Comment by herval | Hacker News Reader

Comment by herval | Hacker News Reader

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I never worked at a place where not having a backlog was an issue. Quite the opposite in fact - there’s always infinite backlogs of stuff. Every single time I’ve seen organizations being slow to decide anything, it was due to the human tendency to stretch their tasks to occupy as much time as possible. Planning meetings are “the work” for a legion of people (even though they also know they’re mostly pointless). Untangling dependencies is harder when it involves approvals of other humans (particularly fun as multiple people are “the tech lead”, are all objectively wrong but unable to see how they’re simply getting in the way).

I don’t think LLMs are particularly smart, or capable of, or will definitely replace humans at anything, or if they’ll lead to better work. But I can already tell that their inherent lack of an ego DO accelerate things at enterprises, for the simple reason that the self-imposed roadblocks above stop happening

At my current workplace, we do have a roadmap for the business, but the actual backlog of tickets to implement work is all waiting on other siloed teams to make decisions that we are downstream of. This ranges from our infrastructure model to simple things like “which CSS components are we allowed to use.”

We are also explicitly NOT allowed to make any code changes that aren’t part of a story that our product owner has approved and prioritized.

The result is that we scrape together some stories to work on every sprint, but if we finish it early, we quickly run into red tape and circular conversations with other “decision makers” who need to tell us what we’re allowed to do before we actually do anything.

It’s fairly maddening. The whole org is hamstrung by a few workaholic individuals who control decision making for several teams and are chronically unavailable as a result.

I’ve seen this sort of thing happen at other big enterprises too but my current situation is perhaps an extreme example of dysfunction. Point being, when an org gets tangled up like this, LLMs aren’t gonna save it :)

The moment those people start being removed, and the little work they do automated, it’ll have a dramatic downstream effect.

I’ve already witnessed a certain big tech that started to move much faster by removing TPMs & EMs across the board, even without LLMs to “replace” them. With LLMs, you need even fewer layers. Then eventually fewer middle-of-business decision makers. In your example, it’s entirely possible that the function of making those components could be entirely subsumed by a single AI bot. That’s starting to happen a lot in the devops space already.

All that said, I doubt your business would benefit from moving faster anyway - most businesses don’t actually need to move faster. I highly recommend the “Bullshit Jobs” book, on this matter. Businesses will just need fewer and fewer people

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