alt Hacker NewsThe 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.
And just to underscore my point about the disconnect between the advertising/hype vs the reality: the real point of this tech and the reason leadership seems so motivated to push it is that they ultimately see this tooling as our replacement, not our enhancement, at least in the long term (although those "many hats" roles will have to persist).
It's just harder to sell trades folk the tools of their demise, so it's couched in terms of a miracle product that'll make us all 10x devs; when the reality is, it'll just be 1/10 of us still around doing the risk mitigation work left within the system that relaced us.