alt Hacker News> I'm ready to bet there's a very inefficient communication channel that has nothing to do with code
That is what I'm saying though. Shipping to production is mostly bottlenecked by product/business leaders who haven't described a clear vision/communication of what is wanted.
I've been a SWE for far longer pre coding-agents than post. The actual development of software was arduous. So much of tech was/is a long list of heavily scoped down tasks that eng takes an order of magnitude longer than today.
A quirk of coding agents is how they assess timelines. Ask it to scope a project you want done and it will answer in engineer days from pre-ai days. In actuality it can be done with a prompt and a few hours in claude
> So much of tech was/is a long list of heavily scoped down tasks that eng takes an order of magnitude longer than today.
I disagree. Based on my personal experience, a lot of time is spent on fine tuning code and double checking the docs. The first pass can be very quick especially if you already have sample code (from the docs or other parts of the project). But when it came to fine tune, that's where the other 90% of the time is going.
A lot of daily activities of engineering is massaging code, either from bug reports or requests after someone tested the features. And a lot of time is spent gathering details, comparing it with what already built, and then apply correction.
From what I've seen with people doing agentic coding, that feedback loop in the development phase is very superficial. Then the most important feedback loop (the one with the user) is distorted as the software is constantly changing.