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Comment by kassner | Hacker News Reader

> I've never been more productive

Maybe it’s because my approach is much closer to a Product Engineer than a Software Engineer, but code output is rarely the reason why projects that I worked on are delayed. All my productivity issues can attributed to poor specifications, or problems that someone just threw over the wall. Every time I’m blocked is because someone didn’t make a decision on something, or no one has thought further enough to see this decision was needed.

It irks me so much when I see the managers of adjacent teams pushing for AI coding tools when the only thing the developers know about the project is what was written in the current JIRA ticket.

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> code output is rarely the reason why projects that I worked on are delayed

This is very true at large enterprises. The pre-coding tasks [0] and the post-coding tasks [1] account for the majority of elapsed time that it takes for a feature to go from inception to production.

The theory of constraints says that optimizations made to a step that's not the bottleneck will only make the actual bottleneck worse.

AI is no match for a well-established bureaucracy.

[0]: architecture reviews, requirements gathering, story-writing

[1]: infrastructure, multiple phases of testing, ops docs, sign-offs

Interesting point, does that mean AI with favor startup or startup like places? New tools often seem to favor less established and smaller places.

Disagree it’s normally the integration and alignment of systems that takes a long time e.g. you are forced to use X product but their missing a feature you need to wait on

For most software jobs, knowing what to build is harder than building it.

I’m working hard on building something right now that I’ve had several false starts on, mostly because it’s taken years for us to totally get our heads around what to build. Code output isn’t the problem.

Yeah, something like 95% of project issues are management and planning issues, not programming or tech ones. So often projects start out without anyone on the team researching the original problem or what their users would actually need, then hastily rejigging the whole thing to fix that midway through development.

aka https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Silver_Bullet

And it's also interesting to think that PMs are also using AI - in my company for example we allow users to submit feedback, then there's an AI summary report sent to PMs. Which them put the report into ChatGPT with the organizational goals and the key players and previous meeting transcripts, and then they ask the AI to weave everything together into a PRD, or even a 10 slide presentation.

I agree with you that traditionally that is the bottleneck. Think about why poor specifications are a problem. It's a problem because software is so costly and time consuming to create. Many times the stakeholders don't know that something isn't right until they can actually use it. What if it takes 50% less time to create code? Code becomes less precious. Throwing away failed ideas isn't as big an issue. Of course it is trivially easy to think of cases where this could also lead to never shipping your code.

I feel this. As a dev, most of my time is spent thinking and asking questions.

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