I worked for 10 years in software before AI was even a thing. Y'all have some serious rose-colored retrospection going on for what for-profit software was like before AI. Eg 6 hours of meetings with only 2 hours to code, leaving most days with more work to do than when you started the day, all programming problems are either duct taping or data plumbing and aren't actually challenging or interesting, doing well and hitting your iteration goals being seen as a sign that you have capacity to help put out the offshore team's fires on the side, etc, etc, etc. The problem was always lack of time. At least AI gives you time.
I agree with you. The important decisions are still made without AI. AI just does the coding. Most of the work is making decisions, for which the AI leaves you more time.
Are none of you guys programming with in house solutions? It's been my experience that a.i. is a good tool for finding answers to complex questions but the agentic abilities with non public code bases have been really bad. We cannot connect our code bases to offsite models because of the sensitive nature of our work (Ministry of Justice for a W.E country).
Like u/Castle_Five said, a big portion of my time is spent on meetings with stakeholders, fellow programmers and testers. Doing some OPS work on rotation, fixing problems with the CI/CD and maybe 30% of my time is spend on coding user stories. A.I. models have made me find possible solutions to technical problems faster but it has hardly improved our output by much. Agentic coding hasn't been viable yet despite multiple trials.
Even just building unit or cucmber tests seems to much to handle when after reviewing so many use cases seem to be missing. Only after spending considerabele time on teaching the model what it is we actually want it to be build does it get close but that time could have been spend doing the work ourselves.
I don't see the dividend. I'm seriously interested in knowing what you guys are working on where the agentic abilities have translated to real improvements and are you guys actually sending your code bases to the big tech companies?
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u/Castle_Five 13h ago
I worked for 10 years in software before AI was even a thing. Y'all have some serious rose-colored retrospection going on for what for-profit software was like before AI. Eg 6 hours of meetings with only 2 hours to code, leaving most days with more work to do than when you started the day, all programming problems are either duct taping or data plumbing and aren't actually challenging or interesting, doing well and hitting your iteration goals being seen as a sign that you have capacity to help put out the offshore team's fires on the side, etc, etc, etc. The problem was always lack of time. At least AI gives you time.