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Comment by krona | Hacker News Reader

There's a difference between the cost of coding and the cost of delivering and maintaining software? AI has demonstrated that these two things are almost entirely unrelated.

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Almost everywhere I've worked, the "designing and writing code" part was about 5% to at most 10% of the calendar time that it takes to make and release a software product. The remaining 90-95% of the time is: aligning stakeholders, meeting with all contributing teams to prioritize, gaining approval from various executives to commence the project, obtaining security reviews, privacy reviews, legal reviews, and so on, soaking in dev, staging, and beta environments to find bugs, manual QA testing, aligning with marketing--potentially waiting on key external marketing events, waiting for various people to come back from vacation, waiting for Mike to answer his E-mail... These things take the vast majority of a software project's time and can't be automated by AI.

So, AI is making 5-10% of your project much faster. Whoopdie doo.

It’s interesting to me that you don’t understand how 90% of the things you listed can either benefit from automation or be made irrelevant because of automation.

The firms of 2031 won’t be doing business like the firms of 2021 but just using AI for coding or in a few places to accelerate the same workflows.

Has AI demonstrated that or have people using AI demonstrated their lack of ability to properly use it, as they are fumbling in the infancy of an new age?

I'd argue that it's shown something slightly different, it's related but maybe not in the way some people hoped.

I think it sums up to something along the lines of "you get what you pay for".

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