I wish I had written that.
Frankly without AI assistance many of these tools just wouldn’t exist at all. We can build stuff in 6 weeks part time as a side project that would have taken at least 3 months full time, and therefore would not have been feasible. Then we can iterate on it at least 2-4 times faster than with hand coding.
So I’d love to have an extra few developers to just work on that stuff full time, but I don’t.
Whether that means our organisation spend on AI overall is a positive, I really can’t say. Quite possibly not, but my team are getting real benefits.
I’m a backend developer so I know what it takes to build a half decent reporting system. Writing all those queries, slice and dice charts and what not takes real time and effort. All that has been outsourced to Claude Code. I now focus on ensuring that the system is sound architecturally and that useful reports are being surfaced.
My experience so far is that it's harder and slower for me to understand the genAI code than to write it myself.
Skipping thorough comprehension seems to be the popular choice in my workplace, but it's not one I can justify.
I guess just like any algorithm it’s easier to verify a solution than come up with one.
Have you read the code the AI produced? Do you understand all of it? Is it bloated? Would you be proud to say you wrote it?
I don't care how fast you created something. You didn't create it, the AI did, and you have no control over it, the AI does.
It's clear HN is a bastion of salesmen who happen to have "engineer" in their work title. But the mentality towards actual engineering makes it clear they are primarily salesmen.
That is absurd, these are tools only my own team use. Why would I not care whether I had them in a month or two, or fur many of these tools quite possibly never because we don’t have the spare capacity for how long it would take without AI?
Because you're thinking like a salesman. What difference does a month make for a supportive tool without financial incentive? Why can't you justify a month of development without the idea of corporate breathing down you neck?
>Amazon workers under pressure to up their AI usage are making up tasks
In my humble opinion good ideas (what to build) are a big part of the bottleneck and those aren’t substantially in greater supply with AI.
Which is sad because they should be. People should be freed up to think and create better things, instead these companies seem to be doing the equivalent of locking their employees in stalls like they do on some animal farms, so they can churn out 'results' ever faster.
Good ideas will never ever be prioritized in the vast majority of companies because good ideas cannot be quantified and turned into performance metrics. At least not without invoking Goodhart's law (see: the academia).
There's also an online version of the Library of Babel, I just found out that full pages of my own books are in it[0], https://libraryofbabel.info/bookmark.cgi?379:17
compare 100 pollocks vs 2-3