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Development speed is not a bottleneck

(pawelbrodzinski.substack.com)
191 points flail | 1 comments | 05 Sep 25 13:13 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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HumblyTossed ◴[05 Sep 25 13:51 UTC] No.45138581[source]▶
You have the unbelievably productive programmers - we all know their names, we use the code they wrote every day. Then you have the programmers who want to be there and will try everything they can to be there - except gain depth of knowledge. They tend to be shallow programmers. If you give them a task and spell it out, they can knock out code for it at a really good pace and wow upper management. But they will always lack the ability to take a task not spelled out and complete it. Vibe-coding is like sugar and crack mixed together for these people.
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1. didibus ◴[06 Sep 25 07:29 UTC] No.45147339[source]▶
Can't agree more.

> If you give them a task and spell it out, they can knock out code for it at a really good pace and wow upper management.

This is so true. I sometimes spend entire days, weeks, all I do is provide those type of engineers the clarity to "unblock" them. Yet I always wonder, if I had just spent that time coding myself, I might have gotten more done.

But it's also this that I think bottlenecks development. The set of people who really know what needs to be done, at the level of detail that these developer will need to be told, or that coding agents will need to be told, is very small, and that's your bottleneck, you have like 1 or 2 devs on all project that knows what to do, and everyone else need a Standard Operating Procedure handed to them for every task. And now everyone is always just waiting on the same 2 devs to tell them what to do.