Comment by blauditore
4 hours ago
Well, imagine racing car manufacturers competing on making better, faster engines. At some point engines are so strong that other parts become the limiting factors, such as tires for traction. Now someone invents superfuel, but cars are still only marginally faster because the additional engine power didn't change the bottom line much.
That's what's happening in software. We knew that coding is only a fraction of the overall work, and even completely automating it away won't increase productivity by an order of magnitude.
Yes, the job is changing, but only parts of it. High-level engineering best practices still apply even without the coding part. And there is no free lunch.
"The overall performance improvement gained by optimizing a single part of a system is limited by the fraction of time that the improved part is actually used" - Amdahl's Law
IMO it's a lot more like a new more powerful engine is now available. Sure, faster drivers/teams will run faster lap times, no doubt, and it'd be a bad idea to not use it. But, less mature teams/drivers aren't going to catch those faster teams by just slapping the new engine in and going. They are still largely held back by the myriad of other things that go into being fast on track consistently IE (driver + datalog review, and just good ol seat time), vehicle [other than engine] setup, aero tuning, pitting practice (esp fueling for endurance stuff), etc etc. All those same things that were making them slower than the fastest teams before. And even still, if you give only the slower teams the new engine, they probably still won't be competitive with the faster teams and, quite honestly, the not great drivers will probably just make the same mistakes they were making before that slowed them down, except faster.
But, even if the new engine is the golden egg, now what? You're still competing against every other team that has the golden egg... And it's right back to the driver mod, vehicle setup, etc.
That's not to say that the slower teams have any choice but to run the engine too to not be even less competitive. It's just to say that having the engine isn't gonna fix the underlying problem, no matter how much of the team you lay off to fuel the new, more power, engine.
It's not, because even the best teams aren't shipping 10X faster. Execs keep demanding it and no one - not Anthropic, not Google, not Walmart or whoever - is actually delivering customer value visibly faster at anywhere near that scale.
The hardest part always has been and always will be - a simplified vision and strategy.
Everything else is a case of project decomposition, planning and scaling up - aka this is when having code written faster is great.
The SV approach of the past decade has been about experimentation, A/B testing and data science - it has its limits.
Except the problem with this is an engine designer doesnt want to pivot to designing a stronger driveshaft, or strengthening the gears of a gearbox, or designing more efficient brakes. They're an engine builder.
Same goes for software. 20 years ago I got into software development for the love and passion of solving problems and writing code. Now I've been forced to pivot to a glorified BA/Products Manager. It sucks.
Bide your time. When the eventual hangover arrives your talents will be in short supply. AI providers are essentially making a long bet: that they will be able to improve faster than the messes that they make are growing. But that can't keep going forever. AI is an accelerator: it will accelerate you if you were careful before towards something better and it will accelerate you towards something much worse if you were not. Just like any other power tool.
I've recently talked about how it makes almost zero sense to ever delegate anything again at work. 3-6 months ago, that was not a thing. 12 months ago, that would have gotten me laughed out of the room. Wherever we are headed, we are not even close to the steady state
1 reply →
The flip side of that is as someone who got into software development 20 years ago because I love to design and make products... Well this is pretty great. I feel for my colleagues, though. And it's not like the "coding problem" is solved, much to the dismay of the hype machine.
Exactly. For many of us, designing and writing code has always been the fun part; reviewing and whatnot, the parts that are still left for us meatbags, was more of a chore.
Or we could just recognize these llms crank out poorly architected bug infested slop. The coding work of these llms is just as garbage as all the other bland, flat, wtf writing they crank out with prose. Even worse because there's no logical mind behind the garbage. With bad human written code there was at least one human there thinking about it.
this is not my experience, in oct2026. Claude does for me what I ask better than any human I've delegated to in my career
Do you read the code? And is it in a domain you understood well before depending on llms?