Most proof of concepts I've seen get traction turned into production.
A rewrite?
I recall a few times everyone promised, if this gets promoted then we will rewrite it from zero. Never happened.
The article touches on responsability, accountability. There is none for risk taker. By definition. You have a crazy idea, you rush it out, you hope clients bite. You profit. It's not even your problem how to make it work, scale, not cost more to run than we sell it for.
The loop on the right. There are companies, two of them are very popular these days, they took it to an extreme. You ship something fast, and since it only scales linearly you go raise money. Successful companies, countless users, some of them even pay. Who's to blame? The senior developer, or simply someone reasonable who asks, how's that sustainable, what's the way out of this? Those are fired, so whoever's left is a believer.
As a /senior/ developer I really dislike blanket statements. I've seen the same amount of failures caused by
> “Do we really need that?”
> “What happens if we don’t do this?”
> “Can we make do for now? Maybe come back to this later when it becomes more important?”
as with experimenters. Every system is different, every product is different. If I were building firmware for a CT scanner, my approach towards trying out new things would be different than a CRUD SaaS with 100 clients in a field that could benefit from a fresh perspective.
There are definitely ways to have eager/very open seniors drive systems into hard to get out corners. But then there are people that claim PHP5 is all you need.
A sort of survivor bias. A VP ordered to use elastic search, because it worked well at his company before. Turned out it worked well for us. Listen to the VP to make technical decisions. And use elastic search.
A really competent senior figures out what the prevailing culture of the company is now, and what it will need to be in 5 years, and adapts as they go. Startups with 5 people maybe don't need extra complexity costing runway. A 500 person business may need that complexity because now there are second-order effects that need to be mitigated for every business decision. It's not a black-and-white "always avoid complexity" it's "add complexity when it makes sense" and even that question has a lot of nuance because sometimes the business just needs to survive for another couple of months.
The written word is how people interact with LLMs. Clarity and precision in writing results in more effective prompting of LLMs. It is just as possible that leaning heavily AI writing will be seen as a marker of not being natively skilled enough at writing to prompt LLMs effectively because of the GIGO principle.
There's no fundamental reason that I have to read random blogposts from people I don't know. I do it today because I find it to be an enjoyable way to learn more about my profession and explore various perspectives on it. If I stop finding it enjoyable because too many people write their posts with AI, I'll stop reading these kind of blogs altogether, in the same way that I (and I suspect many commenters here) do not read even the most lovingly crafted Linkedin posts.
I’m inclined to take the author at their word that they’re a copywriter by trade.
I agree that the punchy staccato and the rhetorical questions smell AI-ish, but the way this person uses them, there’s, like, a payload each time. Versus LLM-speak, where the assertions are at best banal and more frequently just confusing.
I agree with the author's premise - that one feedback loop optimizes for speed, and the other for scale - but I don't think the market is bearing the conclusion - that AI should be utilized to enable more rapid experimentation, where we better scale what works.
Many vendors seem to be learning (or not learning, but just throwing their weight against it anyway) that adding hastily-generated AI features are causing customer dissatisfaction, as more people brand the features "slop".
In the best case, the users give the company more chances. Infinitely more chances.
In a worse case, the users assume the new feature will always be bad, given their first impression. It's hard for a vendor to make people reconsider a first impression.
The absolute worst case is that AI enables a new market, but the first attempts are so poor that the first movers make people write that market off as a dead end, leading to a lost opportunity.
> Ah, well, it can’t yet do the one thing senior developers still do. Take responsibility.
If only higher-ups would recognize that. Instead we see left and right mass layoffs, restructurings and clueless higher-ups who clearly drank not just a bottle of koolaid but a barrel.
> The ‘Speed’ version allows the rest of the business to continue learning from the market, as the senior developers build a trailing version of the system that’s well-reviewed and understandable.
Yeah... that doesn't fly. The beancounters don't care. The "speed" version works, so why even invest a single cent into the "scale" version? That's all potential profit that can be distributed to shareholders. And when it (inevitably) all crashes down, the higher ups all have long since cashed out, leaving the remaining shareholders as bagholders, the employees without employment and society to pick up the tab. Yet again.
FTA: “AI agents are the future of software development. We won’t need developers anymore to slow down the progress of a business.”
Almost all business presidents, CEOs, and owners are thinking this. I guarantee you they are sick and tired of developers taking forever on every project. Now they can create the apps themselves.
My comment isn't meant to debate every nitty-gritty detail about code quality, security, stability, thinking of every aspect of how the code works, does it scale, etc. All of those things are extremely important. However, most leadership never cared about any of that anyways. They only heard those as excuses why developers took so long. Over the last decade they put up with it begrudgingly.
You know all the developers that wanted to complain about IT, cybersecurity, DevOPs, cloud architects for getting in their way and if they only had administrator access then they could get everything done themselves because they are experts in networking and everything else? Well, those developers are about to have the worst day ever when every single person on the planet can generate code and will be "experts" in everything as well.
Most proof of concepts I've seen get traction turned into production.
A rewrite?
I recall a few times everyone promised, if this gets promoted then we will rewrite it from zero. Never happened.
The article touches on responsability, accountability. There is none for risk taker. By definition. You have a crazy idea, you rush it out, you hope clients bite. You profit. It's not even your problem how to make it work, scale, not cost more to run than we sell it for.
The loop on the right. There are companies, two of them are very popular these days, they took it to an extreme. You ship something fast, and since it only scales linearly you go raise money. Successful companies, countless users, some of them even pay. Who's to blame? The senior developer, or simply someone reasonable who asks, how's that sustainable, what's the way out of this? Those are fired, so whoever's left is a believer.
As a /senior/ developer I really dislike blanket statements. I've seen the same amount of failures caused by
> “Do we really need that?” > “What happens if we don’t do this?” > “Can we make do for now? Maybe come back to this later when it becomes more important?”
as with experimenters. Every system is different, every product is different. If I were building firmware for a CT scanner, my approach towards trying out new things would be different than a CRUD SaaS with 100 clients in a field that could benefit from a fresh perspective.
There are definitely ways to have eager/very open seniors drive systems into hard to get out corners. But then there are people that claim PHP5 is all you need.
A sort of survivor bias. A VP ordered to use elastic search, because it worked well at his company before. Turned out it worked well for us. Listen to the VP to make technical decisions. And use elastic search.
A really competent senior figures out what the prevailing culture of the company is now, and what it will need to be in 5 years, and adapts as they go. Startups with 5 people maybe don't need extra complexity costing runway. A 500 person business may need that complexity because now there are second-order effects that need to be mitigated for every business decision. It's not a black-and-white "always avoid complexity" it's "add complexity when it makes sense" and even that question has a lot of nuance because sometimes the business just needs to survive for another couple of months.
I don't necessarily disagree with this conclusion, but the way it is written has a lot of AI prose smell that was extremely distracting for me.
I didn't get the AI vibe from it. At some point we are just going to have to get use to most stuff being written to some degree by AI.
There will be different shades of usage and maybe we draw a line somewhere in there.
The written word is how people interact with LLMs. Clarity and precision in writing results in more effective prompting of LLMs. It is just as possible that leaning heavily AI writing will be seen as a marker of not being natively skilled enough at writing to prompt LLMs effectively because of the GIGO principle.
Let’s do the exact opposite of what this person is saying. Resist AI slop.
There's no fundamental reason that I have to read random blogposts from people I don't know. I do it today because I find it to be an enjoyable way to learn more about my profession and explore various perspectives on it. If I stop finding it enjoyable because too many people write their posts with AI, I'll stop reading these kind of blogs altogether, in the same way that I (and I suspect many commenters here) do not read even the most lovingly crafted Linkedin posts.
I’m inclined to take the author at their word that they’re a copywriter by trade.
I agree that the punchy staccato and the rhetorical questions smell AI-ish, but the way this person uses them, there’s, like, a payload each time. Versus LLM-speak, where the assertions are at best banal and more frequently just confusing.
I agree with the author's premise - that one feedback loop optimizes for speed, and the other for scale - but I don't think the market is bearing the conclusion - that AI should be utilized to enable more rapid experimentation, where we better scale what works.
Many vendors seem to be learning (or not learning, but just throwing their weight against it anyway) that adding hastily-generated AI features are causing customer dissatisfaction, as more people brand the features "slop".
In the best case, the users give the company more chances. Infinitely more chances.
In a worse case, the users assume the new feature will always be bad, given their first impression. It's hard for a vendor to make people reconsider a first impression.
The absolute worst case is that AI enables a new market, but the first attempts are so poor that the first movers make people write that market off as a dead end, leading to a lost opportunity.
> Ah, well, it can’t yet do the one thing senior developers still do. Take responsibility.
If only higher-ups would recognize that. Instead we see left and right mass layoffs, restructurings and clueless higher-ups who clearly drank not just a bottle of koolaid but a barrel.
> The ‘Speed’ version allows the rest of the business to continue learning from the market, as the senior developers build a trailing version of the system that’s well-reviewed and understandable.
Yeah... that doesn't fly. The beancounters don't care. The "speed" version works, so why even invest a single cent into the "scale" version? That's all potential profit that can be distributed to shareholders. And when it (inevitably) all crashes down, the higher ups all have long since cashed out, leaving the remaining shareholders as bagholders, the employees without employment and society to pick up the tab. Yet again.
FTA: “AI agents are the future of software development. We won’t need developers anymore to slow down the progress of a business.”
Almost all business presidents, CEOs, and owners are thinking this. I guarantee you they are sick and tired of developers taking forever on every project. Now they can create the apps themselves.
My comment isn't meant to debate every nitty-gritty detail about code quality, security, stability, thinking of every aspect of how the code works, does it scale, etc. All of those things are extremely important. However, most leadership never cared about any of that anyways. They only heard those as excuses why developers took so long. Over the last decade they put up with it begrudgingly.
You know all the developers that wanted to complain about IT, cybersecurity, DevOPs, cloud architects for getting in their way and if they only had administrator access then they could get everything done themselves because they are experts in networking and everything else? Well, those developers are about to have the worst day ever when every single person on the planet can generate code and will be "experts" in everything as well.