AI is great because my job is a lot easier, but it produces some extremely crappy code that would've NEVER passed a code review 1 year ago.

You could argue that it speeds up development by 5X or more, but then it slows down testing/verifying, code review, and in many cases it makes it impossible to review/rework by hand.

I just do what I'm told at work but even though I'm sure I'm in the minority I'm extremely skeptical that LLMs can produce any good-quality code.

Looks to me like we've just lowered the bar--by a lot--and stopped looking at the code that goes out. Every time I look into how Claude implemented something it's completely insane, with no way to refactor it or maintain it in the future.

> So maybe there's 2x speedup in coding. But that's only a small speedup in the totality of everything software engineers do.

Amdahl's Law should be familiar to anyone with a 4y computer science/engineering degree. Why aren't they applying it to their own throughput?

The other hard to measure part is that I see/hear a lot of LLM usage going towards dev work that was never prioritized before.

Suddenly devs who were cranking out features with no interest in infrastructure are attacking giant refactors to make the code more understandable to the LLM.

Other devs are using LLMs to build themselves quality of life SDLC tools completely separate from the core code base.

Plenty of other examples of this.

I use CC to do the testing and verifying in multiple deployment environments. It’s faster at things like coming up a plausible test payload or ten, querying a bunch of metrics from datadog, querying and verifying state from a db before and after testing, scanning all the deployed logs for relevant errors. For me that has been more of an uplift than the coding. I still feel like communication it’s worst at. So writing tickets, getting a decision out of a group, documenting only the important things, etc. it’s still not that good at

Agentic tools changed the workflow in our org, we were very tense before with a simple yet careful team process.. Since last winter we're now pushing a lot more but the teamwork (which was brittle before) is now mostly gone, everybody can roll on its own, but the review process didn't scale and now monthly deliveries are full of "seems to work". nobody checks properly, nobody reviews, nobody tighten any bolts.. and nobody cares much anyway, the system allows it.