Everything is written by AI, what to do with this potential?

I know when I write this that this will not age well. In the moment it feels like a big happening. In restrospect you will find it hard to understand. But what - did people do this? You mean someone was actully typing all code? By hand?

by Fredrik Kangevall

For the past two weeks Håkan hasn’t written a single line of code. Everything he has shipped has been generated by AI. I know when Spotify mentioned it a month ago it felt close, but not quite there.

Håkan has not been coding recently

Regardless if you feel this is happening to quickly or slowly, the important thing is the consequences of this shift. It naturally impacts productivity, but it also has a massive impact on quality.

For instance it opens up possiblities to

• build more comprehensive tests
• refactor legacy code
• reduce dependency on manual testing

For us, as a Tech company rooted in Lean principles, what was already very important just became even more important: Understanding WHAT to do and WHY.

You have just improved you capability, so what do you do?

In essence it is easy. If you don’t know what problem you are solving you have just improved your capability of building the wrong things.

What I mean with this is that lines of code written has never been a measure of customer success. It is a few selected distinguishing features has. I don’t think anyone believes OpenAI is struggling because they can’t write code fast enough.

How do you know which ones? In my opinion asking someone will give you a hint, but not an answer. So as building things got easier. Create a hypothesis. See. Refine.

Key take aways

Benefits

• Productivty gain: With AI we will be able to lower cost for development projects
• Quick implementation of MVP: It will also be easier to start an MVP and test a hypothesis
• Effective resource allocation: AI frees up resources to focus on refining and tackling the remaining issues, optimising operational efficiency.

To consider

• Improved capability doing what: You have just increased your capability, use it wisely.
• The organisation must embrace the change as well: For any change to be successful it must be embraced by the organisation that will use ut. If you forget this no value will be generated.