Because usually the customer can only tolerate so many failed attempts per unit of time. Running your fitness function is often very expensive in terms of other people's time.
This is easily the biggest bottleneck in B2B/SaaS stuff for banking. You can iterate maybe once a week if you have a really, really good client.
> Because usually the customer can only tolerate so many failed attempts per unit of time. Running your fitness function is often very expensive in terms of other people's time.
Heh, depends on what you do. Many times the stakeholders can't explain what they want but can clearly articulate what they don't want when they see it.
Generate a few alternatives, have them pick, is a tried and true method in design. It was way too expensive when coding was manual, so often you need multiple rounds of meetings and emails to align.
If you don't think coding was the bottleneck, you're not thinking creatively about what's only now possible.
It's not what you can do faster (well, it is, up to a point), but also what can you now, do that would have been positively insane and out of the question before.
Why do you need coding for those. You can doodle on a whiteboard for a lot of those discussions. I use Balsamiq[0] and I can produce a wireframe for a whole screen in minutes. Even faster than prompting.
> If you don't think coding was the bottleneck, you're not thinking creatively about what's only now possible.
If you think coding was a bottleneck, that means you spent too much time doing when you should have been thinking.
For UX, approach like that can often work. For non-UI stuff, more complex processes and exploration (because nobody is actually sure what's going to work best), the handwaving is just deluding everyone.
I've been on enough demos where customers pretended they understood the concepts only to be surprised later, or going back and forth for months on what they actually need, to know that:
> If you think coding was a bottleneck, that means you spent too much time doing when you should have been thinking
is cute, but naive.
Most Enterprise IT projects fail. Including at banks. They are extremely saleable though. They don't see things that are failures as failures. The metrics are not real. Contract renewals do not focus on objective metrics.
This is why you make "$1" with all your banking relationships and actually valuable tacit knowledge, until Accenture notices and makes bajillions, and now Anthropic makes bajillions. Look, I agree that you know a lot. That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying the thing you are describing as a bottleneck is actually the foundation of the business of the IT industry.
Another POV is, yeah, listen, the code speed matters a fucking lot. Everyone says it does, and it does. Jesus Christ.
If you just fill in the gaps yourself, your software doesn't work. Software that doesn't meet the requirements is legitimately useless. The problem is, most of the requirements are in the customer's head, and you have to squeeze them out. Most of them are unconscious, they might not even know them.
Now that process is much, much faster.
when you're building a feature and have different ideas how to go about it, it's incredibly valuable to build them all, compare, and then build another, clean implementation based on all the insights
I used to do it before, but pretty rarely, only for the most important stuff. now I do it for basically everything. and while 2-4 agents are working on building these options, I have time to work on something else.
I work in science, and I’ve recently worked with a couple projects where they generated >20,000 LOC before even understanding what the project was supposed to be doing. All the scientists hated it and it didn’t do anything that it was supposed to. But I still felt like I was being “anti-ai” when criticizing it.
I understand that it’s way better when you deeply understand the problem and field though.
* Hobbyist or people engaged in hobby and personal projects
* Startup bros; often pre-funding and pre-team
* Consultancies selling an AI SDLC as that wasn't even possible 6 months ago as "the way; proven, facts!"
It's getting to the point I'd like people to disclose the size of the team and org they are applying these processes at LOL.
Most LinkedIn influencers, startup bros and consultancies kind of fall into the latter.