I'm a big fan of this explanation/rant from Andrew Murphy.

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@elizayer this has never been about quality and only about the business class trying to free themselves from those damned uppity engineers

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@elizayer

Absolutely:
"More code, less understanding. That's not a productivity gain. That's a time bomb with a nicer dashboard."

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@elizayer @sophieschmieg The CEO of Tailscale made that same point a few weeks ago on their personal blog at https://apenwarr.ca/log/20260316. This is so true, and every initiative to accelerate delivery with LLMs should really focus on these things first instead.

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@elizayer Tragically, many of my colleagues are now concluding the solution is to have the same tool that produced the code review the code, as a way to manage the bottleneck.

I think it's something in the water.

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@elizayer to be 100% completely super fair, we are seeing a massive increase in scams. So AI is good for something. Scams. It’s good for scams.

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@Niall @elizayer While I haven’t listened to the episode — I didn’t realize Pinnamaneni and Vogt had a new project, after the Gimlet debacle — I can say the accessibility question here in Boston is much, much more complicated than that.

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@elizayer We're gonna need a bigger Theory of Constraints.

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@elizayer Very very true.

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@elizayer i think about this. according to the promises, all the little snags and bugs and oversights in all the software i use should be gone by now. "everyone's focusing on bigger things" doesn't excuse it, i was given the expectation these types of fixes should have been trivial and quick. computing should be better than ever, or at least as good as it was in the 2010s

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@beep @elizayer well yes, it's clear you haven't listened to the episode

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@elizayer

"The Mythical Man Month"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month

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@mtnrbq65 @elizayer developers sometimes reference the 80/20 rule. And let's say in certain ways LLM code tools can get you through that 80% part faster, but they also have very real risk of making the last 20% even slower.

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@elizayer yes, this. Code creation hasn’t been an issue for a long, long, long time. See “no silver bullet” (https://worrydream.com/refs/Brooks_1986_-_No_Silver_Bullet.pdf) written in *1986*.

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@elizayer I've listened to a few podcasts now where software company executives (and even a CEO, who I would have expected to know better because he's a CEO) have talked about how much faster their teams are producing code, and since their QA teams can't keep up they've fired those people and are using Claude for QA now.

I get that devs don't study management subjects (I was one myself, many years ago) so they won't necessarily know how to find and fix bottlenecks, but I'm genuinely disappointed that software industry executives don't realise they're in a manufacturing business, nor do they understand how to optimise their value chains.

I know it's a cliche to say that people fail upwards, and I've worked with many executives who were clearly in their roles because they were intelligent, educated, and were delivering at a strategic level - but I'm beginning to wonder if software businesses are a special case.

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@elizayer
Almost all of the code written by the major software companies since the late 80’s has been bloatware. Especially operating systems. The days when programming was an art and minimizing resource usage was the primary consideration are long gone. If that code is what AI and these LLM’s are being “trained” on then expect software to continue its downward spiral.

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@elizayer This is a fabulously well-written article on flow, constraints, and fixing the biggest constraint first. Well worth nyour time if you do…well, anything.

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@Niall @beep @elizayer Germans have a word for accessible cars. it translates as "low floor bus". Sorry, there's no English language version of that article https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niederflurtechnik

Of course, there are people whose disability doesn't allow them to take a bus, those will need a driving service.

Also, driverless subways make a lot more sense than driverless cars, because you have a much more controlled environment.

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@Aedius @elizayer there's just going to be less open source

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@spazcosoft @elizayer Wasn't this always? Newly hyped stuff is used for scam, or porn, or both.

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@wila @elizayer

All code is open source when you push it with a map file.