alt Hacker NewsI've noticed a huge gap between AI use on greenfield projects and brownfield projects. The first day of working on a greenfield project I can accomplish a week of work. But the second day I can accomplish a few days of work. By the end of the first week I'm getting a 20% productivity gain.
I think AI is just allowing everyone to speed-run the innovator's dilemma. Anyone can create a small version of anything, while big orgs will struggle to move quickly as before.
The interesting bit is going to be whether we see AI being used in maturing those small systems into big complex ones that account for the edge cases, meet all the requirements, scale as needed, etc. That's hard for humans to do, and particularly while still moving. I've not see any of this from AI yet outside of either a) very directed small changes to large complex systems, or b) plugins/extensions/etc along a well define set of rails.
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It’s fantastic to be able to prototype small to medium complexity projects, figure what architects work and don’t, then build on a stable foundation.
That’s what I’ve been doing lately, and it really helps get a clean architecture at the end.
I have experienced much of the opposite. With an established code base to copy patterns from, AI can generate code that needs a lot less iteration to clean up than on green fields projects.
Yeah, my observation is that for my usual work, I can maybe get a 20% productivity boot, probably closer to 10% tbh, and for the whole team overall productivity it feels like it has done nothing, as senior use their small productivity gains to fix the tons of issues in PR (or in prod when we miss something).
But last week I had two days where I had no real work to do, so I created cli tools to help with organisation, and cleaning up, I think AI boosted my productivity at least 200%, if not 500.