Posts Tagged "Software Engineering"

I read something last week that unsettled me more than most of the AI articles that fill my inbox, and it wasn't about job losses or productivity charts. It was about motivation: why would anyone bother getting good at something, in public, if the thing they're good at is about to become invisible?

Fiona Chen and James Stratton, two economists at Harvard, have written a paper that I think anybody leading an engineering team should read. It uses work data from 718 companies to ask what happened to software output and jobs once AI coding tools arrived, and what they found is that people wrote a lot more code without a matching increase in software shipped.

Annie Vella and Kelly Blincoe published a longitudinal study of professional software engineers using AI coding assistants, and it turned up this week in one of the engineering-leadership newsletters I read. The headline number is the one everyone already half-believed: 82% of the developers they surveyed said they were spending less time writing code six months after they'd started using AI assistants regularly. What I think is more interesting, and more useful if you're trying to lead an engineering org through this, is what happened underneath that number.

Will Larson published something last week that's been doing the rounds in engineering leadership circles: a write-up of what he's calling the "software factory pattern," an experiment he's running at Imprint, the fintech company where he's CTO. I think most people are reading it slightly wrong, including some of the people criticising it.