Cost is stable (or rising?), user-facing delivery is sameish, (some) engineers seem happier because they are allowed to gold-plate and prepare for future “human development of the hard-things”.
Is that a fair summary?
Is that a fair summary?
> a direct and meaningful impact on the quality and availability of our services.
You:
> user-facing delivery is sameish
I don’t see how you can think that is a fair summary or a good-faith argument.
Just because it can be measured doesn’t mean it matters.
Right, but that is not what was said, so “summarising” it in that manner is not a good faith representation of their argument.
Engineers are happier because they can spend more time on that extra round of polish that was just filed into low-priority "fix when time" Linear tickets.
QA is happier because the stupid bulk operations are handled with AI and they can focus on the hard to find stuff that tickles the QA mind in a special way =)
Same stuff, but with better (in-house) tooling and (most) people are happier. The Code Artesans aren't, but it's mostly their problem and they'll find companies that only do fully manual programming for specific niches.
Not op but no.
I would say internal morale and productivity has improved. We have explicit policy guidance and a general collective distaste of pasting AI responses which is what usually sours me on interactions with people that are fully gargling the kool-aid. My CI experience has gone down from ~1.5 hours to less than five minutes and I can actually run our entire platform locally on my laptop again. My personal experience has improved at least.
Externally, you're probably right that we're not really capturing user sentiment well about how our company's changes are impacting them. I can concretely say that there were several customers that were disappointed that our public change log notes have been about the same length. They were expecting us to go through our feature backlog faster because we we're starting to use AI.
On the other hand, we have had fewer outages, reached our fifth 9 consistently over the past four months which is a new company record in the 11 years its been tracked. We have had fewer support tickets, our customer retention rate is the highest it has ever been in the company's history, and we're growing our internal teams. Based on the evidence I have available to me, I would say that we're healthier than before both from a user sentiment perspective and an internal morale perspective.