Eight Myths on Software Engineering and GenAI

>On my visits to the Bay Area, I would ask AI researchers or interns why they are doing their current research or projects, when in a year or three agentic LLMs could probably do them;

This is such a weird point to make that doesn't become correct just because everyone makes it, all the time. Why clean the ocean if some magic future tech will clean them? Why save the world now if some benevolent AI is 'just around the corner' and will do it for us? And people have been making this point for years now, and it's not like my job got any easier. I just got more AI.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/51294/waiting-for-the...

And I say that as someone who uses Claude Code in complex environments almost hourly; I, as the human, still have to do the thinking as Claude still 'can't jump' [1] and I have seen no evidence that they (or similar AI, any time soon) will 'jump' like a human brain does.

[1] https://www.tomzahavy.com/files/llms-cant-jump.pdf

I feel like all you need to know about how seriously to take this is that they cite that ancient early-2025 METR study, and describe it in the text as "recently one even found..."

I don't understand Myth 1 (Developers Spend Most of Their Time Writing Code).

They quote a study in which developers report to spend 11-14% of their day coding. The rest is stuff like solution design and meetings. The insinuation is that AI can at most automate 14% of your day.

The problem with this argument is that once you have code, some (not all) of the precursors to code go away.

> We already know developers don’t actually spend most of their time writing code, with studies at Microsoft and elsewhere showing it’s closer to 14 percent.

Anyone else finding they're spending more time writing code (or at least driving agents to write code) now?

14% used to feel about right for me - I'd spend the rest of the time researching approaches and libraries, planning things out in issues, or sometimes just thinking really hard about problems I ran into.

Now... I still do those things, but I'm doing many of them faster - and I'm often doing them while my coding agents are churning away on code.

There's also this weird effect where the harder a problem is the more I can get done in parallel with it, because an agent might need to spend 20 minutes on it without my involvement.

It seems that this could have been expanded or contracted to any Fibonacci number of myths.

|--------|-------|------|------|-------|------|

|Contract|Product|Design|Coding|Testing|Deploy|

Writing Code Isn't the Bottleneck, until writing code is the bottleneck, until it's not again.

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