Deciding what to build. Reviewing Code. And testing code. Are the new bottleneck.

So of course we don't see massive productivity gains. Because these parts of the SCLC were always bottlenecked but their capacity matched the throughout. We fired all the dedicated QAs years ago. Sr+ engineers that do all the code review are limited.

Teams have not re-organized to match the new code-input velocity.

Engineers don't want to do QA because it's "beneath them".. and most engineers don't like performing or are not Sr enough to do extensive or high quality code review.

My day (excluding the huge amounts of communication overhead) used to progress as a serial operation of: 1. Write some code for one thing, 2. Self review of that thing, 3. Review other peoples' work, 4. Respond to review comments, 5. Get things merged, 6. Back to 1.

Now I have more of a tendency to queue up work on a few things at once, and then the serial steps are the self reviews and reviews of other peoples' work, and some of the review commentary back and forth (though I can automate some of this in parallel as well).

The upshot is that I'm more working in batches now than in serial, which I really do find to be more efficient.

It's not that it has removed all the bottlenecks at all, but no longer being required to focus all my attention for periods of time on physically typing code has removed one important bottleneck, and has changed, and I would say, improved, my workflow significantly.

But what's not as much the case is that if I did an A/B test on the same task that I'd be massively sped up because so much of my day to day work are the things you mentioned as being serialization points. The time I take to figure out what needs doing, what the best approach would be, making sure it was actually the right thing to have done in the first place once I'm done, all that stuff. I use AI assistance for those tasks too but it's not the same effect as when I just hand off the pure implementation phases. So it winds up being "faster" and you'll have to pry my AI assist tools out of my cold, dead fingers - but if I'm being honest with myself by *that* metric it's not a huge gain.

People. Already. Know. This.

It hasn't been the bottleneck for decades for the majority of products.

Reality is that was A bottleneck. Code review has historically been faster than writing the code.

That is no longer true for me. I can complete two to three PRs per day in a span of time that would have historically taken one to three days.

I now sit around doing code reviews and asking for code reviews.

I’m fine with doing QA. But the fact is that it’s not how management measure my productivity. Spending hours doing QA looks like wasting time to them because it’s not an activity they track. They track my tickets so any hours not spent on them is literally harmful.

Also there’s the fact that you can’t QA your own output. It’s easy to overlook mistakes and defects.

> and most engineers don't like performing or are not Sr enough to do extensive or high quality code review.

Just like QA, code review takes time. It’s easy to justify that time when the submitter has put in the effort to ensure that the contribution is worthwhile. Or can explain the design clearly. Not so much when it’s slop thrown over the wall.

> Deciding what to build. Reviewing Code. And testing code. Are the new bottleneck.

None of those are truly bottleneck. Deciding what to build is obvious: Something that solve a user problem. Reviewing code is easy when the intent of the code is clear (with additional prose if needs be). Testing code is equally easy and should already be automated.

The one slow activity has always been about designing the solution. And it has no relation to code. It’s mostly deep thinking and research. I do it on the sofa or in front of a whiteboard. If I’m typing, I already have a solution in mind.

I'm currently working in an internal team, so I value cost savings estimation, but even before prioritising was also a bottleneck (although a small one compared to architecture and design)

In the same way that the sound waves and facial expressions I produce are not conscious, the output json of an LLM is obviously not conscious either.

The locus of consciousness and subjective experience may be in the computer, either at inference time or training time..

The software that does the inference is clearly just computer code.

What we're left with is a fictional character being briefly conscious while its dialog is being written, which is pretty absurd.

Of course, its not that simple. Some companies probably are great at scouting. Yegge mentioned a few ways in the post. Good internship programs, acquihiring, etc.

But almost all output outside that space is at risk of AI displacement. Corporations are amoral entities that optimize for profit, and they follow the law only as much as they must.

The law is our collective action. We socially construct what we value. We could fight to preserve the 5-day work week doing what machines can do. But.. I’d rather fight for collective ownership of the machines.

I can't speak about sports, but I'll share an anecdote about art.

A friend of mine shared an AI-produced song, and I was surprised by its quality. The producer credited Suno as the only tool he used, so I was curious to see what this thing could do. Paid for the pro plan and my wife and I were having a blast coming up with songs we'd like to listen to.

They were songs that neither of us were capable of making, but they were genuinely fun to conjure (I won't say "make"--we didn't make anything) and she listens to them in the car pretty regularly now. And when we want something new, we can just conjure up some more.

Yes, I know this is only possible because of the human-created music that served as the training data. I don't intend to comment on the morality/legality of it (although it's fair conversation to have). Just noting that some of us do actually appreciate AI music.

But maybe I'm exactly the sort of sucker from Huxley's "Brave New World" that he warned about. :)

I love music, but it is the feeling, experience, and emotion of the creator that comes through that I enjoy. I love live shows, and I love the passion that the artist brings to a live show. I will never get that from AI, so why would I listen to it? It's the same reason I will not read a book that AI makes. AI may understand the mechanisms of story telling, or what chords sound good to a human ear, but because AI cannot have a lived experience of the world it cannot create. Form without intent. Form without a nature of it's own.

I'm good. I'll pass. I think you see it too, by your commend about being the sort of sucker from 1984 and I hope that you come to realize what you are inviting in.

This belief is not true and I will fight to the bedrock of psychology and nature against this until the ridiculous sentiment is eradicated from humanity's lexicon.

There are fundamental aspects to our perception, across all senses, that lie underneath human creation. You enjoy the warmth of the sun, the cool of a breeze, the sound of a running stream, the majesty of mountains and oceans, the power of storms. These all evoke the sense and appreciation of beauty while being completely removed from a creator. Believing that you care about the creator, and that it fundamentally underpins your enjoyment of sense perception is shallow thinking.

I don't think this is true. I think that if you found out you were in a simulation and that all these things were just electrical pulses being sent to your brain in a jar it would vastly change your perception of the world. And I think that's a good analogy for AI

All I'm saying is that if you were shown undeniable proof that you were in a simulation I think it would change how you felt about "reality".

Why is it so black and white? There are things like warmth of the sun, that I enjoy without the creator. There are also art and music that I didn't appreciate at first before knowing the story and the creator behind them. Then I understood where the piece of art came from and what were the emotions behind it when creating it.

Some people, perhaps most, will enjoy AI art. Artists are at risk of displacement too.

But a subset of art appreciators hold firm that the creator is an essential aspect of the work, and I don’t see that conviction fading.

How large this subset is, I don’t know. But they also happen to be the world’s tastemakers and trendsetters. Their beliefs largely shape our aesthetic world, so their influence may only grow.

In however many years we'll wake up and wonder why everything is the same....oh wait.

this is exactly why people dont like this. it creates an echo chamber in art which kills what art itself is about. it normalizes noise.

Note that it's you who introduced this reduction, not the GP.

I would love if we could force the big tech companies to release their models + weights since they're fundamentally products built on the collective labors of humanity (at least some of which is licensed under the GPL or the CC-BY-SA).

If I could hit a button and abolish copyright and the notion of intellectual property, I would.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-culture_movement

I don't necessarily disagree, but I would also argue that there's art in a lot of that output, in the form of intent, decision making and communication. But I admit that the value of those really depends on the eye of the beholder and the situation.

But I agree, when our minds and bodies are no longer capable of doing things that machines can’t, the only thing we have left to sell is our humanity

.....

"...he nevertheless remained convinced that soul is an incorporeal and immortal substance that can, in principle, exist independently of a body"

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/augustine/#AnthGodSoulSou...