A pattern I have seen:
replyThe “old way” would be lots of debate (both bike shedding and useful) among engineers during design phase, and then you’d implement.
Now it’s shifted so there are no design docs and there is only the generated prototype. People trying to do their design review while there’s already a functional-ish prototype and it goes nowhere. There’s an anchoring effect in place because the first thing already exists and management says “this seems to work, just use it and move on”. The result is that useful debates about substantive issues don’t happen and bikeshedding is all way get to do
This is so accurate. I am a fairly senior individual contributor and its been more than a year since I saw a good design doc or quality design discussion. Before you can even question the design, someone has generated a 50k line prototype and already made up their mind because of all the “you’re absolutely right..” and “X is exactly what you need..” from AI.
replyThis very much. First thing built is what get approved. Even if it will generate 10x the workload down the line, because today's quality bar is very much demo level.
replyAnd then you get paged at 2am because prod is down and the support channel is more active than the team's one.
The distance between substantive issues vs bikeshed sized issues is non-linear and ill-defined. Sometimes: yeah, we're just bikeshedding. Other times, it's important to suss out unshared implied context that doesn't match between various stakeholders and will have outsized ramifications later. What's new is the speed of executing changes. If there was no substantive debate about what programming language to even use so everyone is equally happy (read: sad), so what? Have the LLM rewrite the entire project in another language over the span of a couple of days after that discussion is had because the language used has specific shortcomings that have been unmined.
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