John Henry and the Steam Engine - coding edition

The expectations have sped up rapidly. One engineer said that building a feature for the website used to take a few weeks; now it must frequently be done within a few days. He said this is possible only by using A.I. to help automate the coding and by cutting down on meetings with colleagues to solicit feedback and explore alternative ideas.

Lots of ink spilled on the productivity of AI. But one very strong fact remains, if you were copy/pasting from stack overflow before, copy/pasting from LLMs is just more efficient. Besides how many unique apps are built everyday? Execution is the diffrientiator.

_{Quote Citation: Noam Scheiber, “At Amazon, Some Coders Say Their Jobs Have Begun to Resemble Warehouse Work”, May 27, 2025, https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/25/business/amazon-ai-coders.html/}