AI coding has made CI a bottleneck, so we reworked ours to keep up

Re:AI coding has made CI a bottleneck, so we reworked ours t... by ehnto on Monday September 21, 2026 @11:17PM (#49796430)

No seriously, companies hired developers just to starve the competition of talent, raise more investment etc. It was a genuine thing, that left a lot of developers doing pretty meaningless work. A similar thing happens for managers in big orgs, who want bigger headcounts to inflate their power in the org. You get thumb twiddling and initiatives to justify the headcount.

It's probably changing now as VC cash floods into AI instead of web app startups, but I am not talking out of my ass, it's a well known phenomenon.

The industry does not incentivise or reward lean software, the software input for a lot of "software" companies doesn't require it, that's fine. Exactly as you said they're businesses, they do what makes money and go where incentives take them. That cuts both ways, they are not disincentived to have a lot of wasted dev hours, at least not historically.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:AI coding has made CI a bottleneck, so we reworked ours t... by antupis on Tuesday September 22, 2026 @02:06AM (#49797312)

I think it's more about money and scaling, bus factor is pretty big if run very lean organization eg whatsapp 2014 and that point all those developers are kinda your cofounders and probably start asking much bigger piece of pie. With small teams you kinda trade scaling and availability to velocity. It's much easier to ship but running oncall 24/7 with small team is just nightmare.

[ Parent | on HN ]