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ErrantX | on: We should be more ambitious with the software we build
It's going to be a challenging period though - just because of constraints theory.

Prior to this, building the software was, generally, one of the main constraints. If the business wants to do X, then it takes 3 months to build.

That means the business ideation and governance cycle (what do we want to do, are there customers, what do we charge) can take 3 months.

If you 10x thay development process then you also have to do the same with the business processes.

Once engineering teams have cleared the backlog, then burned through the decades of tech debt the constraints will switch. And how businesses react to that will be interesting.

anonymous908213 | parent | next
> burned through the decades of tech debt

Riiight, except tech debt is the one thing that's actually been 10xed. People are now producing a decades' worth of tech debt in less than a year.

jcgl | root | parent
Exactly. What factors limited tech debt before? Mostly two things, I’d guess: velocity, and Good Practice. And I’d guess that the former plays at least as large a role as the latter. So if you then unconstrain velocity, you’ve likely done a lot to unconstrain tech debt.
daveguy | root | parent
Yup. It's a great time to go into software development and learn without using AI as a crutch. The tech debt mountains won't be resolved with tech debt generators.
loading story #50231971
wazHFsRy | parent | next
No one is clearing the backlog right now, though. Every new change that's incoming is another 5,000 lines of change, and even if that solves the current problem at hand, it creates 5 new follow-up tickets for new edge cases that come from this huge change. At least that's the constant reality I see day to day.
ErrantX | root | parent | next
I dispute this, although only from observation.

The latest frontier models are producing significantly higher quality output. And the usual reason to introduce tech debt (deadlines) is less relevant.

Indeed, I know multiple companies fixing decades of bugs and security issues in just the last few months.

pixl97 | root | parent
Eh, I will say the back log and a number of long standing issues where I work has been addressed more than I'd even seen in the past. There were a number of more minor issues being a pain in my ass for a couple of years that in a session with the devs were ironed out. Also a few rare bugs that had been around forever were fixed when they set up agents with a description of the issue and the agents ran loops while developing a theory on how to trigger it and then debug it.
sdeframond | parent | next
> Once engineering teams have cleared the backlog, then burned through the decades of tech debt the constraints will switch. And how businesses react to that will be interesting.

I have no doubt someone in business will have more ideas than any team can deliver.

Think about all those product-pitch PPTs. What if one could present a prototype instead? Boom, demand increased 100x.

That's Jevons Paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

charcircuit | parent
>If you 10x thay development process then you also have to do the same with the business processes.

Or the extra time can be used towards polishing the software.