AI and Software Question/Bleg I'm on record as saying new development is trivial, boring, stuff people do to feel fancy, but roughly none of the important part of software development. I stand by that statement. Along with thinking that algorithms and data structures are trivia in 99% of cases. It's like if a pro baseball player only practiced hitting sliders from left-handed 6'6" pitchers. I mean...it happens, but really? Let's talk about hitting the other 99% of the balls first. Or a basketballer who only shot from the logo. Software development IS software maintenance. It's almost 1:1, and, since about 1997, that's where my attention has been: How do you maintain software well? How do you make it so that at the end of the project, or a couple years from now, when product discovery figures out that we need a change in the system ... that the changes are smooth, easy, and cheap. How do you keep the Total Cost of Ownership of the software down, and manage responsiveness WHEN we find out how we're wrong about real user needs. That's far more important than all the things you do during "initial development" or "the project" --- So suppose we have a reasonably sized system ... 100k or 1M lines. How much have you found LLMs and similar tools to help with updating the system, with CHEFS constraint (CHeap/Easy/Fast/Safe) What have you found it depends upon? Strong pipelines? Test automation? Strong decoupling?
It's easy for you because you're an expert practitioner but it's hard for beginners and many practitioners in the first 3 to 5 years of industry experience.
In my experience, Agile practices often devalue architecture over speed to value. Speed speed speed. Then, when they look up, they've got 1M lines of crap unmaintainable code and a refactoring project that's too big to fit into the schedule.
TCO is something that can easily be missed .
Profit Wizard | GTM Alchemist
6moNothing here that answers your bleg. But. I think you're massively underestimating how much gets built to support selling vs how much gets built with any thought toward TCO and maintainability factored in.