Thread

1. torben-friis · 1790026444 · focus · HN ↗

   Here's my constant question:

   Everyone's going so fast that they keep hitting walls. Review, CI, product asking for things, whatever.

   Why have we not seen an improvements in products?

   While every post and thread feels like a 90's wall street office, the new android and iphone ship with fewer features than usual. No indie guys come up with a linux-sized alternative OS. Switch 2 remains unhacked. Windows takes 3 seconds to show the right click menu.

   Is everyone just running full speed in circles or something?

   1. TrueDuality · 1790027434 · focus · HN ↗

      A good chunk of what my company has been doing with AI falls into either burning down our known tech-debt and "easy wins" that no one ever had the bandwidth to approach... And improving / automating our processes. The former is having a direct and meaningful impact on the quality and availability of our services.

      Our QA, formerly a fairly frequent blocker of all our releases, are doing more in-depth reviews and catching issues earlier in our release process. They have become unblocked to the point they are actively chasing down work that starts to slip.

      We have cleaned up and tuned both our security alerts and operations logs and improved our tenant isolation in our service in a way that makes customer and formal audits SIGNIFICANTLY easier.

      We're setting ourselves up for faster human development of the hard-things. Our development environment and infrastructure are faster, cleaner, more auditable processes, and cheaper overall to operate.

      These fixes mostly don't show up in our product change logs, and definitely don't fall into "new features". It would largely be invisible to the outside world, but our costs are going down (though to be fair, not offsetting the spend on AI to date), internal productivity has improved, operational incidents are down, and customer satisfaction is up.

      1. lazyasciiart · 1790038889 · focus · HN ↗

         How is dev satisfaction?

         1. consumer451 · 1790040098 · focus · HN ↗

            A luxury of the past, for >90% of devs?

            1. consumer451 · 1790060635 · focus · HN ↗

               I want to add to this, because it's certainly not all doom and gloom for me, yet.

               If you are product-driven, life is pretty good, and maybe has never been better? (For the moment)

               1. zerr · 1790067697 · focus · HN ↗

                  If you are product-driven why not go into Product Ownership roles? It certainly will be more satisfying compared to prompt "engineering" clerk "career".

                  1. consumer451 · 1790068008 · focus · HN ↗

                     Well, my life is currently both, as I am on the smallest possible tech and product team. To me, extrapolating on having done this since Sonnet 3.5 to now, there will be no tech aspect to the job soon enough. There are many hundreds of billions invested in making that a reality, and they are succeeding.

                     Until ~9 months ago, I spent most of my time being a "prompt engineer." Today I join a meeting, ten minutes later I receive the transcript. Then, I run a custom skill in my project, and I get Jira epics and stories to triage that are nearly perfect. Then, I run the second skill orchestration skill... some babysitting... and ~85% of the time that is all I need to do. Docs, code, unit and e2e, great UX... all there after every meeting, and basically two commands on my part.

                     I see two to three to maybe five years before anything I have to offer, in any capacity, is completely cut out of the picture.

                     I honestly don't understand how everyone is not on this same page. The labs are going to eat it all. The only reason I see for them to talk about "pausing," is because they finally realized that they are going to collapse the entire service economy around themselves at this rate: aka, the USA.

                     1. zerr · 1790070122 · focus · HN ↗

                        Not sure how long the current subsidized pricing would last. Also, the vast majority of software shops can't afford those subsidized prices anyway.

                        1. baq · 1790076676 · focus · HN ↗

                           It’s 10 devs with a small ai budget each vs 1 ex-dev now PM with a large ai budget - the choice is quite obvious for any decision maker who counts time and money

                           1. brookst · 1790080348 · focus · HN ↗

                              But assuming that one ex-dev with a large AI budget is highly profitable, why wouldn’t you convert the other 9 and give large ai budgets as well?

                              I guess if the company has no opportunities for growth so they only need exactly as much output as one team? But that sounds like a company that’s doomed anyway, regardless of ai.

                              1. baq · 1790083987 · focus · HN ↗

                                 You need to grow customers or contracts by 10x to fill the new pipeline and that's an impedance mismatch. Easier to let 9 go and hire later, especially since everyone else will be doing the same thing and there'll be a rather large pool of talent.

                                 How you identify talent in this new world is a different kind of a problem which I don't think people figured out still and won't for quite a while.

                                 1. brookst · 1790168945 · focus · HN ↗

                                    If an org suddenly has 10x the production capacity for the same price and can’t figure out how to sell it profitably, it is mismanaged and will die. That’s very much the case for a lot of businesses for sure, but there have been filters before (the internet, for instance) and we survived.

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