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Comment by CraftingLinks | Hacker News Reader

I see whole teams pushed by c- level going full in with spec driven + tdd development. The devs hate it because they are literally forbidden to touch a single line if code. but the results speak for themselves, it just works and the pressure has shifted to the product people to keep up. The whole tooling to enable this had to be worked out first. All Cursor and extreme use of a tool called Speckit, connected to Notion to pump documentation and Jira.

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> literally forbidden to touch a single line if code.

That is extremely stupid. What does that ban get you? I reqct to this because a friend mentioned exactly this. And I was dumbfounded.

> That is extremely stupid. What does that ban get you?

confidence in firing coders I presume..

They are hiring "architects", or do we call them analysts. The impression is we're going back to analysts drawing those pld school UML-like diagrams etc. Also, a lot of the devs are on the brink of just quitting, because it's "not programming" anymore. So, not only will you still need devs, or people massaging those specs, you'll also need enough "product" people to keep that engine fed! If your management isn't lazy, I can see the need for growing people count will continue to rise within such companies. That doesn't mean the work will be ...satisfying for devs.

It seems like just a CxO dick measuring exercise.

CEO1: "We allow our engineers to use AI for all work."

CEO2: "Oh yea? We mandate our engineers use AI for at least N% of their work!"

CEO3: "You think that's good? We mandate our engineers use AI for all code!!"

CEO4: "Pfff, amateurs. We don't even allow our engineers to open source code editors or even look at the LLM output..."

I also thought it was pushing it to the limit, but I think this is just some Founder of a successful company deciding engineering was going to transform to this way of working. A huge bet, but the implementation didn't feel amateuristic or ad hoc. Just not very pleasant for most devs to work that way. I'm sure some will look elsewhere. I know I would!

I don't think it's implemented that harsh or enforced so hostile, but they have these rict procedures now on how the code is to be developed. That procedure they follow is all centered around automated code generation. So they simply... don't anymore in practice, it is not part of the job description so to speak. He wasn't happy I can tell, but also acknowledged it was working very well.

> but the results speak for themselves, it just works

The results do speak for themselves, but it doesn't work.

yeah i'm not gonna be an AI company's guinea pig just because the c-suite wants to sign me up. "the results" you mean AI-psychosis and dunning-kruger syndrome?

Like I said, devs don't like it. He said productivity went up 3-4x. "It works". There was no question of denying that as far as he was concerned. At the same time he was going to look for another job as it was just painful to work like that.

> He said productivity went up 3-4x

3-4x from what? There are companies out there that are so dysfunctional and over-managed that they can't code anything to begin with. I wouldn't be surprised if an LLM only solution helped them. I did a contract job that was a week of basic CRUD work for a company, and I was told it took them years to do as much as I did.

I have also seen CEOs do exactly as you're describing, only to find the 3-4x productivity improvement is actually 3-4x more lines of code. And more bugs. Unfortunately there are a lot C-suite people who would rather have captive users locked into a buggy app everyone hates that constantly acts like it's shipping helpful stuff than an app people want to use.

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