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by phamilton 2 hours ago
I'm not talking about time. I'm talking about safety. The amount of times I've seen "I refactored it, but I'm not confident enough to take it to prod" is significant. Being able to go faster but still not ship it is the huge opportunity cost.
2 comments
cassianoleal 1 hour ago
Time, safety and cost are one and the same. Not safe enough? Spend more time increasing confidence. Taking too long? Cheap out now and pay the price later due to added risk.

All of that is orthogonal to AI. All AI did was accelerate the typing code part - which was never the bottleneck or a very significant cost to begin with.

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sublinear 1 hour ago
In the broader corporate world, that's not "opportunity cost". All changes are considered "risk".

All deployments must be approved by an advisory board. All work must originate from a clear business need. Analysis of those needs is not concerned with implementation, least of which whether "AI" is used.

What matters far more is that a contract requires work to be done by a deadline. Those deadlines are driven by policy. There will be no adjustment to policy unless tangible benefits are shown from more frequent deployments of code.

I gotta tell you that's extremely unlikely if you're already shipping every other week at the end of the sprint. Most of that sprint is spent in meetings, not writing code. Nobody is doing big refactors because it wasn't built so fast to require them. There's some technical debt, but nothing so severe. Those meetings are preventing risk, not wasting time. The bottleneck is a feature, not a bug.

If you think the future of dev work is to be a bureaucrat, you're right! It looks like the rest of the world outside of SV is ahead of the curve and living in the future.

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phamilton 1 hour ago
That's not at all what I meant.

I mean "We can't build X because our code structure makes that difficult" has an opportunity cost of the value of X.

I don't think the future of dev work is being a bureaucrat. I've done more rigorous engineering the last two years than I did previously. I'm more confident in the things I shop and they were built in a fraction of the time. It's a bright future for software engineering.

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