| > Dothey do requirement gatherings? This is true, but they have helped prepare me with good questions to ask during those meetings! > Do they do the analysis? Removing specs that conflict with each other, validating what's possible in the technical domain and in the business domain? Yes, I have had LLMs point out missing information or conflicting information in the spec. See above about "good questions to ask stakeholders." > Do they help with design? Helping coming up with the changes that impact the current software the least, fitting in the current architecture and be maintainable in the feature. Yes. I recently had a scenario where I had a refactoring task that I thought I should do, but didn’t really want to. It was cleaning up some error handling. This would involve a lot of changes to my codebase, nothing hard, but it would have taken me a while, and been very boring, and I’m trying to ship features, not polish off the perfect codebase, so I hadn’t done it, even though I still thought I should. I was able to ask Claude “hey, how expensive would this refactoring be? how many methods would it change? What’s the before/after diffs on a simple affected place, and one of the more complex affected places look like? Previously, I had to use my hard-won human intuition to make the call about implementing this or not. It’s very fuzzy. With Claude, I was able to very quickly quantify that fuzzy notion into something at least close to accurate: 260 method signatures. Before and after diffs look decent. And this kind of fairly mechanical transformation is something Claude can do much more quickly and just as accurately as I can. So I finally did it. That I shipped the refactoring is one point. But the real point is that I was able to quickly focus my understanding of the problem, and make a better, more informed decision because of it. My gut was right. But now I knew it was right, without needing to actually try it out. > Not a true debate or weighing options based on the organization context. This context is your job to provide. They will take it into account when you provide it. > Do they help with coding? Yes. > Do they help with testing? Coming up with tests plan, writing test code, running them, analysing the output of the various tools and producing a cohesive report of the defects? Yes, absolutely. > Do they help with maintenance? Taking the same software and making changes to keep it churning on new platforms, through dependencies updates and bug fixes? See above about refactoring to improve quality. |
At least in the case of lot of automated test coverage and typed language (Go) so it can work independently efficiently.