Comment by whateveracct

4 hours ago

> So maybe there's 2x speedup in coding. But that's only a small speedup in the totality of everything software engineers do.

Amdahl's Law should be familiar to anyone with a 4y computer science/engineering degree. Why aren't they applying it to their own throughput?

2 comments

whateveracct

t-writescode 3 hours ago

Well, there’s probably several reasons:

  1) because they’re not doing those others spheres of work
  2) because they don’t think about the work
     nor how tired they are afterwards
  3) they’re proselytizing AI work as the future and
     that conflicts with that vision
  4) the other shoe hasn’t dropped
  5) they really don’t see it
  6) some people genuinely hate programming and this
     helps them skip that.

I’m sure others as well.

ChadNauseam 3 hours ago

Let's apply it:

- 25% planning & aligning with other teams

- 25% coding

- 25% testing/verifying

- 25% code review/rework

I'd say that thanks to LLM assistance I'm 10x faster at coding, code review/rework, and testing/verifying. (LLMs can partially automate testing/verifying too, and the code is higher quality now as well so less testing/verifying is necessary).

So that leaves us with:

- 92.5% planning & aligning with other teams

- 2.5% coding

- 2.5% testing/verifying

- 2.5% code review/rework

Obviously, that makes zero sense as a split. If you saw any organization doing that, you'd suggest having fewer teams, more silos, etc. Maybe you have designers produce code, instead of showing the designs to coders and having the coders implement it. Maybe you force all your engineers to dogfood the product that way they can identify issues themselves rather than needing QA teams to do it. And so on. so the last category, "planning & aligning with other teams", falls too.