alt Hacker NewsWe shouldn't give up on line-by-line review for serious applications.
My company's leadership is oscillating every few weeks on AI goals. Their most recent story is "we're expecting developer velocity to approximately double over the new 2-3 years as people get better at using AI". But of course that's completely non sequitur. People on my team spend about 10% of their time writing code and 90% doing design and analysis. So if AI doubles our code writing velocity, then it will make us 5% faster overall.
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I wish they taught Amdahl's law in business school. Or at the very least the simple concept of "bottleneck".
Which is basically what this study is showing.
> So if AI doubles our code writing velocity, then it will make us 5% faster overall.
This tracks with the actual revenue impact of AI adoption:
https://www.bcg.com/publications/2026/the-formula-for-agenti...
Their very cheerful "high" revenue increase from AI adoption (that few companies in the index manage to achieve) sits at 4.5%. Most of those in the "value generating" minority are seeing sub-1% returns.
Which, of course, is non-zero, real, and all that, and matters when we're talking about a 4-5% increase of a big company's revenue, assuming the expenses are not catching up with that.
Which they absolutely are. The AI is subsidized by venture capital, and the subsidies are drying up (hence OpenAI upcoming funding round). None of the AI companies are profitable (much less self-sustaining), and AI prices are inevitably increasing.
Is your company striving to automate design and analysis, then?
> We shouldn't give up on line-by-line review for serious applications.
But how many changes are actually serious?
I can have an agent mass-produce security bug fixes, zip through our low-priority backlog, etc.
IMO - we need to get out of our own way.
Building is cheap now. Agents are also really good at following checklists and running tests.
So instead of having individual engineers reviewing code, we need to
* Leave human review for the most impactful changes
* Get better at defining the quality bar
* Continually codify human concerns into rules or systems that can be checked against
A lot of this was touched on a few months ago with Spec-driven development becoming a hot topic when agentic coding started.
We should continue that with spec-driven review, testing, etc.
...and they are not using LLMs to help speed up design and analysis?
I'm no booster but this is most of what I currently spend tokens on so it's maybe not as absurd as it sounds. Maybe those gains are possible and without having to sacrifice serious code reviews too.
Just to back you up most surveys say only 10% to 20% of programmers time is coding.
Microsoft study of 484 developers, published in 2025 says 11%.
Another Microsoft study where programmers had telemetry installed showed 21%
https://gwern.net/doc/psychology/writing/2017-meyer.pdf