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bitwize04/23/20251 replyview on HN

Earlier this year, a hackernews started quizzing me about the size and scope of the projects I worked on professionally, with the implication that I couldn't really be working on anything large or complex -- that I couldn't really be doing serious development, without using a full-fat IDE like IntelliJ. I wasn't going to dox myself or my professional work just so he could reach a conclusion he's already arrived at. The point is, to this person, beyond a certain complexity threshold -- simple command-line tools, say -- an IDE was a must, otherwise you were just leaving productivity on the table.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42511441

People are going to be making the same judgements about AI-assisted coding in the near future. Sure, you could code everything yourself for your own personal enrichment, or simply because it's fun. But that will be a pursuit for your own time. In the realm of business, it's a different story: you are either proompting, or you're effectively stealing money from your employer because you're making suboptimal use of the tools available. AI gets you to something working in production so much faster that you'd be remiss not to use it. After all, as Milt and Tim Bryce have shown, the hard work in business software is in requirements analysis and design; programming is just the last translation step.


Replies

kcexn04/26/2025

My professional career has mostly been in IT ops. I've worked for companies that do requirements analysis and design in-house, write up a huge spec, send the spec to an offshore development house, then simply acceptance test the software that is sent back.

Companies know that the quality of the software they get back might be lower than if they hired the bestest, smartest developers in the world. But it doesn't matter because keeping the production cost of the asset low means that they can maximize long term profits.

Writing good software is not the same as writing profitable software.