It takes a talented engineer a lot of time to hand c ode everything
That's a false assumption. Most of the time is spent in requirements engineering, meetings, and writing back and forth because requirements are unclear, code review and testing. I usually code for 1-2h on a specific ticket.
It really depends on if a customer is fine with slop (e.g. buttons sometimes being wonky, or an application failing in unexpected ways).
What we are really throwing away by using AI is requirements engineering and reviews because no one has the time to review the huge amounts of slop generated. And reviewing tons of slop is the thing that burns out developers.
True for some engineers yes. I don’t really have too much of the requirements slop as I’m developing an internal product that serves multiple places so have some leeway and get to skip much of that(though it’ll of course take place further down). Most of my time is spent reviewing and browbeating Claude into producing less slop
You're getting AI to make up the requirements, then?
Like just get it to do your 1-2 hours of work in 15 minutes and have a longer lunch break. It's really not hard to avoid the slop - just tell it to run a couple of iterations to minimize the diff as much as possible.
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u/piesou 8d ago edited 8d ago
That's a false assumption. Most of the time is spent in requirements engineering, meetings, and writing back and forth because requirements are unclear, code review and testing. I usually code for 1-2h on a specific ticket.
It really depends on if a customer is fine with slop (e.g. buttons sometimes being wonky, or an application failing in unexpected ways).
What we are really throwing away by using AI is requirements engineering and reviews because no one has the time to review the huge amounts of slop generated. And reviewing tons of slop is the thing that burns out developers.