alt Hacker NewsI've started noticing at $WORK that a lot of systems, procedures, etc. that fall under SDLC or devX are being made ever more onerous or complex because "LLMs can do it."
Some examples include requiring that someone addresses every review comment separately, or that a PR description be formatted a specific way, or that support requests have existing JIRA numbers etc. All of these make the developer experience much worse and would never fly if generating text (that no one reads) wasn't cheap now. A lot of this is cargo culting to make vibe coding feel more serious and entreprise.
The teams that have gone full specs driven development are not AFAICT more productive but good luck getting any change in without 10$ of API usage, even for a one liner. In some cases development is now slower with LLM than it was before!
Replies
> A lot of this is cargo culting to make vibe coding feel more serious and entreprise.
Those examples sound like responses to being swamped with LLM PRs:
* "every review comment separately" [so the bot doesn't get a chance to miss it]
* "a PR description be formatted a specific way" [so the bot has guardrails]
* "support requests have existing JIRA numbers etc" [so we can have a chance of understanding the context]
> The teams that have gone full specs driven development are not AFAICT more productive
I suppose time will tell. It's difficult to generalise my experiences beyond my immediate team/company/industry.
> In some cases development is now slower with LLM than it was before!
Yes, pre-LLM I wouldn't sign up for formatted PR descriptions!
I've seen every one of the things you listed, sometimes all at the same company. None of them add much in the way of effort/time to do the work.
- JIRA ticket - audit trail
- PR format - easier for people to scan, and to make sure things aren't forgotten (you can even have the template inserted when it's created)
- address review comments separately - not sure what to say on this one because I don't understand how _else_ you would address them - I've always addressed each one individually