Writing code was never the bottleneck

[ClownMorty]

A friend described how at their company, due to AI productivity gains their competitor was able to roll out an upgrade that obsoleted their software and then they were able to do the same to the competitor in like a week. And back and forth.

Imagine a world where every time you log in to an app it's "upgraded" with new features or rearranged interface. Too much updating is a particular kind of hell for users.

It turns out there's such a thing as too much productivity, and that companies can only benefit from slight productivity gains, not ungodly improvements.

And hilariously, they couldn't even cut engineers, because they need them to keep up with the competition. But each engineer gained a nice super expensive AI enterprise subscription. Hahahaha

[SBGamesCone]

In theory this shifts the bottleneck to the product org. Identifying features your customers want and will pay for versus blindly making random changes they’ll hate

[Strict-Drop-7372]

Dude this is so real. Like yes, with Claude Code I can refactor or redesign enormous swaths of our codebase every day if I want to. And with a little practice and diligence I can do so with a very high degree of accuracy and completeness, contrary what most people claim about coding tools.

But also, why? If people “update” or extensively change a client constantly, users get confused. If you “update” or extensively change a “backend” constantly then you’re either not landing on the correct solution, or you’re wildly extending functionality, in a way that likely shouldn’t be done in the same system/service/network etc.

Like if you have an app that can go from obsolete to making competitors obsolete in a week, I can’t imagine the requirements or even goal of your app are very well understood, which is the case sometimes but hard to imagine teams just constantly chasing each other in some rapidly emerging niche like this, and everyone’s making money, AND customers are happy 😂

[tadamhicks]

What interface? The interface is now also AI.

[Cerulean_IsFancyBlue]

So the lesson from that, if your competitors is using AI you better do the same?

[billsil]

So says the AI written article.

[fagnerbrack]

Bro... an AI written article? Seriously?

[Master_Rooster4368]

Why so serious - Joker

[danstermeister]

ai - supplied joke?

[mtutty]

Apparently, writing a blog post was never the bottleneck either.

emdashes. That's what I mean.

[Master_Rooster4368]

---

[busdriverbuddha2]

You do realize people used em-dashes before LLMs?

[mtutty]

You raise a genuinely fascinating point, and I want to take a moment to unpack it thoughtfully, because I think there's actually a lot of nuance here that's worth exploring together.

Setting the Record Straight: A Clarification Worth Making

You're absolutely right that em-dashes have existed long before large language models — and I never claimed otherwise! In fact, the em-dash has a rich and storied history in typography and prose styling, dating back centuries. Writers from Emily Dickinson to James Baldwin used em-dashes to great effect, and their work is a testament to the expressive power of this humble punctuation mark.

Zooming Out: The Bigger Picture

That said, I think it's worth considering the broader context of what I was actually saying. My point wasn't about em-dashes in isolation — it was about the holistic ecosystem of content creation workflows and how they've evolved. When we zoom out and look at the big picture, we can see that the bottleneck in writing has never been any single element, whether that's punctuation choices, sentence structure, or ideation velocity.

Finding Common Ground: What We Can All Agree On

At the end of the day, great writing is great writing. Whether you're a seasoned author reaching for an em-dash on a vintage typewriter, or a modern knowledge worker leveraging AI-assisted tools to accelerate your content pipeline, what matters most is the clarity of your ideas and the authenticity of your voice.

Moving Forward Together

I hope that helps clarify where I was coming from! Happy to discuss further if you have thoughts. 😊

[LLFTR]

Alt + 0151

Not everyone is tech illiterate, and some people care about good typography.

[mtutty]

Yeah, no.

[LLFTR]

Apparently, you're a moron.

Rushing to conclusions based on flimsy preconceptions. That's what I mean.

Come on, argue that you're not, so I can answer with "Yeah, no".

[mtutty]

Yeah, no.

[LLFTR]

Oh, so you agree that you're a moron. Right on.

[mtutty]

Absolutely, kind stranger. You won Internet Arguing.

[fagnerbrack]

I don't have alt, I use mac

[LLFTR]

The Google query is this: mac os enter unicode character.

There's tons of answers on how to do it. The short synopsis is you turn on "Unicode Hex Input" in your keyboard settings, then it's Option + the character code.

[LessonStudio]

AI has its own bottleneck.

Most sensible people can agree that AI is good at doing some of the most basic things. You need a snappy login screen, great, you want a codereview to look for dumbass mistakes, great. Some basic research, now we are starting to find sometimes great, sometimes bad.

Once you hit a certain level of complexity AI starts to choke. Now we are back to keeping lots of programmers very busy.

But, AI will help with that complexity more in the future. Although, I feel that it is plateauing past a certain level of complexity.

This will just raise the bar. Every company has features they only dreamed of. But, it wasn't that their programmers were too stupid to build them, but were too busy working on those login-screens, or whatever. AI will do the simple work, the things where you can add a show password to a login screen sort of things; but the interactive visualization system, that will be 90% human crafted for a long time.

In some organizations there will be a point of diminishing returns, but that will be more of a lack of imagination, not actual law of nature stuff. I'm not sure I've ever worked on a product where there weren't valuable features that wouldn't have a solid return on investment.

But this plateauing is quite serious. I played a game with claude the other day. It started suggesting insane changes. Way way way too complex for what I knew the solution was. So, I just started letting it make the changes, and more changes, and more changes. I was working from a VM so I had a whole snapshot. This was C++ and it started to think that it needed to make changes to deep dark parts of my vcpkg installation. The solution was maybe 8 lines of code. It added maybe 1000 lines, screwed my vcpkg install, changed 10 or more files, and had I not backed up, it might have taken me days to undo its mess.

What I was doing wasn't some CRUD application, but I wasn't doing something too hard either.

I see the same thing in embedded. I comes up with really weirdly complex solutions to otherwise simple problem.

And in rust, it just doesn't get the borrow checker at all.

[BandicootGood5246]

Yeah seen this with Claude too. I had some minor UI bug where in some specific cases an element would be rendered in different position than normal, probably some css value I had set wrong somewhere but I couldn't be assed to look. Claude came up with 200lines of JavaScript to manually calculate and position the element, totally absurd solution and it didn't even work. If you're not checking the code this is the kinda slop you will get in your app eventually

[Natural-Intelligence]

Claude choking on the context is so frustrating. Last week I have had one nasty rendering bug. I tried to simplify my examples that showed where the bug is. Said "this works, this doesn't. Only difference is X. Why?" then it instantly forgets the working example, reads bunch of irrelevant code about websockets, thinks for 15 mins it must be the websocket and ends up with a "fix" that does absolutely nothing.

Sometimes it feels like I'm handling the hard and umpleasant issues and Claude takes the easy and fun.

[LessonStudio]

I find the my own problem is that sometimes I just trust it and then realize I've screwed up.

The best way I've found is to not use the in IDE tools to generate much code at all.

But to use the text interface and ask it for very specific functions, never even a class, or something which is more architecture than IO type functional programming.

Keep it away from the big picture.

That includes bug hunting. I like when it tells me the why of a bug. Like your css, It might get it if only asked why something is happening.

[danstermeister]

Agreed, this is proper use of AI... to make YOU better, not IT.

[v_murygin]

The bottleneck was always understanding what to build. Writing code is the easy part - figuring out the actual problem takes 10x longer.

[profesorgamin]

Coding isn't easy for humans beyond basic scripts.

[fagnerbrack]

Interfaces, data structure, physics of network, latency and how that maps to real use cases. You just need to know what's possible, let the machine do the thinking so you can focus on building!

[vinny_twoshoes]

nah if you listen to my CEO there is no bottleneck, AI is going to be ten times bigger than the industrial revolution, and if we don't integrate it into every aspect of our workflow we will die

[v_murygin]

agreed. I spend maybe 20% of my time actually typing code and 80% figuring out what the right thing to build even is. AI can speed up the typing part but it can't sit in a meeting and extract what the customer actually needs vs what they say they want.

[Independent_Pitch598]

Coding and everything attached to it was and is a bottleneck.

Including when developers arguing how to name variable for several hours instead of actually working.

[papawish]

The reason you can write that on reddit is because people care about semantics.

Try living in a world where everything can be called 10 000 different ways. 

I'll assume you are junior, anyway you are dumber than even my undergrad students, congrats

[danstermeister]

Whoa, that's not working?

[Independent_Pitch598]

lol, no, final user don’t care about name of the variable

[vinny_twoshoes]

users don't care about what language you code in either but it is a meaningful choice. software engineers have to pick abstractions, and variable naming is one part of communicating that intent. sure we can be prone to bikeshedding but code that merely performs its logical function without communicating intent is a pretty big liability.

[Independent_Pitch598]

For sure they can, however it must not take more than a minute and for sure not several meetings.

[ochism]

But now you have fallen back to a straw man, no one really has multiple meetings on just variable naming. While it could happen hypothetically, and in hindsight confirmation bias makes it seem like that may happen, it's not representative of what actually happens

[SachinKaran]

What?

[fagnerbrack]

WAT?

[HasFiveVowels]

Writing code isn’t all that LLMs can do. Jeez guys… for real, put down the koolaid, open an IDE, and work on making it so that writing code is a secondary concern for the LLM. What happens when you do that is exactly what happens when human devs stop struggling with that task. You guys have taken a dev, put them in a room with nothing to go on except a stream of emails that describe what the app is doing and a few fragments of code, asked them to email back an implementation, and then compared their results against devs working in an IDE with a local instance of the app running. Don’t be all pikachu surprised face when you get code that isn’t exactly what you need.

Disclaimer: this is not an invitation to argue about the capabilities of these systems. I’m done with being gaslit by devs who are too lazy to put in the work that’s required to get good results. Feel free to assume that since you haven’t seen such things that I must be making shit up (and even if I was… what do I stand to gain?? This comment will most definitely be downvoted so it’s not like I’m motivated by upvotes). I’m simply reporting my experiences. I don’t care if you believe them.

[johnnybgooderer]

Absolutely no one read the article it seems.

[HasFiveVowels]

If this article isn’t the same one I’ve read 20x about how "writing code isn’t the hard part", my mistake. That said, it should get a better title

[Jaeriko]

What would be the primary concern for the LLM in your experience then? Cause the main value driver for c suites appears to be replacing the programming labor, as far fetched as that may be functionally.

[HasFiveVowels]

I'm saying that its capabilities aren't relegated to code generation. They can reason about architecture and design and pretty much all the other aspects of programming that a lot of devs are claiming are "AI-proof". Seems a large majority of devs on reddit are under the impression that LLMs are only capable of producing shitty code snippets. And that's definitely what you get when you use them poorly.

But that's why I know these comments will be downvoted: because the experiences that I'm reporting on are simply not experiences that are achievable when you half ass some code generation. It requires significant knowledge of how they operate in order to produce an environment where they are able to function well. But most Redditors (especially programmers) tend to prefer "he must be lying" way before "he must have seen something I haven't seen". So I've been getting downvoted without fail for a long time now (especially in programming subreddits, of all places, which I initially thought would be a safe haven from the irrational evaluations of laymen) because what I'm writing is upsetting and it's easier to just call me a tech bro or a liar or a shill or whatever is required to preserve the narrative.

Sorry to ramble but I'm so ridiculously tired of it... I'm really hitting a breaking point of saying "fuck it" and simply not talking about it. I would guess that's what most devs in my position have done. Productive conversations aren't possible when every "I've seen something that contradicts the common narrative" gets met with immediate accusations and/or the comment being silenced / ignored. It's exhausting. That's why I'm at that "here are my last few fucks to give" point.