing a button is actually easy if you get all the design system down usually with a component library, visual regression automation and testing automation. If a team doesn't have tools and automation in place, AI might speed them up a little but it adds a layer of complexity, i.e. everyone have to manage their own workflow and tools. And when you try to align the team, you get the tools and automation that the team is supposed to have in the first place. As for ideation, the problem isn't the speed of information ingestion but the ability to connect and understand different parts of the information, which require thinking. More information at times is just going to hinder the ability to think. For example, it is obvious to developers why there is a rate limit for the APIs but for PMs it might not be obvious. They might ask the AI whether or not a rate limit can be removed easily, how many days if you vibe code it and ignore the possibility that the rate limit might by abused by users just to improve a feature because it is too slow. We are still doing alot of work with new tools but old methods though, it will be interesting to see how far can we go if we forget about the old rules and embrace the chaos entirely.