alt Hacker News> Planning, alignment, scoping, code review, and handoffs—the human parts of the SDLC—remain largely untouched
Seems likely that process is holding things back. Planning has always been a "best-guess". There's lots you can't account for until you start a task.
Code review mostly exists because the cost of doing something wrong was high (because human coding is slow). If you can code faster, you can replace bad code faster. I.e., LLMs have cheapened the cost of deployment.
We can't honestly assess the new way of doing things when we bring along the baggage of the old way of doing things.
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The cost of doing something wrong still is high. Even if bad code is produced instantaneously, its detrimental effect on production remains the same. Yes, yes, what fell on the floor and was picked up in five seconds is still considered fine to eat! Does not apply to eggs though. Customer trust is usually such an egg.
Writing code has become much faster. Writing correct and reliable code has become somehow faster, but not nearly as much. Understanding what code to write has barely become faster.
The more novel is the code you're writing, the smaller are gains from AI writing it.
Planning might end up being more reliable thanks to coding agents: if you want to estimate how long a task would take, just send an agent to do it.
If the agent comes back in a few minutes with a tiny fix, it is probably a small task.
If the agent produces a large, convoluted solution that would need careful review, it is at least a medium task.
And if the agent gets stuck, runs into architectural constraints, etc. then it is definitely a hard task.