It is the System Stupid

When programmers get a feeling that they’re getting things done faster, they’re often only considering the part where they write the code - particularly when that’s their part of the process.

What they’re not considering is the whole software development process, and especially downstream activities like testing, code review, merging, deployment and operations.

More code faster can mean bigger change sets - more to test (and more bugs to fix), more code to review (and more refactorings to get it through review), more changes to merge (and more conflicts to resolve), and so on.

“A.I.” code generation’s a local optimisation that can come at the expense of the development system as a whole, especially if that system is more batch-oriented, with design, coding, testing, review, merging and release operating like sequential phases in the delivery of a new feature. In such a system, more code faster means bigger bottlenecks later. So there’s no paradox at all: one causes the other.

When teams work in much smaller cycles - make one change, test it, review the code, refactor, commit that and maybe push it to the trunk - they may experience far fewer downstream bottlenecks, with or without “A.I.” coding assistance. Arguably, coding assistants might make little noticeable difference in such a workflow.

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