Thread

AI coding has made CI a bottleneck, so we reworked ours to keep up

317 points · 408 comments · julian_digital

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?
    consumer451 · 1790040098 · focus · HN ↗
    A luxury of the past, for >90% of devs?
    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)
    netdevphoenix · 1790066000 · focus · HN ↗
    >If you are product-driven, life is pretty good, and maybe has never been better
    It has certainly been better for junior devs, mid devs, anyone looking for zirp era salary growth and supply demand ratios. For a senior code-adverse coaster looking forward to see his static salary get eaten by inflation, life has indeed never been better.
    consumer451 · 1790067243 · focus · HN ↗
    Yeah, at Corp, that makes sense. I was thinking more along the lines of scrappy startup silliness. "I am one person and I deal with any and all code to get my product built."
    From that POV, has it ever been better, assuming you can rise to the top of an ever more crowded market?
    netdevphoenix · 1790067940 · focus · HN ↗
    > "I am one person and I deal with code to get my product my built." From that POV, has it ever been better, assuming you can rise to the top of an ever more crowded market?
    Building a product is easier now, same way making a photograph is easier now. Making a reliable and high income living out of it though, it looks increasingly uncertain.
    In a world with abundant music and photography, just saying that you made your music using Reason/ProTools or you made your photograph with a Leica isn't enough. I believe the same will happen with software. Sales, product design, customer service and operational aspects like uptime will matter more than the software itself. Ironically, this is the kind of stuff the HN type highly dislikes.
    consumer451 · 1790070025 · focus · HN ↗
    > I believe the same will happen with software. Sales, product design, customer service and operational aspects like uptime will matter more than the software itself. Ironically, this is the kind of stuff the HN type highly dislikes.
    Agreed. It's not even a new thing. They tried to teach me/us long ago, starting by putting it into words we might more easily understand, such as "Customer Development" lol.
    When I realized that it was the sales guys that will have the power in the mid-term new world, I got genuinely upset. However, maybe they always had the power and I just didn't want to accept reality.
    Now, I believe the most desired hire in the near future will be the PMM.
    netdevphoenix · 1790073687 · focus · HN ↗
    What is PMM?
    sgarland · 1790077688 · focus · HN ↗
    Percona Monitoring and Management [0].
    ...or not. Probably not.
    0: <a href="https://github.com/percona/pmm" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/percona/pmm
    disgruntledphd2 · 1790080304 · focus · HN ↗
    It's probably Product Marketing Manager. So essentially selling the new stuff to new and old clients at scale.
    r_lee · 1790078244 · focus · HN ↗
    I'm guessing PM mistyped
    daveidol · 1790092903 · focus · HN ↗
    No it’s Product Marketing Manager. A common title and one part of the holy trinity (PM, EM, PMM) at bigger companies.
    brookst · 1790080158 · focus · HN ↗
    Some orgs use PMM for product management and marketing.
    consumer451 · 1790099757 · focus · HN ↗
    > A Product Marketing Manager (PMM) in tech is a strategic bridge between the product, sales, and marketing teams who defines who a product is for and why it matters.
    A PMM with a tech background must be worth their weight in unobtainium at this point.

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