At every company I’ve ever worked for, the bottleneck is not “how fast can we spit out more code?” It’s always: “how fast can the business actually decide what they want and create a good backlog?”

Maybe startup development will significantly accelerate with AI churning out all the boilerplate to get your app started.

But enterprise development, where the app is already there and you’re building new features on top of a labyrinthian foundation, is a different beast. The hard part is sitting through planning meetings or untangling weird system dependencies, not churning out net new code. My two cents anyway.

As a PM I have never not had a backlog of little stuff we'd love to do but can't justify prioritizing. I've also almost always had developers who want to make improvements to the codebase that don't get prioritized because we need new features.

The upside is that both of these things are the kind of tasks that are probably good to give to AI. I've always got little UI bugs that bother me every time I use our application but don't actually break anything and thus won't impact revenue and never get done.

I had a frontend engineer, who, when I could just find a way to give him time to do whatever he wanted, would just constantly make little improvements that would incrementally speed up pageload.

Both of those cases feel like places where AI probably gets the job done.

That sounds good, but if you have a PMO and an enterprise Change Control Board that controls your not-quite-CI/CD deployments, you may find yourself hamstrung. I've been in that position before, where there was simultaneously a bottleneck of clear requirements and also a bunch of stuff (tech debt, small features, bug fixes, UI tweaks) sitting and waiting on a branch ready to deploy when downtime was finally approved. Or, situations where enterprise policy requires human SQA signoff on everything going to prod. There are lots of places you can create inefficiencies in the system and lack of approved requirements is just one.

Thankfully my career has been at very early stage startups, so none of that applies!

> developers who want to make improvements to the codebase that don't get prioritized

So, to clarify – developers want to make improvements to the codebase, and you want to give that work to AI? Have you never been in the shoes of making an improvement or a suggestion for a project that you want to work on, seeing it given to somebody else, and then being assigned just more slog that you don't want to do?

I mean, I'm no PM, but that certainly seems like a way to kill team morale, if nothing else.

> I had a frontend engineer, who, when I could just find a way to give him time to do whatever he wanted, would just constantly make little improvements that would incrementally speed up pageload.

Blows my mind to think that those are the things you want to give to AI. I'd quit.

I completely agree. Those annoying UI bugs and the general need to refactor are often the same technical debt. If you want to make an already bad codebase even worse, giving those tasks to AI is probably the quickest and surest way.

The ability to untangle old bad code and make bigger broader plans for a codebase is precisely where you need human developers the most.

I'd give them to AI because they're generally just not getting done. I worked hard to get that frontend dev time to make those improvements, but there was no chance it was ever going to be enough. When you're talking about enterprise software, minor improvements to pageload speed do not move the needle on revenue. When you have a list of features that customers will actually pay for, those will get priority 100% of the time.

Everybody's job is to serve the company priorities. Engineers don't get to pick the tasks they want to do because they're getting paid to be there. I also have spent lots of time doing things I'd rather not do, because that's the nature of a job (plus a pile of stock options incentivizes me).

Better to have those tasks done by AI than not at all.

Really says something about the HN crowd that you're getting downvoted for this.

I never worked at a place where not having a backlog was an issue. Quite the opposite in fact - there’s always infinite backlogs of stuff. Every single time I’ve seen organizations being slow to decide anything, it was due to the human tendency to stretch their tasks to occupy as much time as possible. Planning meetings are “the work” for a legion of people (even though they also know they’re mostly pointless). Untangling dependencies is harder when it involves approvals of other humans (particularly fun as multiple people are “the tech lead”, are all objectively wrong but unable to see how they’re simply getting in the way).

I don’t think LLMs are particularly smart, or capable of, or will definitely replace humans at anything, or if they’ll lead to better work. But I can already tell that their inherent lack of an ego DO accelerate things at enterprises, for the simple reason that the self-imposed roadblocks above stop happening

At my current workplace, we do have a roadmap for the business, but the actual backlog of tickets to implement work is all waiting on other siloed teams to make decisions that we are downstream of. This ranges from our infrastructure model to simple things like “which CSS components are we allowed to use.”

We are also explicitly NOT allowed to make any code changes that aren’t part of a story that our product owner has approved and prioritized.

The result is that we scrape together some stories to work on every sprint, but if we finish it early, we quickly run into red tape and circular conversations with other “decision makers” who need to tell us what we’re allowed to do before we actually do anything.

It’s fairly maddening. The whole org is hamstrung by a few workaholic individuals who control decision making for several teams and are chronically unavailable as a result.

I’ve seen this sort of thing happen at other big enterprises too but my current situation is perhaps an extreme example of dysfunction. Point being, when an org gets tangled up like this, LLMs aren’t gonna save it :)

The moment those people start being removed, and the little work they do automated, it’ll have a dramatic downstream effect.

I’ve already witnessed a certain big tech that started to move much faster by removing TPMs & EMs across the board, even without LLMs to “replace” them. With LLMs, you need even fewer layers. Then eventually fewer middle-of-business decision makers. In your example, it’s entirely possible that the function of making those components could be entirely subsumed by a single AI bot. That’s starting to happen a lot in the devops space already.

All that said, I doubt your business would benefit from moving faster anyway - most businesses don’t actually need to move faster. I highly recommend the “Bullshit Jobs” book, on this matter. Businesses will just need fewer and fewer people

All of those things will be easier with fewer people involved though?

Yup I agree. The fundamental limiter is humans deciding. But it will trivial to clone apps where things were already decided.

Though AI will probably just proactively add features and open PRs and people can choose

There was a submission a few months ago that boiled down to 'AI will force us to reevaluate our human in the loop decision points.'

Which I expect will be the gist of management consulting reports for the next decade.

If human decision-makers become the bottleneck... eventually that will be reengineered.

I'm fascinated to imagine what change control will need to look like in a majority-AI scenario. Expect there will be a lot more focus on TDD.

Eerily similar to the plot of terminator

The trouble is: broadly speaking, no one uses those.

I logged into classmates a couple of years ago. I had a message waiting from 2005 from one of my sister's insane ex-friends. That was a blast from the past and hilarious. 18 years without bothering to log in.

Then I realized their business model is so low-rent, they had web 1.0 style protections on scraping all their scanned yearbooks. So I liberated all the ones with anyone I was likely to know and posted them to Archive.org.

You're welcome.

Also: #deletefacebook

Your argument is so out of touch I can only assume it’s being made in bad faith.

Many of the pro-Palestinian protesters are also Jewish. Equating all Jewish people with Israel and Zionism is insidious and misleading.

What on Earth? How is their argument out of touch or made in bad faith? It's a reasonable and popular line of reasoning that you disagree with strongly. Assuming the best possible interpretation is one of our community guidelines, please follow it.

The punishment needs to be commisserate with the crime, and dealt with through due process; to do otherwise is distinctly un-american (see 1st amendment on freedom of assembly, 4th amendment on freedoms from unreasonable state actions: "The right of the people to be secure in their persons[...] against unreasonable searches and seizures", and especially the 5th amendment: "[no person shall] be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law").

What we are seeing at Colombia University (as well as the country at large) is the continual abridgement of these rights. Note that for the fifth amendendment specifically, the constitution refers to any person, not just citizens. Those here legally are entitled to due process protections under the law.

The following argument relies on the following: (1) Universities historically have been the the catalysts of change through student protest. (2) Peaceful protest is a right of the people that shall not be abridged. (3) Public Universities (being government institutuions themselves; see campus police and jurisdiction) have a duty of care to protect their students.

With the above holding true, the argument against this being a "betrayal" falls facially flat, as it is a severe consequence that the university capitulated to, and had a duty to prevent. The arument boiled down to "they were being disruptive, so we should get rid of them," because the betrayal amounted to the jailing and deportations (or attempted deportations, in some cases) for the "crime" of being nonviolently disruptive in a public place.

Without articulating a legally rationed basis for a criminally sanctionable offense, an equivalent is threatening to jail and deport construction workers when they block a business entryway. In general, you do not have a right to be merely inconvienced by others in a public space.

The second paragraph answers your second question, actually.

How so? I don't see how that answers any of my questions. It just adds more color and nuance to the situation being discussed.

You can be 100% correct while not being mainstream.

And you're laundering what the linked page says--they try to paint a picture of JVP being anti-semitic, but don't specifically accuse them of that. They do call them anti-Israel and anti-Zionist but you must not conflate that with anti-Semitism.

Do you find the ADL credible anyway. Seems they themselves could be accused of anti-semitism: https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5097676-elon-mus...

Saying Musk's anti-semitic behavior isn't anti-semitic is definitely stretching the truth.

> Many of the pro-Palestinian protesters are also Jewish

Nearly every person who claims to be jewish, when pushed turns out to be "jewish" it's essentially a strange version of blackface and fairly bigoted.

Exactly. Most people of Jewish faith I have met puts the interests of Israel above those of the United States, because it is in their religion to return to the homeland. Look no further than Pelosi arguing that if the Capitol burned to the ground, as long as Israel prospers, elected officials will remain committed to Israel (and the crowd at that Jewish council cheered on). Btw, one cannot find this video anywhere anymore (you will find it on Facebook using Pelosi Capitol). I wonder why.... People advocating for Israel at this point are traitors to the United States and should be treated as such. When elected officials like Pelosi would rather the capitol burns to the ground but Israel prospers, I feel nothing short of dread. But students writting opeds opposing Genocide is the story...

Well luckily for them, I’d imagine they don’t think too hard about it.

Love this. I’ve had the same thought for years and I’m glad to hear there’s a name for it.

Going out on a limb here: nope.

Do I wish otherwise? Of course. Will anything of the sort happen? Nope.

A “gaming headset” with a built-in microphone. The sound quality was fine but the build quality was terrible. It broke apart while I was wearing it, after owning it for less than a year.

Now I just use a pair of Sennheiser studio headphones and a usb desktop microphone, and they’ve lasted for years with no issues.

There are also inline headset mics for sennhesier headphones that work reasonably well (they’re part of the cable that plugs into the headphones). More convenient than a desk mic imo.

Beautifully written and fun to read. Blog posts like this give me a boost of mental strength to keep going during my worst episodes of burnout.