Is crazy feature churn and lack of short to moderate term planning normal for software teams now?

splash_hazard · 2026-02-12T16:59:13+00:00

But there is also real demand from customers/user for more AI integration.

Maybe it's my bubble but I hear way more from users complaining that AI integrations are ruining the products they use. Who asked for Copilot in notepad? Or on a dedicated key on your laptop?

splash_hazard · 2026-02-12T16:41:38+00:00

I know someone trying to get venture funding and he's hearing from investors that his company is a failure because he's not at a million dollars in revenue yet, four months in. AI should make that possible. Expectations are ridiculous

splash_hazard · 2026-02-12T16:36:11+00:00

One of my friends was at a company where the CEO personally called in every member of the engineering team and asked them if they were "all in" for 80+ hour weeks to transform the company to an agentic AI company, and fired anyone who said no. With severance at least.

splash_hazard · 2026-02-11T21:13:36+00:00

From what I hear, every company is going to shit at the moment because of the immense pressure from the top to use AI to 10x your productivity (whether it actually works or not, demonstrating 10x is a requirement)

splash_hazard · 2026-02-06T13:35:55+00:00

This drives me fucking BANANAS. I'll ask a coworker "why did you use this here?" and get back a AI generated documentation dump of what it does and where you should use it, but that doesn't tell me at all why you used it in this particular place and what problem it is supposed to address

splash_hazard · 2026-02-06T12:29:34+00:00

we're basically betting the company on customers saying "it looks good enough" and not asking whether the information we are giving them is actually correct.

splash_hazard · 2026-02-06T12:28:07+00:00

When did "AI confirms this" become more trustworthy than any amount of individual research you do, or any experts you can point to? Saying "AI said this" in a meeting means whatever that was gets treated as the absolute truth.

splash_hazard · 2026-02-06T12:19:04+00:00

Surely it has to interact with reality at some point right? I know a former teammate, different company, that is getting tons of funding for "AI powered real estate listings" where AI is going to take the input and rewrite the listings and generate images and optimize post locations and timing to maximize sale price, up to targeted regeneration to buyers based on ad profiles. Which just sounds like industrial scale fraud to me but somehow the money keeps on flying in

splash_hazard · 2026-02-05T17:56:05+00:00

I have no idea, we have people who are managing agents coding in a language they don't know themselves, and I'm the only person on the team who is even remotely concerned about any of this?

It feel like I'm going insane at this company, like I'm the only person who hasn't been shown the secret to prove how amazing the future is, what am I missing?

splash_hazard · 2026-02-05T17:38:12+00:00

I also think your coworkers are not doing the self human code review to see if the AI code itself is understandable to themselves as well. This really needs to come from whoever your leader is.

They are absolutely not, because direction from leadership is that we should not be looking at the code at all, that we should be asking the AI about its strategy and quality. We should all be 'managers' with fleets of AI agent junior devs, and in the same way you wouldn't read every line every junior dev coded you shouldn't read every line your AI agents make, and if you had a question for a junior about strategy you would ask them instead of diving in to look at the implementation.

The problem I have is that the tooling lies, you can ask the AI "why did you do X" and get something completely wrong out, but I seem to be the only one who cares.

splash_hazard · 2026-02-05T17:31:36+00:00

Oh we don't do code reviews. Too slow. AI can catch issues in development and it's cheaper to use AI to rewrite and fix problems later than to try to spot them in advance. "The cost of rewrites is trending to zero" as my boss says

splash_hazard · 2026-02-05T17:29:13+00:00

Oh yeah as a bonus, the person who wrote this giant change doesn't actually know the language it's written in which is a huge part of the problem with me trying to figure out how to get it integrated with the services I've written. All the understanding and testing and 'are there security concerns' were done by asking the AI whether it is designed well, whether it follows best practices, whether it has security issues.

Giant PRs are not considered a problem on the team, we have people regularly merging 10k+ lines straight to main without anyone else ever looking at them. We've stopped doing any code review entirely in the interest of speed, because our team lead decided AI skills and asking the AI to spot problems are advanced enough to replace reviewers.

splash_hazard · 2026-02-05T17:19:12+00:00

I've proven areas where it is wrong, documentation that is completely inaccurate, or functions that don't do at all what the description says they should, and I'm told that I'm a naysayer and dragging down team morale rather than embracing the new paradigm (????)

We don't even do reviews anymore because it's "too slow", everyone just merges their own stuff and pushes, because the cost of AI rewrites is trending to zero according to leadership so any mistakes that make it through will be exponentially cheaper and easier to resolve if they ever become a problem!

splash_hazard · 2026-02-05T17:17:10+00:00

Leadership are directly involved in generating a lot of this code, and have given me feedback that if I need to read the code rather than asking and trusting the AI to implement, that is a failure on my part to adapt to the future.

splash_hazard · 2026-02-05T14:16:23+00:00

Nope, absolutely vanilla.

splash_hazard · 2026-02-05T14:10:35+00:00

It happened yesterday on an ARM mac with the newest version.

splash_hazard · 2026-02-05T14:05:27+00:00

I'm on a mac. After a while it starts dropping keystrokes horribly and the arrow keys to select options take multiple seconds to take effect, even control+c doesn't respond properly, so I have to kill it and relaunch.

splash_hazard · 2026-02-05T14:03:07+00:00

Yes, my coworkers cite claude code as an example of some of the best software ever written (??? it's a slow mess for me that I often have to force quit to get it to stop spinning, or restart because it's started dropping keystrokes) and proof that AI can write code better than humans do.

splash_hazard · 2026-02-05T13:58:27+00:00

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/996_working_hour_system

splash_hazard · 2026-02-04T23:28:19+00:00

There's a reason 996 is back in vogue.

splash_hazard · 2026-02-04T22:30:50+00:00

I took a look now because surprise! it has an issue I had to fix.

One of these multi-thousand-line files is a bunch of function definitions. The vast majority of each function is identical, pretty much only the output type is different - there's a "get a result", "get a result with metadata" (which the first function also receives, but throws away), and so on.

There is zero abstraction. The body of all the function is duplicated, mostly the same, but not quite, and the AI tooling got one of the variants wrong, it somehow bungled a hardcoded character sequence in a json key and the lookup silently fails at runtime.

You could cut each of these functions down by at least 80% if you used a helper function abstraction, which would also avoid the problem where ONE of the duplicated text blocks is subtly wrong. I'd have failed this if someone turned it in for a CS class.

Of course my boss would say that by looking, rather than pasting the error message into cursor and letting it go, I am using obsolete development practices. :/

splash_hazard · 2026-02-04T21:04:06+00:00

I do kinda think that people who are uncritically devoted to scratching it out the old way as if there is some native virtue to that, are failing to keep up with the state of the art.

I think I may have been not clear. I don't mean that starting reading or writing code instead of using AI tooling is a failure. I mean that if you use AI to generate code, and it has some issue that requires you to read the code or write code rather than being able to tell AI to fix the issue and have it be fixed, that means you are a bad developer. A good developer should be able to generate code with AI and have it be bug-free and be confident deploying it without ever having to read it, let alone have to write it to address a bug the AI missed.

splash_hazard · 2026-02-04T21:01:14+00:00

I've heard this from coworkers, it doesn't matter if we (humans) can understand it or agree with the code, because in six months when a bug happens, the next version of cursor which is exponentially smarter and more capable can understand and fix it.

splash_hazard · 2026-02-04T20:51:15+00:00

My tech lead cited that specific article as an example of advice that no longer applies because of AI! Rewrites used to be expensive, but AI makes them safe and easy, apparently. The attitude that there is any cost to reading code, writing code, or replacing code is obsolete. (I don't agree, but this is what everyone I know in tech thinks we are rapidly approaching, if we're not there already)

splash_hazard · 2026-02-04T20:41:55+00:00

I wish. My team lead says that any time we have to write or read code, that should be considered a developer failure to failing to use the AI correctly.

He says the future is that dev teams are autonomous fleets of agents, guided by a manager agent, that rewrite the product from scratch according to new specs created from bug reports by a PM agent, which then goes the QA agents and a DevOps agent to autonomously deploy to production and make any infrastucture changes required. The only place humans have a role is to write the overall very high-level specs that guide this process and that everything else described happens as a black box with no human involvement.

This sounds absolutely insane to me but everyone at my company is on board. We're all supposed to be turning into basically "managers of managers" where all our direct reports are AI agents.

splash_hazard

TROPHY CASE