Comment by fg137
20 hours ago
I have seen plenty of "my backlog has never been shorter" comments here.
I'm interested in how that turns out 6 months later.
In my team, we have plenty of enhancement requests from users. We address those that make obvious sense and are trivial to do but withhold from others, even though the code change itself is likely small. Because we don't know if there is more than a single user that can actually benefit from it, if it has unintended consequences, or if it causes maintainence issue down the road.
> I'm interested in how that turns out 6 months later.
That really is the real question, isn't it?
For me it has been a mixed bag so far, I've seen some companies use this tech in a slow and deliberate manner to do what they were already doing but a little bit faster. I've also seen hail Mary passes where the whole codebase was turned over to agents to go wild on with an undersized team and little to no QA. Time will tell...
> but withhold from others, even though the code change itself is likely small.
Prediction: programming is going to change massively not only because the cost of creating code will go down, but because people are so tired of this sort of gatekeeping "we know better" from programmers.
What you're describing as "gatekeeping" is actually Product Ownership and should be applauded, because the alternative is a product owner who abdicates responsibility to the customer.
Lots of responses to a comment I explicitly did not make. Let me try and spell it out for you folks:
demand was suppressed by an access bottleneck, the bottleneck is gone, expect a magnitude of change proportional to how much demand was actually pent up rather than proportional to how much programmers currently think was reasonable to deny.
Explicit things I am not saying: gatekeeping was bad, feature creep is good or desirable, etc. etc. etc.
This really makes it sound as though the programmers were doing something wrong:
> people are so tired of this sort of gatekeeping "we know better" from programmers
This describes a product with no vision or purpose.
People have to take 'no' for an answer sometimes, even if they don't accept it. You can't really 'gatekeep' your own product.
Can you explain to all of us how this gatekeeping is actually bad? Software would be way, way worse if we just allowed any arbitrary feature to be added to software, and ordinary people who want all the things would have to learn, the hard way, that doing all the things is not actually good.
Thank you. I'm spending a lot of time reminding my peers that cheerlead this sort of thing that feedback is usually presented to us a solution, not the underlying problem and that our job is to solve problems, not just vomit out the requested solution.
And the software without gatekeepers will be regarded as confusing and complicated or buggy.
The work to go from software to usable software system is vast.
Knock yourself out and change the world, absolutely nobody is stopping you. That you haven’t already does tell us something though.
> Prediction: programming is going to change massively not only because the cost of creating code will go down, but because people are so tired of this sort of gatekeeping "we know better" from programmers.
I assume the "gatekeeping" decision to not implement a feature request is coming from someone responsible for the product, not from a developer.