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Comment by josephwegner | Hacker News Reader

> coding isn’t about the finished product. its a lot like writing

This doesn't seem applicable in most contexts. Yes, when I'm coding for fun or purely for learning the finished product is less relevant... but I'd guess the vast majority of code that is written is for a business that _only_ cares about the product. Code is an implementation detail.

If (and this is a _big_ if) AI-based coding can increase developer velocity even as little as 50%, no sane business is going to let their engineers ignore it just because it's not as fun as artisanal code.

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> even as little as 50%

Depending on how you measure that velocity (e.g. including security risks, debugging capabilities, ...) even as little as 5% increase is a no brainer for a business. Whether it's AI, powerful laptops, a fully-fledged IDE, an environment with a good dev experience, anything that gives a few percent increase snowballs into millions over an entire workforce.

Whether the current AI capabilities provide that increase without trade-offs that would be too heavy later one is a question that still seems up to debate.

I would wager 80% of places that write software have almost trivial ways to get that 5% improvement. Between ci/cd, static checkers, upgrading IDEs, and just aligning practices between everyone, I think you can easily improve at 50% of places.

Those things don't happen because the slowdown required before adoption, and the office politics of convincing everyone to make a change, and then the effort of convincing people that this new thing is what should be changed to.

>I would wager 80% of places that write software have almost trivial ways to get that 5% improvement.

No. Because most of these changes are totally opaque, you don't know what change needs to be made and making it becomes a political problem in the organization. Giving each engineer a subscription to some service is trivial.

Meanwhile, my last big employer "couldn't motivate the expense" of a hardware upgrade for the most productive dev on the team (who spends a large part of their time waiting for CI jobs and builds) of <1/4 of their monthly pay. That should be a no-brainer and paid off itself quickly.

I do not believe that corps make rational decisions around these matters.

If AI increases programmer productivity by just 5% it is easily worth it.

I have no doubt that AI, right now saves me 5% of my time. That is 24 minutes a day I am not searching for something in the documentation of some library.

> Code is an implementation detail.

It’s worse. Code is a liability.

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