Post #459631

2026-02-28 22:43 UTC

RE: https://cosocial.ca/@mhoye/116148772813747144 To expand this point: software is composed of code, organizational processes, and people. A surprisingly large number of software developers are narrowly focused on generating code and miss all the surrounding processes and people (skills, knowledge, understanding of goals) that make that code usable. &quot;It&#39;s so good at generating code&quot; doesn&#39;t address the costs in other categories: - Degradation of processes. For example, you get denial of service on code reviews means code reviews go away, &quot;it passes tests, it&#39;s fine!&quot; - Degradation of people&#39;s skills and knowledge. If it breaks, no one will know how it works because no one really understands the code. And an experienced engineer can only control an agent because they have experience _writing code_. If you stop writing code, that experience degrades, new people don&#39;t get it, and control of the agent degrades. For this narrow focus on artifacts, and not the surrounding requirements, I highly recommend the book &quot;What Machines Can&#39;t Do: Politics and Technology in the Industrial Enterprise&quot;, by Robert J. Thomas. (It has nothing to do with AI, it&#39;s about manufacturing.) But you see the failure modes from he calls having only an aesthetic of product, and no aesthetic of process; similar failure modes result in the original DevOps movement, which was a political movement, not a job title.

Replies (4)

@dalias@hachyderm.io 2026-02-28 22:52

@itamarst Absolutely, but to add: we shouldn't be repeating their claim "It's so good at generating code" noncritically. If it's "good" at emitting code, that's because the code you asked for was already written by someone and it just stripped the identifying characteristics and attribution. "Writing" code that's already been written, but adding bugs and stripping the provenance needed to know you need to fix a bug that was present in the source you copied it from, is a huge disservice in itself.

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@chrisjrn@social.coop 2026-02-28 22:54

@itamarst thank you, adding all of these to my reading list

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@kelvin0mql@mastodon.social 2026-03-01 00:24

@itamarst THIS is the bit that the VCs & many CEOs miss. The software is doing a great deal of the work, yes. But the success of the company as a whole is dependent on the PEOPLE in the company understanding the customers’ problems, as (oft poorly) described by the PEOPLE who work at the customers’ companies… then adjusting the software as needed to solve those problems, once they’re clearly understood. AI can help with that, sometimes a lot. But AI can’t DO all of that.

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@simeon@indiehackers.social 2026-03-02 14:06

@itamarst Thanks for the book tip! I found a secondhand copy in NL for 23 euro’s… should arrive on Wednesday the latest.

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