alt Hacker NewsYup.
For me the biggest signifier is Spotify. They claim their (best) devs don't even code anymore, they use an internal AI tool that they just send prompts to which then checks out a personal test build that they can download off of Slack. "A new feature in 10 minutes!"
Okay, if that is the case, why have we only seen like 3-4 minor new QoL improvements in Spotify the last ~12 months, with no new grand features? And why haven't they fired 95% of their devs and let the remaining elite go buckwild with Claude?
The Emperor really has no clothes.
Replies
> why have we only seen like 3-4 minor new QoL improvements
You are seeing improvements? From what I can tell, my user experience has only been going downhill over the past years - even pre-AI...
tbf they have been saying they've started doing this since December, so we're only a few months in. And like most software it's an iceberg: 99% of work on not observable by users, and in spotify's case listeners are only one of presumably dozens of different users. For all we know they are shipping massive improvements to eg billing
Also, why isn‘t there a native client for all platforms? Could they not just let the AI auto-translate the code?
> They claim their (best) devs don't even code anymore
No, they claimed they didn’t code during a time period. Around year end until early this year. Technically they could have just been on leave.
Also best dev = principal / staff engineers. They rarely code anyway.
AI or no AI anyone could have made that claim.
Everyone here says "if developers are so much faster, why aren't we seeing more features?!" as if the only thing required to release a feature is developers.
My CEO keeps asking me "how can we go faster with AI", and my answer is "we can't, because even if we had developers that would instantly develop any feature perfectly, we'd still be bottlenecked on how slow we are at deciding what to actually release".