Jonathan Blow – If AI Solved Coding, Why Is My Software Still the Same? [video]

Re:Jonathan Blow – If AI Solved Coding, Why Is My Software S... by skydhash on Friday November 13, 2026 @11:45AM (#50486112)

From "The Mythical Man-month" (1995 ed)

  For some years I have been successfully using the following rule of thumb for scheduling a software task:
    l/3 planning
    l/6 coding
    l/4 component test and early system test
    l/4 system test, all components in hand.

The separation can be blurred if you follow an iterative approach (also explained in the book), but it aligned roughly with my experience. And whenever I helped a colleague in the past, coding was not the problem. It was either the lack of planning (no data modelling, no rough algorithm design), or no test setup (trial and error coding). It was never the coding part. Syntax errors is trivial to solve (with any good editor) and most libraries have good reference docs (not learning the library is an orthogonal matter).

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Re:Jonathan Blow – If AI Solved Coding, Why Is My Software S... by k0morebi on Friday November 13, 2026 @12:14PM (#50486539)

Say what you want about reducible fractions but that's a pretty nonintuitive way to describe how you divvy up time. Weird to not use percentages or a common denominator...

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Re:Jonathan Blow – If AI Solved Coding, Why Is My Software S... by Taikonerd on Friday November 13, 2026 @12:41PM (#50486964)

I think it would be funny if the fractions summed to more than 1. Like the old joke: "the first 80% of the project takes 80% of the time, and the last 20% of the project also takes 80% of the time."

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Re:Jonathan Blow – If AI Solved Coding, Why Is My Software S... by Supermancho on Friday November 13, 2026 @12:45PM (#50487026)

That's nice, but not authoritative for ~20 years (since before VMs and AWS). This book was before CI was commonplace.

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Re:Jonathan Blow – If AI Solved Coding, Why Is My Software S... by bigstrat2003 on Friday November 13, 2026 @12:53PM (#50487145)

Doesn't matter. Nothing has fundamentally changed since he wrote it, because the book is more about how people act than technology.

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Re:Jonathan Blow – If AI Solved Coding, Why Is My Software S... by SoftTalker on Friday November 13, 2026 @12:55PM (#50487190)

If anything, testing/TDD is a bigger share compared to coding than before. LLMs can write tests too, but it's still something that has to be managed.

It meshes with my experience. Coding was never the bottleneck. Understanding what the customer/business wanted or needed was always the vast majority of the time spent on a project. A developer might not have seen that, depending how the organization worked. If you got specs from a manager you might not have been aware that those were 6 months in the making. If most of what you experienced was writing code then that could feel like the bottleneck especially if your manager demanded frequent status reports.

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Re:Jonathan Blow – If AI Solved Coding, Why Is My Software S... by svachalek on Friday November 13, 2026 @12:58PM (#50487231)

AI practically zeroes out the coding and component test part of the process and massively accelerates the system test. What's left is "planning" which under a modern iterative model apparently includes deployment/distribution and getting/understanding/incorporating feedback. With a fully optimized process, knowing what to build is nearly the entire problem.

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Re:Jonathan Blow – If AI Solved Coding, Why Is My Software S... by skydhash on Friday November 13, 2026 @03:21PM (#50489094)

> AI practically zeroes out the coding and component test part of the process and massively accelerates the system test.

Have this been measured, not comparatively, but absolutely? Where you plan, but don't code, instead leave the task to an agent (while you do something else), then test the result (maybe a quick look at the code), and ship. Is it sustainable? Or is it for greenfield setup and common ideas (things you would use tooling and snippets before)?

> What's left is "planning" which under a modern iterative model apparently includes deployment/distribution and getting/understanding/incorporating feedback.

That is not "planning" means. Planning is usually understanding, research, and design.

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