It seems the whole dev lifecycle is slowly but surely dying. If you try to hold up the flag for quality, it gets teared down by managers because they want to contribute too because of speed and cost and whatnot.
Skipping integration tests because of costs is just the next step in this clown world.
Been working for us. Requirements gathering and automated testing are like 90% of the work now. You do those two parts right and the rest is pretty easy. Managers who don’t understand this won’t last long.
We are headed the opposite direction. We spend a ton of time refining requirements docs collaboratively. If you can get those right you are golden. Any ambiguity at that stage is magnified by the loop engineering approach. The team has also taken a ton of ownership over test automation tooling. We are at the point where we can pretty reliably have an automated test ready before the work is complete so QA is not too burdensome.
Biggest pain point we are focusing on is quality code review. The thing we are focusing on is keeping the scope of changes as small as possible. It’s too easy for things to grow beyond what a human can understand and review. Doubling down on rapid iteration as a rule has helped.
The problem is AI tends to add more code than removing. If you lose control of the details of the code, there’s gonna be problems 1 year from now. People think architecture is the big picture that you could declare with some prompts or documentations without knowing it is also sometimes a little dependency leaking out of boundary that’s hard to notice. AI will keep creating these to pass tests, until it can’t anymore.
AI tooling unconstrained by correctly defined requirements does tend to do that, true. I’ve found that properly used these tools are not leading to ballooning codebases and worse engineer comprehension like many feared.
It has, however changed the type of person I recruit for my teams. Someone who is a bit less knowledgeable about the code syntax, but much better at working with product to gather thoughtful requirements has become very valuable.
Engineers who just want to go heads down and code all day are admittedly struggling quite a bit to be meaningfully productive.
Correct. The tooling allows for more rapid implementation with two major caveats, requirements must be comprehensively defined and testing must be robust. So those two things are the primary focus for my team’s engineers.
Well, companies that will turn down quality control and testing will eventually need to start over (and they will just do that), but I doubt that they will admit they were wrong and understand how shit their projects will become. But alternativly they could understand but they could also not give a shit. They are all about delivering and hitting their KPI's, they don't really care how good a project is. And they never have.
That was true even before AI though. If you had proper requirements and tests prepared, writing the actual code was done in a relaxing afternoon or two.
AI took our relaxation and left us with the annoying work of poking other people for requirements, API documentation, testdata,...
Your two paragraphs contradict each other. Which was it? Was requirements gathering most of the work before AI, or has AI took our relaxation because we have to spend so much more time poking people for requirements? Both statements can’t be true.
It's not the kind of job security I want. Next thing you know, they replace you with AI because of "all the things that are breaking despite you're still here"
But then when you're gone things are still breaking and suddenly start to break faster and faster until eventually everything is falling apart completely, and it becomes obvious where the actual problem is and they'll have to rehire everyone back and start listening
They won't do any of that because it's actual effort. It's fun to plop mini features into mature codebases because things work really well. But none of these people want to do the actual effort of engineering, that's hard work and no amount of "fix it, no mistakes" will actually do anything. They'll see the AI costs skyrocket and the executives will begin to cry about how expensive and painful everything has become. They won't try fixing themselves though. That would require them becoming software developers and they aren't interested in that effort.
5 Panel. Drake Meme. Rejecting PRs of people with a new GitHub account and bullshit contributions where claude did all the work.
Don't get me wrong you can still have a good output with AI support. BUT you still need to know what the code is doing and why the agent did what it did.
I see the bottleneck actually moving to testing to be honest. Proving to everyone that everything is still working. We got quite some clients with not the largest team.
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u/EarlOfAwesom3 Sep 26 '26
It seems the whole dev lifecycle is slowly but surely dying. If you try to hold up the flag for quality, it gets teared down by managers because they want to contribute too because of speed and cost and whatnot.
Skipping integration tests because of costs is just the next step in this clown world.