[sokoloff]

I don’t think AI marks the end of software engineers, but it absolutely can grind out code for well specified, well scoped problem statements in quarter-minutes that would take a human an hour or so.

To me, this makes my exploration workflow vastly different. Instead of stopping at the first thing that isn’t obviously broken, I can now explore nearby “what if it was slightly different in this way?”

I think that gets to a better outcome faster in perhaps 10-25% of software engineering work. That’s huge and today is the least capable these AI assistants will ever be.

Even just the human/social/mind-meld aspects will be meaningful. If it can make a dev team of 7 capable of making the thing that used to take a dev team of 8, that's around 15% less human coordination needed overall to get the product out. (This might even turn out to be half the benefit of productivity enhancing tools.)

[skydhash]

> Instead of stopping at the first thing that isn’t obviously broken, I can now explore nearby “what if it was slightly different in this way?”

What? Software engineering is about problem solving, not finding the first thing that works and called it a day. More often than not, you have too many solutions and the one that's implemented is the result of a list of decisions you've taken.

> If it can make a dev team of 7 capable of making the thing that used to take a dev team of 8, that's around 15% less human coordination needed overall to get the product out.

You should really read the mythical man month.

[sokoloff]

I credit my understanding of the incredible costs relating to the increased need for coordination and the sharply decreasing return on productivity for additional people to The Mythical Man Month.

I don't take credit for the value of being able to do with 7 what currently takes 8, but rather ascribe it to the ideas of Fred Brooks (and others).