AI, activity, and outcomes in software engineering

rubicon33

We are. This has got to be clickbait.

ftchd

Because we spend time writing clickbait articles

smy20011

We definitely see more broken features that was removed after a short amount of time.

throwitaway222

More tickets and larger tickets, full migrations that used to take 4 weeks coordinating with 3 teams are now a single PR done in a day. edit: if you're seeing a slow down in PRs, it's more likely that 10 of your 10x'ers are slinging code in 3-4 plus accounts in codex on the side during their shift on 8 startups.

0xb0565e486

We are. A month of work turned into one day.

HeadOfProbing

We definitely are.

hackboyfly

I work for a midsize company within retail and we are definitely shipping faster?

ferguess_k

We are definitely shipping faster. Does that turn to better products? Not necessarily.

9cb14c1ec0

I am shipping so much more, but I don't know that our customers would necessarily know it. Total rewrites that needed to be done but were getting pushed off due to the scope are now getting done. Security issues are getting patched. Support ticket open to resolution time is dropping. So yes, shipping a lot faster to create a much better project rather than just focusing on features.

throwaway7783

Who is not shipping faster? We definitely are.

choult

The excitement of LLMs has been around the productivity of the engineers, not the quality of the projects. Traditionally, we have bottlenecks at review and QA stages for new work, and a lot of orgs turn on the firehose of new code without fixing those bottlenecks. If you want to drive at high speed, you need to build a highway first.

prmph

The question should be: why isn't software improving? Claude Code TUI, probably the poster child for AI-driven coding, itself is still going to sh*t.

xnickb

I think the recent article by Rober Haas on why Postgres release is delayed is giving a very good insight into the general "why".

throwaway0q5347

At least in our case, we are shipping faster. The rate of bugs has gone up, but still proportional to the behavior changes.

mr_roboto

I'm shipping faster, but not as fast if the output was the same as before. AI allows for deeper code, all the nice to haves you wouldn't normally do. Test coverage is now fully complete as well, and I mean full tilt mocks and every edge case, not just the happy path plus bugs found in testing.

fizx

Speak for yourself, mate

raincole

Who are we? Google Search: 1998 Gmail: 2004 Google Map: 2005 Google Docs: 2006 Chrome: 2008 vs Claude 3 (+ tool calling, web search): 2024 Claude Code: 2025 Claude Design, Sheet, Data: 2026 "We" (whatever it means) are shipping faster now, no?

MisterPea

I feel like I'm going crazy with all the people questioning the impact of AI in software development. I think people already have forgotten how long and arduous software development was just a few years ago. The biggest bottleneck now is CI/CD/Experimentation with respect to engineering, and product alignment with respect to the business.