Hacker News Reader

Comment by Avicebron | Hacker News Reader

A lot of people have jobs that aren't limited by how much "stuff" they generate.

We are capped by testing and PR review. The junior devs can spam out a million PRs a day but we keep having production incidents from not carefully scrutinising the changes. So the speed of code generation is limited by how fast we can actually accept those diffs.

Don’t forget requirements gathering and design. There’s only so fast the business side can feed requests into us.

The business side will step up their token output.

Haven’t you heard, Anthropic uses Claude for all of its PR reviews and has no issues at all!

Unfortunately I work with users who get upset when the app goes down or features break.

Unironically you should be using claude for monitoring and within CI. "PRs causing bottleneck" is an anti pattern during AI. It is as easy to verify as it is to generate.

If Claude is good enough to review the code, then it should be good enough to write it right the first time, isn't it? Why waste money on CI?

That was always the issue... Rewrites were done before LLMs and the results were the same... There was never a point in time where the bottleneck was production of code, it was always review, testing, QA, fixing bugs and edge cases, and that is when only focusing on the technical part of delivery, and leaving out communication and synchronisation within the company and between company and clients...

That strongly depends on context. In larger organisations, this is definitely the case. For smaller startups and teams then the overhead is much smaller and the actual core programming work is much more of a bottleneck.

Sometime in the last 15 years we got these huge backlog wishlists of one line thoughts. People were convinced because software devs couldn't keep up translating one line thoughts into working software that the code must be the bottleneck

They never realized how much effort went into turning those one like tickets into code was, and the code was the least part of the effort

Production incidents from not carefully scrutinizing changes is a sign that someone more senior should be putting infrastructure in place to minimize the impact of those incidents.

Feature flags, staggered rollouts, quick rollbacks, smoke testing, etc.

Sure, if you were hand managing every rollout up until now, and relied primarily on unit tests, you’re in for a world of hurt when you give a junior engineer Claude code and let em rip.

But if you have more advanced systems to measure and maintain overall service health, and codify your business logic invariants, you can really start flying these days as long as you’re all aligned on what to build and the potential impact.

I agree, with a big tech deployment process this would be less impactful. But getting from a company used to manual testing and weekly deployments to a fully automated CD pipeline is more work than a single Claude prompt.

>someone more senior should be putting infrastructure in place

High chance said senior has been laid off because "A junior with $200 claude plan" is cheaper.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com