Comment by keithnz
4 hours ago
It doesn't match my experience. We are producing more software, and being a lot more ambitious about the things we develop. The trick is mostly to do with getting good guidance in place and then you can spend a lot more time iterating the product itself. I spend a lot more time play testing the product now and trying different things / refining. However, there is a lot of previous work that's been done to create a huge amount of technical guidance on how to do things. Lots of things on Specification, Design/Architecture/Coding, Performance, Testing, QA testing, etc. I think getting all this guidance/tooling/process in place is critical to producing software.
I think it highly depends on what field you're in. Personal projects that I find useful in my everyday life? Churning them out like crazy. Enterprise software? It has slowed our productivity down to a halt--part of this is due to people not knowing how to use these tools, and the other part of it is the collective AI psychosis of our leadership (I work at a Fortune 500 software company).
Do you think its enterprise software? or the team? I work on a product ( https://www.mywildeye.com/ ) but we do a lot of back end enterprisey type stuff to manage our logistics / manufacturing as well. We are a small dev team with a lot of latitude to make decisions. For us, AI allows a dev to deal with a lot more things. We also churn out internal tools like crazy. Our Hardware, Firmware, Accounts, and Support people are all creating tools. Our CEO (former developer) is also getting back to making things, we recently released a free ios app https://epicfields.app/ so farmers can monitor water demand using free satellite data.
Very Large Enterprise is very hard to change, or rewrite, especially old systems. Our company mostly sells contracts to large corporations / government institutions (1500+ employees), with an insane amount of transactions, functionality, etc. Even with the latest models you cannot automate everything, the world is far too complex, and there is quite a bit of pushback when anything changes.
In order to keep some of these extremely large contracts (using Samsung as an example here) for example, we had to revert certain changes that were global but now we have a "Samsung version" because we want to maintain a large presence in Asia and Samsung leaving would be a huge blow.
At this scale, code isn't even the bottleneck, it's customer wants, politics, etc.