Comment by furyofantares
3 days ago
I'm specifically talking about greenfield work. I do a lot of game prototypes, it definitely does that at the very beginning.
3 days ago
I'm specifically talking about greenfield work. I do a lot of game prototypes, it definitely does that at the very beginning.
This is really interesting, because I do gamejams from time to time - and I try every time to make it work, but I'm still quite a lot faster doing stuff myself.
This is visible under extreme time pressure of producing a working game in 72 hours (our team scores consistenly top 100 in Ludum Dare which is a somewhat high standard).
We use a popular Unity game engine all LLMs have wealth of experience (as in game development in general), but the output is 80% so strangely "almost correct but not usable" that I cannot take the luxury of letting it figure it out, and use it as fancy autocomplete. And I also still check docs and Stackoverflow-style forums a lot, because of stuff it plainly mades up.
One of the reasons is maybe our game mechanics often is a bit off the beaten road, though the last game we made was literally a platformer with rope physics (LLM could not produce a good idea how to make stable and simple rope physics under our constraints codeable in 3 hours time).
Greenfield is still such a tiny percentage of all software work going on in the world though :/
It’s a tiny percentage of software work because the programming is slow, and setting up new projects is even slower.
It’s been a majority of my projects for the past two months. Not because work changed, but because I’ve written a dozen tiny, personalised tools that I wouldn’t have written at all if I didn’t have Claude to do it.
Most of them were completed in less than an hour, to give you an idea of the size. Though it would have easily been a day on my own.
I agree, that's fair. I think a lot of people are playing around with AI on side projects and making some bad extrapolations from their initial experiences.
It'll also apply to isolated-enough features, which is still a small amount of someone's work (not often something you'd work on for a full month straight), but more people will have experience with this.
greenfield development is also the “easiest” and most fun part of software development. As the famous saying goes, the last 10% of the project takes 90% of the time lol.
I’ve also noticed that, generally, nobody likes maintaining old systems.
so where does this leave us as software engineers? Should I be excited that it’s easy to spin up a bunch of code that I don’t deeply understand at the beginning of my project, while removing the fun parts of the project?
I’m still grappling with what this means for our industry in 5-10 years…