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. weakfish · 1790093363 · focus · HN ↗

                        I honestly don’t understand comments like this because in my work, this would be a disaster. And before I get the comments about my harness/skills etc, I’ve tried many tools and harnesses and skills and all that earnestly and in good faith. I find use in it for doing the grunt typing labor, but letting it loose in ways described above have only ended in spending much more time cleaning it up than if I just did the work myself.

                        I hate to sound pretentious, but I wonder if it’s a difference in complexity of work and problems being solved.

                        1. consumer451 · 1790193673 · focus · HN ↗

                           I just reviewed this thread, and thanks for an opening to say something I had realized I missed.

                           > I hate to sound pretentious, but I wonder if it’s a difference in complexity of work and problems being solved.

                           It is about complexity, at least for me. I am working on b2b SaaS.

                           There are times where even using LLM assistance, I spend weeks or months working on a tough problem.

                           However, the <show product get feedback> loop is now nearly entire automated, when it does not involve some actually complex problem, which are most of the meetings.

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