Comment by getregistered
1 day ago
> AI-assisted programming pushes the limits of programming from what you can implement to what you can specify and what you can verify.
This really resonates. We can write code a lot faster than we can safely deploy it at the moment.
> We can write code a lot faster than we can safely deploy it at the moment.
We always could. That has been true since the days we programmed computers by plugging jumper wires into a panel.
> We always could. That has been true since the days we programmed computers by plugging jumper wires into a panel.
That's news to me, and I'm an ancient greybeard in development.
If you have a team of 1x f/time developer and 1x f/time tester, the tester would be spending about half their day doing nothing.
Right now, a single developer with Claude code can very easily overwhelm even a couple of testers with new code to test.
> Right now, a single developer with Claude code can very easily overwhelm even a couple of testers with new code to test.
Because there are endless errors and problems that never gets fixed with AI coding. The reason testers ran out of things to test before was that developers tested themselves before sending it over, if you take a bunch of cowboy coders coding thousands of lines a day with no testing whatsoever before throwing it over to the testers you would say you don't have enough testers even if you had thousands.
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> If you have a team of 1x f/time developer and 1x f/time tester,
Y'all have dedicated testers!? In 14 years of development, across FAANG and startup, this has never been true for me. The closest I've come is a brief period when a group of ~7 teams were able to call on the services of two testers. As you can imagine, with that ratio, the testers were not spending much time doing nothing.
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> the tester would be spending about half their day doing nothing
That's because the developer would be spending 2/3 of their day fixing the problems the tester already found.
And the time spent writing new code has always been a rounding error from 0.
> We can write code a lot faster than we can safely deploy it at the moment.
This has always been the case?