alt Hacker NewsThis article assumes that AI only has an impact on the development phase which is certainly not true. It can speed up every part of the step. Including ideation, legal, documentation, development, and deployment.
Ideation: Throw ideas back & forth, cross reference with knowledge bases, generate design documents. Documentation: Generate large parts of docs. Development: Clear. Deployment: Generate deployment manifests, tooling around testing, knowledge around cloud platforms.
Every single step can be done better & faster with AI. Not all of them, but a lot.
Even development. Yes some part of your job involves understanding the problem better than anyone & making solutions. But some parts are also purely chore. If you know you keed a button doing X, then designing that button, placing it, figuring out edge cases with hover & press states, connecting to the backend etc - this is chore that can be skipped. Same principle applies to almost all steps.
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All of the above points align with our organization’s experience. But there is one more thing happening as well: we have more people in more roles able to create software solutions for issues that used to be brute forced via physical processes. (We are a small manufacturing business.) While these aren’t big giant enterprise projects that require deep swe experience, they are simple software tools that are improving process and productivity everywhere. It is pretty amazing what happens when your head of shipping can build a bespoke tool to solve a problem that previously they dealt with through burning through a lot of labor hours.
The article pretty much plays out whats happening in our place, heavy use of AI in software development but we dont see us shipping faster, about same or perhaps slower (for other reasons). Its a weird feeling as were waiting for this utopia to kick-in but its not and were cant fully put our fingers on it.
The onus isn't on people using AI effectively to prove it to others.
In fact, these disagreements and disbeliefs create opportunities and salients in the market.
Precisely. People don't realize that it's all numbers. Given average IQ of people involved in a project is 140, an AI with an IQ of 150 can replicate each and every such individuals in the pipeline. People saying AI can't do this or AI can't do that should come to terms with the fact that this IQ gap is monotonously increasing.
I tend to agree with the article.
A typical example of trying to add a new significant capability involves many meetings (days, weeks, months, etc. )with the business to understand how their work flows between systems X, Y and Z as well as all of the significant exceptions (e.g. we handle subset A this way and subset B that way, but for the final step we blend those groups together, except for subset C which requires special process 97).
Then with that understanding comes the system solutioning across multiple systems that can be a blend of internal system or vendor's system, each with different levels of ability to customize, which pushes the shape of the final solution in different directions.
There is certainly value in speeding up coding, but it's just one piece of the puzzle and today LLM's can't help with gathering the domain information and defining a solution.