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nyruleztoday at 4:41 PM5 repliesview on HN

Bold claims that writing code was never the bottleneck. It may not be the only bottleneck but we conveniently move goal posts now that there is a more convenient mechanism and our profession is under threat.


Replies

orpheatoday at 4:57 PM

  our profession is under threat.
It is. But I don't think it's AI that threatens it. It's susceptible to hype people who, unfortunately, have the power over people's jobs. C-level management who don't know anything better than parroting what others in the industry are saying. How is that "all engineers will be replaced in 6 months" going?
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Frierentoday at 5:01 PM

This is a case of "depends on the project".

For very small projects, code may be the main bottleneck. Just to write the code is what takes most of the time. Adding code faster can accelerate development.

For larger projects, design, integration, testing, feature discovery, architecture, bug fixing, etc. takes most of the time. Adding code faster may slow down development and create conflicts between teams.

Discussing without a common context makes no sense in this situation.

So, depending on your industry and the size of the projects that you have worked on one thing or the other may be true.

demorrotoday at 4:56 PM

There's plenty of evidence of this line of thinking even from before the turn of the Millennium. Mythical Man Month, No Silver Bullet, Code Complete, they all gesture at this point.

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greggybtoday at 5:23 PM

I actually consider that the claim is not that bold, and in fact has been common in our industry for most of the short time it has been around. I included a few articles and studies with time breakdowns of developer activity that I think help to illustrate this.

If an activity (getting code into source files) used to take up <50% of the time of programmers, then removing that bottleneck cannot even double the throughput of the process. This is not taking into account non-programmer roles involved in software development. This is akin to Amdahl's law when we talk about the benefits of parallelism.

I made no argument with regard to threat to the profession, and I make none here.

Sparkle-santoday at 5:04 PM

Writing good code might be a bottleneck and the same can't be said about code in general.