Comment by bartread
7 days ago
The other problem is the perennial, how much of what we do actually has value?
Churning out 5x (or whatever - I’m deliberately being a bit hyperbolic) as much code sounds great on the face of it but what does it matter if little to none of it is actually valuable?
You correctly identify that software development is often driven by fashion and emotion but the much much bigger problem is that product and portfolio management is driven by fashion and emotion. How much stuff is built based on the whims of CEOs or other senior stakeholders without any real evidence to back it up?
I suppose the big advantage of being more “productive” is that you can churn through more wrong ideas more quickly and thus perhaps improve your chances of stumbling across something that is valuable.
But, of course, as I’ve just said: if that’s to work it’s absolutely predicated on real (and very substantial) productivity gains.
Perhaps I’m thinking about this wrong though: it’s not about production where standards, and the need to be vigilant, are naturally high, but really the gains should be seen mostly in terms of prototyping and validating multiple/many solutions and ideas.
"I suppose the big advantage of being more “productive” is that you can churn through more wrong ideas more quickly and thus perhaps improve your chances of stumbling across something that is valuable."
But I think there is a very big danger here - you build in the action but completely neglect the deep thinking behind a vision, strategy etc.
So yes you produce more stuff. But that stuff means more money spent - which is generally a sunk cost too.
In a bizarre way, I predict we will see the failure rate of software firms rise. Despite the fact these 'productivity' tools exist.
Yeah, I mean, you might be right. As others have commented, I think it's simply very hard to say what gains we're really going to see from AI-assisted software development at present.
And then of course there's the question of how many businesses have their key value proposition rendered obsolete, and to what extent it's rendered obsolete, by AI: doesn't have to be completely nullified for them to fail (which obviously applies to some software companies, but goes far beyond that sector).