Re:The Rise of Judgement over Technical Skill
by skydhash on Monday June 02, 2025 @08:39AM
(#44158202)
> Instead of stopping at the first thing that isn’t obviously broken, I can now explore nearby “what if it was slightly different in this way?”
What? Software engineering is about problem solving, not finding the first thing that works and called it a day. More often than not, you have too many solutions and the one that's implemented is the result of a list of decisions you've taken.
> If it can make a dev team of 7 capable of making the thing that used to take a dev team of 8, that's around 15% less human coordination needed overall to get the product out.
You should really read the mythical man month.
Re:The Rise of Judgement over Technical Skill
by sokoloff on Monday June 02, 2025 @10:19AM
(#44159124)
I credit my understanding of the incredible costs relating to the increased need for coordination and the sharply decreasing return on productivity for additional people to The Mythical Man Month.
I don't take credit for the value of being able to do with 7 what currently takes 8, but rather ascribe it to the ideas of Fred Brooks (and others).
To me, this makes my exploration workflow vastly different. Instead of stopping at the first thing that isn’t obviously broken, I can now explore nearby “what if it was slightly different in this way?”
I think that gets to a better outcome faster in perhaps 10-25% of software engineering work. That’s huge and today is the least capable these AI assistants will ever be.
Even just the human/social/mind-meld aspects will be meaningful. If it can make a dev team of 7 capable of making the thing that used to take a dev team of 8, that's around 15% less human coordination needed overall to get the product out. (This might even turn out to be half the benefit of productivity enhancing tools.)