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Comment by OakNinja | Hacker News Reader

This problem is not new. The new thing is that anyone can understand the core problem they’re trying to solve without involving a dev team by quick ideation and rapid prototyping.

Just as always, it’s then up to the company to prioritize what to focus on - Just like how it’s always been.

* Don't hold onto an idea or prompt output just because you spent time on it.

* Writing code is easy. Maintaining it is hard.

* If it doesn’t save time or generate revenue, it’s just an expense.

* Output does not equal value.

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It's also worth pointing out how many businesses have always had a dev team that can rapidly prototype regardless of AI usage.

They tend to be the largest businesses (outside of SV) that employ the majority of people in the USA. They are also the least likely to really use AI for much other than copilot in MS Teams.

I have spent the better part of the last decade of my career being approached by executives asking me how to optimize or automate away services that I felt had reached a local optimum. Each time this was the case I would gently express that our options were to commodify, by offering a kind of template, the service or optimize the process and way we gathered information from clients. Without fail, they hated the latter option. It was hard to do, and it implied that any number of people needed to do a lot better at their job in seemingly abstract ways. No, they’d always go for the template, then be dissatisfied by the fact that it’s, well, a template! Finally, they’d go back to begging me for alternatives.

This feels like them doubling down yet again. It’s like looking at your personal finances and trying to optimize it by canceling Netflix instead of acknowledging that you eat out 7 days a week.

Spot on. Generative AI is an amplifier of your current trajectory, and a good side effect of that is that it exposes inefficient internal processes. As a company, it will be increasingly hard to go for the naïve and easy solution (the template) when the blockers are clearly visible.

One of my mantras is:

Automate governance first, creation second. Streamline code reviews and compliance before content generation, or you'll drown in manual oversight.

And this is not what people want to hear, because generating content is easy and automating governance (code reviews, build the domain knowledge into skills and automated processes) is a _real_ and hard engineering problem.

Thank you for your reply.

Yes, we could all work a bit more effectively cross-team. It's missing the point to focus on the "what" and the "doing" instead of the "why" and the "planning".

If there are some people who need AI training wheels to help plan, I think that strongly signals some kind of dysfunction. They are rehearsing how to talk to another team? Sounds unprofessional and inexperienced.

LLMs actually raise the bar and resulting demand for experienced workers. Most programmers with more than about 5 years are not the bottleneck. It's all the auxiliary people that are supposed to be coordinating, but don't know their ass from their elbow.

Is it worth pointing out, or should you point it out?

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