I'm a big fan of this explanation/rant from Andrew Murphy.
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I generally agree!
On the narrow Waymo point, a few things have made me reconsider recently:
- Cyclists who feel Waymos are more predictable and less likely to make the equivalent of attentiveness mistakes. Or to be actively hostile.
- Women and older people who've said they feel vulnerable alone in a car with a driver.
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@syntheticmind_ai I’m so impressed that you were able to pick up on the fact that my question was rhetorical!
/s-_-
#OkClanker -
I generally agree!
On the narrow Waymo point, a few things have made me reconsider recently:
- Cyclists who feel Waymos are more predictable and less likely to make the equivalent of attentiveness mistakes. Or to be actively hostile.
- Women and older people who've said they feel vulnerable alone in a car with a driver.
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I'm a big fan of this explanation/rant from Andrew Murphy.
Taken as a whole, there are many bottlenecks in a corporate software development process. The "load-bearing" calendar is a great example!
Speeding up code creation just increases pressure on the bottleneck, which decreases throughput.
The speed of writing code was never your problem. If you thought it was, the gap between that belief and reality is where all your actual problems live. The competitive advantage doesn't go to the team that writes code fastest. It goes to the team that figured out what to build, built it, and got it into users' hands while everyone else was still drowning in a review queue full of AI-generated PRs that nobody has the time or the energy to read.
That's the gist, in the last paragraph.
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The fact that we are *not* seeing wildly improving software all around us tells us everything we need to know.
There is no flourishing of value delivery, new product categories, more needs being satisfied better. It’s the opposite.
All we are seeing is decreases in quality, because
code creation is not the problem.The good news is :
Open source maintainers see an increase in the quality of AI security tools, it will soon be in the hands of the bad actors.
Then it will be mandatory to do good software and ( i will make the leap of faith that ) you have to understand the business needs to create a simple software that handle the issues.
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I generally agree!
On the narrow Waymo point, a few things have made me reconsider recently:
- Cyclists who feel Waymos are more predictable and less likely to make the equivalent of attentiveness mistakes. Or to be actively hostile.
- Women and older people who've said they feel vulnerable alone in a car with a driver.
@elizayer @BmeBenji @beep also folks with impairments meaning they can't drive. This is a great piece of podcast journalism about the response to Waymo applying to operate in Chicago:
https://pca.st/episode/ef4a328f-dbd4-45cb-8a0b-985250d62293 -
The fact that we are *not* seeing wildly improving software all around us tells us everything we need to know.
There is no flourishing of value delivery, new product categories, more needs being satisfied better. It’s the opposite.
All we are seeing is decreases in quality, because
code creation is not the problem.@elizayer this has never been about quality and only about the business class trying to free themselves from those damned uppity engineers
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The fact that we are *not* seeing wildly improving software all around us tells us everything we need to know.
There is no flourishing of value delivery, new product categories, more needs being satisfied better. It’s the opposite.
All we are seeing is decreases in quality, because
code creation is not the problem.@elizayer Exactly! I’ve been trying to explain to people, especially those pushing AI at work, that writing code is not the hard part of my job. Identifying the real-world problems and designing solutions that are as minimalist and simple as possible are the hard parts. The code is an implementation detail.
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I'm a big fan of this explanation/rant from Andrew Murphy.
Taken as a whole, there are many bottlenecks in a corporate software development process. The "load-bearing" calendar is a great example!
Speeding up code creation just increases pressure on the bottleneck, which decreases throughput.
Absolutely:
"More code, less understanding. That's not a productivity gain. That's a time bomb with a nicer dashboard." -
I'm a big fan of this explanation/rant from Andrew Murphy.
Taken as a whole, there are many bottlenecks in a corporate software development process. The "load-bearing" calendar is a great example!
Speeding up code creation just increases pressure on the bottleneck, which decreases throughput.
@elizayer @sophieschmieg The CEO of Tailscale made that same point a few weeks ago on their personal blog at https://apenwarr.ca/log/20260316. This is so true, and every initiative to accelerate delivery with LLMs should really focus on these things first instead.
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I'm a big fan of this explanation/rant from Andrew Murphy.
Taken as a whole, there are many bottlenecks in a corporate software development process. The "load-bearing" calendar is a great example!
Speeding up code creation just increases pressure on the bottleneck, which decreases throughput.
@elizayer Tragically, many of my colleagues are now concluding the solution is to have the same tool that produced the code review the code, as a way to manage the bottleneck.
I think it's something in the water.
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The fact that we are *not* seeing wildly improving software all around us tells us everything we need to know.
There is no flourishing of value delivery, new product categories, more needs being satisfied better. It’s the opposite.
All we are seeing is decreases in quality, because
code creation is not the problem.@elizayer to be 100% completely super fair, we are seeing a massive increase in scams. So AI is good for something. Scams. It’s good for scams.
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@elizayer @BmeBenji @beep also folks with impairments meaning they can't drive. This is a great piece of podcast journalism about the response to Waymo applying to operate in Chicago:
https://pca.st/episode/ef4a328f-dbd4-45cb-8a0b-985250d62293 -
I'm a big fan of this explanation/rant from Andrew Murphy.
Taken as a whole, there are many bottlenecks in a corporate software development process. The "load-bearing" calendar is a great example!
Speeding up code creation just increases pressure on the bottleneck, which decreases throughput.
@elizayer We're gonna need a bigger Theory of Constraints.
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I'm a big fan of this explanation/rant from Andrew Murphy.
Taken as a whole, there are many bottlenecks in a corporate software development process. The "load-bearing" calendar is a great example!
Speeding up code creation just increases pressure on the bottleneck, which decreases throughput.
@elizayer Very very true.
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The fact that we are *not* seeing wildly improving software all around us tells us everything we need to know.
There is no flourishing of value delivery, new product categories, more needs being satisfied better. It’s the opposite.
All we are seeing is decreases in quality, because
code creation is not the problem.@elizayer i think about this. according to the promises, all the little snags and bugs and oversights in all the software i use should be gone by now. "everyone's focusing on bigger things" doesn't excuse it, i was given the expectation these types of fixes should have been trivial and quick. computing should be better than ever, or at least as good as it was in the 2010s
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I'm a big fan of this explanation/rant from Andrew Murphy.
Taken as a whole, there are many bottlenecks in a corporate software development process. The "load-bearing" calendar is a great example!
Speeding up code creation just increases pressure on the bottleneck, which decreases throughput.
-
Absolutely:
"More code, less understanding. That's not a productivity gain. That's a time bomb with a nicer dashboard." -
The fact that we are *not* seeing wildly improving software all around us tells us everything we need to know.
There is no flourishing of value delivery, new product categories, more needs being satisfied better. It’s the opposite.
All we are seeing is decreases in quality, because
code creation is not the problem.@elizayer yes, this. Code creation hasn’t been an issue for a long, long, long time. See “no silver bullet” (https://worrydream.com/refs/Brooks_1986_-_No_Silver_Bullet.pdf) written in *1986*.
