alt Hacker NewsAt which point you've gained very little efficiency in most large organizations given that by the time you're actually doing development work at the ticket level 90% of the project timeline (identifying issues, prioritizing, creating requirements, architecture, ticket breakdowns, coordination, etc) has already passed.
If AI can enable engineers to move through the organization more effectively, say by allowing them to work through the service mesh as a whole, that could reduce time. But in order to evaluate code contributions to any space well, as far as I can tell, you still have to put in leg work even if you are an experienced engineer and write some features which exposes you to the libraries, quirks, logging/monitoring, language, etc that make up that specific codebase. (And also to build trust with the people who own that codebase and will be gatekeeping your changes, unless you prefer the Amazon method of having junior engineers YOLO changes onto production codebases without review apparently... holy moly, how did they get to that point in the first place...)
So the gains seem marginal at best in large organizations. I've seen some small organizations move quicker with it, they have less overhead, less complexity, and smaller tasks. Although I've yet to see much besides very small projects/POCs/MVPs from anyone non-technical.
Maybe it'll get to the point where it can handle more complexity, I kind of think we're leveling off on this particular phase of AI, and some headlines seem to confirm that...
- MS starting to make CoPilot a bit less prominent in its products and marketing - Sora shutting down - Lots of murky, weird, circular deals to fund a money pit with no profits - Observations at work
It's really kind of crazy how much our entire society can be hijacked by these hype machines. My company did slow roll AI deployment a bit, but it very much feels like the Wild West, and the amount of money spent! I'm sure it's astronomical. Pretty sure we could have hired contractors to create the Chrome plugin and Kafka topic dashboard we've deployed for far cheaper
The productivity gains are somewhat real in a sense, but are not really about "moving faster", as the hype would have us believe. GenAI agentic systems instead boost individual developer "efficiency" by allowing a single, reasonably qualified developer, to approximate an entire software team. As those developers, however, we're still required to manage the workload of those teams and ourselves to ensure quality output, just as ever before.
The problem is that it's VERY easy to overload oneself with the output of these new tools. Human comprehension is the bottleneck, as much as it always has been. Anyone that tells you otherwise is shilling for these companies.