alt Hacker News> Of course this may be entirely different in a software shop building routine features where the difficulty is indeed the social part and the software itself is more clearly understood. But I'd say that's when AI can be even more effective since it can do mundane coding even better proportionally than research code
And here’s another fallacy that is always thrown around. Always underestimating the other’s tasks when you are not an expert in it and don’t know intimately what’s involved.
So which is it? Is the coding part easy or hard? If it's easy and the task is mainly all the song and dance with the client, the stakeholders, getting approval and whatnot, then AI can take care of that easy coding and at least save that time. But then that is proportionally not much. I do have friends in industry, and they do sit quite a lot of hours in front of an IDE typing and fighting compilation issues, etc. It's not like they are always in meetings. I know people who work in the computer vision industry, 3D perception, and they have relatively few meetings and report to their boss occasionally, are not micromanaged, there is little red tape. They are getting real benefits from AI. It has eliminated several efficiency problems in their code that nobody took the time to fix, like consolidating repeated computations to just being done once, or similar things. They have solved a lot of CI pain with it, where they used to have an entire employee just taking care of keeping the CI in shape and updating it and remembering all the quirks, it's no longer a full time job, though also not fully automated. The CI person of course doesn't like the fact that his arcane knowledge has become un-moated. (I've worked on maintaining servers myself and I was the only one who really knew how it worked or how to fix it when it was broken, how to use it in specific special contexts, e.g. in context of a Slurm cluster. Today a lot of that hard-earned detailed knowledge is obviated by Claude, because it can answer similarly well to how I could, or better. So I have experienced such things myself too.)
I don't think we should be making sweeping claims. But everyone generalizes. The person on top claimed that productivity doesn't increase for competent people and that coding is anyway very easy. That may be true in some contexts but not in others. Some software jobs require a lot of face-to-face, others less. Some managers micromanage, others just care about results on a longer timeframe. Some people build technically difficult, computationally heavy code, deployed on special hardware with efficiency requirements, others deploy website-like iPhone apps and CRUD webapps all day. There's no single shape for a software-related job.