This is such a weird point to make that doesn't become correct just because everyone makes it, all the time. Why clean the ocean if some magic future tech will clean them? Why save the world now if some benevolent AI is 'just around the corner' and will do it for us? And people have been making this point for years now, and it's not like my job got any easier. I just got more AI.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/51294/waiting-for-the...
And I say that as someone who uses Claude Code in complex environments almost hourly; I, as the human, still have to do the thinking as Claude still 'can't jump' [1] and I have seen no evidence that they (or similar AI, any time soon) will 'jump' like a human brain does.
I still have to do quite a bit of thinking but the amount of of thinking I do per task is trending down. I agree LLMs are not good at abduction but very few humans are either and very few jobs/tasks require it. I can't talk for researchers jobs though. But perhaps fewer researchers would be desired by these labs (not none).
Don't worry, I'm sure you'll hit your goal of zero thinking soon!
I, too, am glad that few humans seem good at abduction.
I say this as someone who's watched a bunch of woodworking videos but hasn't actually done this myself :)
> > Mathematician Richard Hamming used to ask scientists in other fields "What are the most important problems in your field?" partly so he could troll them by asking "Why aren't you working on them?" and partly because getting asked this question is really useful for focusing people's attention on what matters.
> I imagine someone being asked this question, and how they should respond. I think like so - ‘Fuck off Richard’.
> This is partly because I imagine this question being asked in a kind of snarky, gotcha kind of way, with some sort of nerdy superiority. Like ‘ha your behaviour is inconsistent with your implied preferences, you idiot, do you even von Neumann–Morgenstern?’
Btw, I think the discussion of Einstein's career in the paper you link is historically wrong in many respects, particularly the argument about 'weak signal'. Einstein was in fact working on some of the most mainstream and widely discussed problems in physics of the day, he is admired for the creativity of his solutions to those problems, and much of his work built incrementally on ideas and breakthroughs that came (long) before (as all research does).
Article suggests that a central motivation of Einstein's work was resolving action-at-a-distance in Newtonian mechanics - yet Maxwell introduced the same Lagrangian field theories for electromagnetism we use today 50 years earlier to solve the same problem for Farraday's laws of electromagnetism. Similar wave equations existed even earlier. Heaviside in 1893 extended this technique to gravity (matching 'weak field' GR) 20 years earlier. So this is perhaps the one aspect of gravity that had actually already been solved before Einstein. Authors might be conflating his work on action-at-a-distance in QM.
Einstein's GR extended the linear 'weak field' understanding of gravity to include the non-linear self-referential case where masses themselves create gravity. This was mathematically incredibly difficult but was necessary precisely because SR's mass energy equivalence created so many strong signals that were unresolved. For example: if finite energy is mass, then mass changes as objects accelerate past a large mass like a start, and hence their propagation in space could not be explained by linear EM style field equations. Many such considerations were causing very 'strong signals' in SR, and there were analogous problems in QM atomic models being developed at the same time.
SR was also a solution to a problem that was actively being worked by many of the leading physicists of the day. SR actually does match Newtonian mechanics for a single observer - it resolves contradictions in the case of separate observers, by allowing them to assign different values to the speeds, masses, etc of objects such that each object appears to follow Newtonian mechanics for each observer. Again, this was necessary because of a lot of contradictions related to the behavior of light that had been well-known for ~20 years at the time.
Personally, I don't consider this kind of reasoning to be beyond the capabilities of future LLMs (even current LLMs if the task was broken into technical rather than philosophical problems). Personally, I doubt that such problems could stand open for 20+ years waiting for a creative genius to solve them in the modern world.
And don't get me started on the philosophy.
What kind of answers were they expecting to get?
Overall, I'd like to understand those who have a positive outlook on design and software engineering as a career. Where do you see the opportunity where I just see a bleak one where anyone can do this stuff by typing or talking to AI? Myself, after 17 years in the field I am begrudingly back in school for a new medical career. As well, anytime an IT recruiter reaches out I am getting responses back only after under-cutting the hourly rate I use to demand and what others probably are still trying to get. And with it feels even bleaker as it becomes a race to the bottom!
- In biz development, a dev usually spends 30-40% time on coding, and more time on requirement discussion, integration testing (especially when the tests involves mobilephone or car)
- coding time can be reduced to 30%, which means reduce 20%-30% time of the full pipeline
- meanwhile, every phase and role is using LLM now, for example, product manager can produce longer requirement doc easily (we can use LLM to read it anyway:) Meeting sometimes is more than before, because more document output leads to more reading and discussion.
- I hope to find new ways to express biz requirements, in a more efficient and automatic manner.
- Shorten the requirement-dev-test-deploy loop is very important. OUTPUT is not OUTCOME. It is equal when we can see the final result, instead of intermediate metric.
- Agentic infra is extremely useful, or every one will find a way to access the database, report and ops system, in some weird fragile method.
Anyone else finding they're spending more time writing code (or at least driving agents to write code) now?
14% used to feel about right for me - I'd spend the rest of the time researching approaches and libraries, planning things out in issues, or sometimes just thinking really hard about problems I ran into.
Now... I still do those things, but I'm doing many of them faster - and I'm often doing them while my coding agents are churning away on code.
There's also this weird effect where the harder a problem is the more I can get done in parallel with it, because an agent might need to spend 20 minutes on it without my involvement.
> Anyone else finding they're spending more time writing code (or at least driving agents to write code) now?
Not really, as once it is time to write code, the problem has been defined/understood (to the degree possible with knowledge acquired at the time), and encoding it is largely an exercise in typing along with verifying assumptions via test suites.
Does GenAI quicken some portions of the above workflow? Sure, in the same way IDEs with contextual code snippet suggestions can make encoding faster.
They also have an update -- linked from the original study! -- explaining that it's out of date and no longer reliable, and explaining why they had to cancel a follow-up study because it was understating productivity gains (but also was showing wins for the people who carried over from their previous study): https://metr.org/blog/2026-02-24-uplift-update/
The authors of this paper decided to ignore all of METR's follow-up data and discussion, and to report only the ancient number from early 2025 (a time when Windsurf was state of the art). And then, rather than apologizing for it, and caveating it as a number not to be taken seriously, they described it as a study done "recently."
That's either shockingly dishonest or incredibly out-of-touch.
So much has changed since late 2025 one can’t really draw any conclusions from this.
In fact, I’m guessing things will continue to move so fast that by the time one were to execute a survey of developers, many of the responses and findings are no longer relevant.
Reminds me of COVID and how everyone was fighting over early trends during that time.
They quote a study in which developers report to spend 11-14% of their day coding. The rest is stuff like solution design and meetings. The insinuation is that AI can at most automate 14% of your day.
The problem with this argument is that once you have code, some (not all) of the precursors to code go away.
Show me the evidence that AI has an impact on productivity when doing design work. Or reducing meeting load.
My own experience is that AI doesn't tighten the design cycle, and in fact might extend it by encouraging gold plating.
Well, I expect when you've vibed too much and lost track of the code, and can't answer questions in meetings anymore, you'll stop getting invited to them.
In the case of an LLM generated demo, usually deceptively so.
> and give an impression that the design decision has been made.
In the case of a vibed design, this is the opposite of useful for the team.
This isn't exactly novel territory, here, Simon. Let's not pretend I'm asking for something strange, unprecedented, or unreasonable.
I have similar charts across my three main open source projects:
https://github.com/simonw/datasette/graphs/code-frequency
https://github.com/simonw/llm/graphs/code-frequency
https://github.com/simonw/sqlite-utils/graphs/code-frequency
More code written is not a good measure of productivity. It could be garbage, or redundant code, or simply not addressing the real or more pressing needs, it could be building the wrong thing, etc.
Like TFA mentions, it's been known for decades LoC is a misleading metric for productivity. It's one of the lessons of software engineering.
That meeting that you spent an hour in to understand the requirements? You don't need that meeting if you're not writing the code. That sync up with the QA engineer you did to hand it off to them? Don't need that meeting if you're not writing the code. That half hour you spent installing vim extensions? Don't need 'em if you don't open vim anymore.
There are engineers whose jobs go well beyond coding, of course. Staff engineers and principal engineers have had their jobs radically change because of AI, but not because it's writing all their code.
But there are also a lot of engineers -- your standard mid-level engineer, or even senior engineers at a lot of orgs with title inflation -- whose job is almost entirely about delivering code, and who spend all day either writing code or engaging in scaffolding around code-writing activities. Let's not pretend that automating away that code writing is a 15% boost.
How are you going to prompt the LLM or validate its output if you don't understand the requirements?
Talented, experienced devs leaving the field out of disgust would be pretty disruptive.
Crumbling, faulty technical infrastructure with unmanageable heaps of AI slop that no one understands would definitely disrupt businesses.
Skill atrophy, and an entire generation of "developers" that have never actually written code will be disruptive when something breaks and no one knows how to fix it (this isn't a hypothetical, I'm seeing this phenomenon in a lot of large enterprise groups).
The total elimination of novel solutions, new ideas and new approaches to development and the resulting industry wide stagnation won't be disruptive, but will certainly be a drag.
Replace "AI slop" with "code", and you've got basically any large enterprise today.
So an 180 from the current coding-automation frenzy..
> Your PM can write the ticket, and your QA can test the output.
If your PM can write the ticket and your QA can test the output, why not cut out the middleman by having the PM write the coding agent prompt(s)?
And if your PM can write the coding agent prompt(s), why not cut out the QA group by having the PM write the verification prompt(s)?
And if your PM can write those prompts, why not cut out the PM and have your CSRs write the feature request/verification prompts?
And if your CSRs can write the feature request/verification prompts, why not cut them out and have the organization's customers write the feature request along with acceptance prompts?
And if customers can write those prompts, why would they pay you?
|Contract|Product|Design|Coding|Testing|Deploy|
Writing Code Isn't the Bottleneck, until writing code is the bottleneck, until it's not again.
That includes talking to vendors, meetings with every layer of stakeholder when just one person digs their heels, etc.
That is truly the final frontier for "AI", and one that it will likely never cross. That would be when even the execs and upper management feel threatened by "AI". But, since they also delegate so much, you often see someone at the bottom of the totem pole in those meetings. This is why nobody is getting replaced by "AI". We really need to move this discussion away from the scifi stupidity already. There is no singularity or godlike AGI about to take over the world.
I hate to use awful terms like "synergy" and "teamwork", but they do have a lot more substance and truth to them than any perceived threat from "AI".
I stopped reading after this. AI has massively impacted most aspects of my non-coding work including the mentioned planning, understanding legacy code bases, setting up environments, etc etc.
Either this article is written by people with skill issues or - given the platform - its a biased and protectionist take that will fall quickly under the march of reality.
This is a depressing stat. The real productivity gains come from leaving soul sucking big tech companies where nothing gets done with any sort of urgency.
Writing code is indeed the bottleneck for same resource constrained companies.
Rapid code development creates more opportunities for trial and error, providing companies with more information for decision making, that previously might have been addressed by meetings.
Of course, this might bring other problems, but it might not right to generally speaking that writing code is not a bottleneck.
Basically as a senior tech lead in a large company engineering org, I don't have the bandwidth to individually validate every assertion from engineers on other teams OR from every product manager that comes with a half-baked ask. In the past I would be limited by the influence I could get through human relationships to strong SMEs with good judgment, and those folks always thin out as a company grows and calcifies. The number of creative and innovative thinkers dwindles, and the number of people protecting their turf and doing the minimum not to get fired increases. As a result many good ideas can get blocked by random gatekeeprs with poor imagination, poor expertise or both. However with AI I can follow up on gut instincts and fact check a lot more things, and ask incisive questions that can cut through a lot of organizational bullshit.
That's where I think most of the AI gains are today. Of course once AI plateaus and normalizes I think it will be baked into the org structures of tomorrow. But for now it offers real competitive advantage to those with the expertise to ask the right questions.
Coding has never been expensive as it is nothing more than a reification of a solution to a problem as it is understood at that time.
It is the underlying understanding of the problem which has always been expensive and remains so.
The only point that still holds is that organizational policies and procedures that automate AI use and lower the barrier to entry are more efficient than leaving it up to each individual. Every other point they make is either stale or was never true to begin with.
I must be a crap developer, because I probably spend twice as much time bugfixing and testing than "coding". (Both of which actually involve coding stuff, so I really don't like that distinction they make)
This is stuff AI can be really good at, so brushing that part under the table distorts the picture.
Having said that, I do agree with most of the myths they present.
For those more junior - keep in mind that a lot of the maximalist rhetoric are from people either selling models, or the cottage industry of people selling you courses or tools to help you use the models. Try and keep in mind software is not a mature industry, it's an immature one, and it's prone to hype and fads.
But I'd push back on one thing the article implies that AI is automatically a productivity win. It's not. Some days I've shipped two months of work in a few days with AI. Other days, like today, I've burned a whole day and gotten almost nothing done because the proper research was not done by me or multiple agents.
The bottleneck for AI can be the human understanding of how to optimally use the tool. While the bottleneck for the human can be not maximizing multiple agents, or the input the user enters, then the retention of the output. If the user's input is lost, the output falters. If the user doesn't understand what the AI output is, there is going to be a problem eventually.
The article touches on adoption barriers (Myth 7), but it doesn't really get into the ego piece. There's still a wave of experienced devs who either refuse to adopt AI, or use it quietly and don't share what they're doing. That slows the whole team's learning curve. At this point, I think it's pretty much understood that you should be using AI as a dev — not to replace your skills, but to accelerate them. That means still learning new languages, still writing code, still troubleshooting. The tools change, but the craft doesn't.
I think the article is right that the real leverage is organizational, not individual. The teams that succeed with AI aren't the ones giving everyone a license — they're the ones rethinking how they review, test, and maintain code.
What I'm still uncertain about is how to measure whether AI is actually making systems better, not just faster. Lines of code is clearly a bad metric, but I haven't seen a good alternative yet. What metrics are people actually using that feel meaningful?