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Comment by lumost | Hacker News Reader

it's a common missconception that engineers spend most of their time producing code based on documented requirements in jira tickets.

I'd believe that a complete automation of this aspect of our industry would only be enough to provide a 10-20% boost in productivity. Still impressive, but within the range of "Our team improved our CI, build times, development process etc."

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Exactly this. Grinding away inside various places I've worked for the last 10 years I longed for intense chunks of actually writing code. It was actually a rare treat to get something large and coherent enough to involve code production.

Most times were spent juggling paperwork, bouncing back and forth on code reviews, negotiating ambiguous requirements, and attending pointless meetings.

Granted... the agentic tools can also help with that. I've had them automate JIRA tedium for me before, much to middle management's chagrin.

  > Most times were spent juggling paperwork, bouncing back and forth on code reviews, negotiating ambiguous requirements, and attending pointless meetings.

you are only as fast as your slowest part. it seems so many execs and managers are clueless about things people discovered decades ago (deming, goldratt, demarco et al)

This is a bit like going back in time to the beginning of the industrial revolution and estimating the impact of a mechanisation based on comparing the speed of early mechanical looms vs. a skilled human.

It takes years or decades for the automation of an artisan process to shake out, because it involves rethinking how everything around the now-automated process happens, and because the benefits involve the automation's ability to continue scaling beyond a level where human capacity was saturated. We're only at the very beginning of that process for coding, and right now we tend to see LLMs somewhat awkwardly inserted into pre-existing software development lifecycles. But it's unlikely that'll be still be the way we're creating software in 10/20 years time.

Except that LLMs are only being trained to do things that humans can do, not things that humans cannot do.

I have heard a lot of claims like this, where we cannot imagine the benefits of AI because the work will look so different to how it is now, but I have yet to see that actually demonstrated anywhere.

This is nonsense.

Every new technology we discover from here on out has a compressed lifecycle.

If I understand correctly, there are more people employed in manufacturing today than there were a century ago. The hollowing of western manufacturing due to policy choices created a false perception that the sector was in decline globally.

With hardware, there’s a physical element that the management can appreciate, even when they don’t understand every constraint. With code, it’s that nebulous thing where the only thing visible are pictures on the screen. Trusting engineers is apparently too high a bar to cross.

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