Your engineering team looks healthy. It probably isn't

15 points by brbash

zaphar

Like most AI coding stuff it's just magnifying stuff that was already there. Your team was unhealthy without AI and it's unhealthy with it. The only difference is that you see the good and bad results sooner with AI than you did without it. It amplifies things but it doesn't fix them.

zesterer

The point of the article is that this is explicitly not what's happening:

Here is what AI gives an engineer -- the speed of writing code. Here is what AI does not yet give -- the speed of making decisions about which code to write.

The claim being made (which I happen to think is probably true) is that the pie is becoming not just larger, but increasingly unbalanced because being botlenecked on code was, accidentally, a feature of the old system: it forced people to slow down and think about implications before committing to functionality.
- zaphar
  
  If you didn't have that discipline as a company before then the AI won't instill it in your company. It will however magnify the effects of the lack of that discipline. If you did have that discipline as a company the AI won't remove it but it will magnify the effect of doing that discipline.
  
  I'm sure there are probably teams that drop this discipline after AI for some reason or another but given that the most likely team works in a company where this discipline was only ever paid lip service to the overwhelming majority of teams are going to see that lack of discipline magnified.
  
  The minority few with an actual commitment to quality and planning will find that they can produce higher quality with an AI than the team that doesn't probably a little bit faster then they used to.
gcupc

I'm not sure it's that you see good results and bad results sooner. It seems like AI may make it harder to see how unhealthy your team is for longer, and therefore let things get worse for longer before you know what's wrong.
- zaphar
  
  That in itself is a form of amplification though. If you couldn't see it before AI you are going to be even less able to see it after.
  - gcupc
    
    Yes, I agree that it is also amplification of existing problems, but want to point out that it's worse than your initial reaction.
- nolanvoid
  
  Articles like this are interesting because i knew it would be ai-generated before even reading it (and was confirmed once i started reading). This is basically linkedin-posting
- dpc_pw
  
  Just another generic too abstract to be useful article like thousands similar ones before.
- jonathannen
  
  Second, if you hired a CTO or VP Engineering, let him make technical decisions. Even the ones you do not agree with. Especially the ones you do not agree with. Otherwise, you are paying a senior salary to a person who is functionally your secretary for technical questions, and in a year he will leave. This is not theory. This is the most common scenario I see.
  
  The gendered language here is a bit jarring (although maybe just a non-native speaker?).
  
  I don't buy the premise. I don't see why a CTO shouldn't be disagreed with. It's a serious role -- a CTO or VP should be able to advocate for decisions and handle pushback. Authority doesn't come from the founder just ceding "authority"; it comes from making good calls and communicating them well.
  
  I agree it's never that simple -- the founder might be dead wrong -- but that's kind of the whole point of the role. Eliminating that conflict won't lead to a better result.