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Writing code hasn’t been the bottleneck in software production since the 1980s; RAD, IDEs, OOP, and off-shoring made code (in corporations) a relatively cheap quasi-commodity long ago. The bottleneck has always been making software that’s actually useful.

Butlerian Jihadist of House Dornick@shimminykricket.blacksky.app

Harvard just dropped a study AI productivity in software engineering and it found the average increase in productivity from using Claude code is.....zero and for exactly the reasons you'd think fion.ac/jellyfish.pdf

8/10/26, 3:13 am14 reposts55 likes

By “useful” I mean software that helps people do something in a much better way than they could before—and without it being unpleasant and annoying; pleasant even. (Most software does none of these things.)

sugoyona.bsky.social

@sugoyona.bsky.social

Getting software to simply not be annoying already feels like half the battle.

Thomas A. Powell

@tpowell.bsky.social

Yes but Thomas all our metrics point up LoC - up Batch sizes - up PRs - up WIP - up Velocity - up Regressions - up Bugs - up Downtime - up Senior Dev Frustration - up Unsubstantiated claims - up Motivated Reasoning - up Recklessness - up Doomerism - up Value & use must be up, it just follows 😏