alt Hacker NewsYes I’ve seen very little change over the past 3 years in my role (platform engineering) except mostly JIRA tickets are more unreadable because people just have Claude vomit a novel into it.
I mean I use it every day of course, but the velocity of work doesn’t really seem to be budging lol. And frankly a lot of time wasted on AI made gadgets, and meetings about those gadgets (look at this dashboard Claude made! etc)
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You may be interested in this report from earlier this year: https://www.faros.ai/blog/ai-acceleration-whiplash-takeaways
And a breakdown of it that gives a bit of an alternate explanation of their numbers (and more closely matches what we're seeing IMO): https://unessays.substack.com/p/talk-is-cheap
Short version is that what you, I, and other responses to you are seeing is backed up by the numbers: AI code generation leads to significant bottlenecks, burnout, increased bugs, insane code churn (rewrites), and decreased feature deployment (presumably due to dealing with the bugs and bottlenecks). And as of when this was done, increased AI did not improve the situation, it generally made it worse.
The code churn stat is what bothers me the most: People keep portraying the whole "quickly rewrite/re-generate code with AI" thing as a feature, but looking at it over time, it actually means you lose your battle-tested code and no longer have a stable foundation to build on top of. That's where I think the major problems will show up as code needs to be maintained - and, seemingly, already has been.
It absolutely has for me. Hours/days out of a month of smashing my head against silly bugs or SQL syntax errors have gone away.
I will agree that some of the savings has been eaten up elsewhere. Lots of trivial but not wrong PR comments ther lead to churn as an example.
So much of this yes, colleagues who think doing AI work is asking Claude to, as you so eloquently wrote "vomit a novel", and allow themselves to disengage their brains.
The joke is at the level of developers, the constant sharpening of AI merge-requests reviewing (sometimes too much) has made the new job of AI speedriding & reviewsfighting a serious brain squeeze.
The value of conscienciousness has skyrocketed, and the value of openness is still the same as it ever was.
> Claude vomit
Stealing this, will use instead of AI slop!
>just have Claude vomit a novel into it
True, that's the other side of it: my daily work has lost the fun reward loop and I'm being alienated from my colleagues. But I still have colleagues!