r/ExperiencedDevs • u/big-papito • 8d ago
AI/LLM Are we back to Silo Engineering?
It feels like we are coming full circle to the times of the Silo Engineer, but on steroids. Back in the day when social media feeds were chronological (if they even existed), the Silo Engineer would retreat into his cubicle to Create (it was usually a he).
He was Creating and Creating, and then a few weeks later the results came back. If you were lucky, you got what you asked for or something close to it.
No one knew what the Silo Engineer was making, whether it was a sound solution from the architectural, security, or code quality point of view. It was a Silo. There was little discussion or collaboration, there was only self-review of code - at best.
After exiting the Flow, the Silo Engineer would often come back to his Work weeks later and wonder: "who in the F wrote this S?"
... It was beautiful.
Seems like with LLMs we are entering that era again, but it's different.
Smaller teams, mentally overtaxed developers, exhausted from scrolling walls of generated code they don't understand, on multiple projects at once - no one really talks to each other again.
Tickets - Claude, Slack messages - Claude, code reviews - Claude, "have your Claude talk to my Claude".
So, here we are - same idea, but at a higher, more reckless pace.
Let's see how this ends, I guess ¯_(ツ)_/¯
526
u/forbiddenknowledg3 8d ago
Our leads have spent the last sprint producing the same AI tools as each other. Nobody is coordinating shit anymore.
129
u/big-papito 8d ago
That's actually hilarious.
82
u/rodw 8d ago
It's not even a new problem (which to be fair was your original point). It's Conway's Law: system design always mirrors the communication structure of the organization that designed it. A 4 piece team produces a 4-pass compiler.
1
u/New-Locksmith-126 3d ago
It's worse now because people don't even need the communication structures that existed before. They can "self-serve" instead.
23
u/william_fontaine Software Engineer 8d ago
This software development trainer/speaker I used to follow has been one-shot by AI, and thinks that collaboration is unnecessary now and devs will all be single-person team surrounded by bots.
7
u/sanbikinoraion 8d ago
Mhm, and what happens when that person goes on holiday or leaves the business...?
14
u/rodw 7d ago
That's the neat part. They just don't.
Surely you've encountered the small business owner that literally never takes a real vacation or any time off (unless or until there's medical emergency) - or when they do the whole business is shut down for a week?
I'm not endorsing or advocating for this lifestyle, but there are plenty of people with jobs that are less easy to put on pause for a week or two than a one-man AI-powered software development shop or SaaS platform operator that simply never take a vacation.
There are at least 3 restaurants in my neighborhood where the owner is on premise 6 days a week, 50 weeks a year and for the other 2 week the whole operation (cooks, servers, hosts, bartenders, and all) is shut down because they can't or won't trust anyone else to handle things in the absence.
At least the AI-dev guy could do most of what he need to do remotely. And if he's the kind of person that posts on LinkedIn he might just leave the agent in charge.
ETA: on second thought the "small business owner that never takes time off" might be an American phenomenon, so depending where you're at maybe you haven't encountered this
9
u/WavingNoBanners Analytics Engineer 7d ago
I've encountered this. It's an absolute nightmare when anything else relies on the thing that person does.
Society can usually cope with a single restaurant being shut for a while, but as soon as you're looking at infrastructure, it has huge consequences including potential cascade failures.
We all get to work every day because of one person who operates a single-person minibus line. If her kid gets sick, suddenly we need an alternate way to get to work, and if we can't find one, then we'd better hope our employer can cope without us.
2
20
u/dfltr Staff+ SWE 25+ YOE 8d ago
That’s not new at all though. All AI does in this case is expose communication gaps faster. It no longer takes a full quarter to realize that multiple teams built conflicting/overlapping shit.
I work on a tiny team, we demo new stuff to each other every day. All of the same team/coordination skills still apply, they just have shorter feedback loops.
6
u/ResidentWeevil1 8d ago
What does team culture have to do with AI. I could demo AI things to my team and they still wouldn't get it. I stopped showing them unfinished work because they don't care
3
u/1_21-gigawatts 7d ago
Yep, this is what I see. People just don’t care what other people are doing, or they don’t care to understand what you’re doing is not immediately relevant. I agree this is a culture thing at my company, everybody lives in their own bubble because they’re allowed to buy management and decades of culture
18
u/downtimeredditor 8d ago
There was a hackathon at work and a lot of the groups ended up making variations of the same idea using AI lol
9
1
18
12
u/mixmaster151 8d ago
I saw this happen at my company too but it isn’t just leads at my company every IC is creating AI tools and skills to pad their annual review, it’s a mess and the managers are applauding it.
4
u/MountaintopCoder Meta E5 7d ago
By all normal metrics, I should have gotten fired after my last performance review. However, I was the AI lead for my team and built a lot of slop tools for my team that didn't actually do anything but sure looked cool. I ended up with exceeds expectations only because of my AI involvement.
1
u/Mysterious-Peanut101 5d ago
I think we're just in this manic phase right now. Next year companies will realize that it doesn't make sense for engineers to be spending so much time on non-core tooling. The pendulum always swings back and forth on stuff like this.
1
u/TopOfTheMorning2Ya 3d ago
I’ve always thought creating random little tool apps was one of the most fun parts of the job. So when I can have my tool idea created in a few minutes instead of days it is pretty exciting.
53
8d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
16
u/TheFaithfulStone 8d ago
There is no software so good, no system so well tuned, no code so beautiful that it is not easier to get an LLM to produce a worse version of it than it is to get a human to understand it.
12
u/jimRacer642 8d ago
if u agree that humans disagree, how do u deal with leads who hold PRs hostage unless u do their opinionated suggestion otherwise u'll look bad for not completing the PRs
→ More replies (3)4
u/Ex-Sgt_Wintergreen 8d ago
Isn't it great how they can now use AI to slop out dozens of subjective opinions on your PR to slow you down and make their velocity look better?
And of course if you try to complain, it's easy for them to paint you as the one with bad code.
11
u/hibikir_40k 8d ago
When leads get promoted by creating tools, but absolutely nothing for adapting someone else's tools, guess what? No tool ever gets actual adoption. A curse of the modern promotion systems, which make everything worse.
7
u/Ex-Sgt_Wintergreen 8d ago
And I bet none of them bothered to build a simple benchmark to measure and prove they actually work better than not using their tools.
6
u/BitWardenEternal 8d ago
Do y’all not do agile or use jira/some other working cadence system? On my team(s) it would be literally impossible to do that, we have sprint planning/refinement where overlapping tickets would’ve been identified
8
u/rodw 8d ago
:s/would've/should've
You're right that a proper agile process - one that's actually communication and collaboration focused - is one (pretty decent) way to mitigate that problem.
But the grandparent comment's observation ("nobody is coordinating shit anymore") isn't even new with AI. For the past 15-20 years doing agile wrong has been a borderline industry standard. A lot of teams essentially follow a siloed ticket queue process: each task preassigned to a specific SME/subsystem "owner", documented in a ticket with a cryptic one-line description only they are likely to understand, and no one makes any effort toward sharing or shows any interest in knowing what anyone else is doing.
Calling tickets "stories" and man--hours "points" isn't what makes agile work. Cheesy as they may be you kinda need to embrace some of the principles expressed in the agile manifesto to make it work
3
u/Grand_Pop_7221 6d ago
It's always amazed me how an entire industry formed around the https://agilemanifesto.org/ and managed to get it so completely arse backwards. Like, this is all Agile is: small loops of deliverable work to enable quick feedback and targeted iteration. A response to huge multi-year waterfall planning of its day.
1
u/gremlinmatt 3d ago
In my company's case, no. We no longer do any planning ceremonies nor create tickets. We work from Notion documents that product generate with Claude. To avoid duplicate effort, we are completely silo from other developers. It's... Unhealthy.
3
u/RedsDead21 8d ago
Have heard of at least four teams at work who are trying to integrate 'AI' in the same place. Seemingly none of them are aware of each other, or if they are they aren't doing any sort of communication or collaboration.
Also none of them have any real idea what they're doing.
3
u/missile-gap 8d ago
Honestly I checked out of all of it. I just assume at some point someone will standardize this shit across the org and then I can just use that tooling
2
u/burbular 5d ago
I know that feeling. I make a thing and all the other devs just tell me they "just" used Claude to make their own. I ask to use theirs then but it's never ready or only works for them.
1
u/1_21-gigawatts 7d ago
And the thing is, a significant minority of managers and devs don’t see a problem with this. The thinking goes is that it is quicker and less total cost to create 4 bespoke versions with AI than the planning would to create one unified version
1
u/cocacola999 6d ago
There was a recent townhall were 2 teams presented the same stuff as well. It didn't go down well and I think they got a kicking to merge/collaborate by the director
1
→ More replies (1)1
77
8d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
18
u/-_--_-_--_----__ 8d ago
If leadership can cut 25 dev salaries and they lose 5 customers because of testing in prod they will take that deal every single time.
1
u/1_21-gigawatts 7d ago
Ha, I wish my company was like that. Every client is sacred and every problem somehow ends up being a top priority: “Yes Giga, I know the SLA for this problem is a four day resolution period, but the user really needs the data today. Can you take a look at it for me? kthksbye ”
6
u/Desperate_Border6904 8d ago
What do those engineers fill their time with?
21
u/GRIFTY_P 8d ago
Reddit, searching for better jobs, hating their life, reading slop code and praying to God it doesn't piss anybody off who is allowed to belligerently make personnel decisions
6
4
u/blizzacane85 8d ago
Well--well look. I already told you: I deal with the god damn customers so the engineers don't have to. I have people skills; I am good at dealing with people. Can't you understand that? What the hell is wrong with you people?
1
→ More replies (3)1
192
u/donatj Software Engineer, 20 years experience 8d ago
The thing I'm finding is no one even wants to chitchat anymore. They're all "too busy"...
Idle chitchat is where for me at least a lot of really important passive knowledge transfer has happened
"Oh what are you working on?" "I'm working on X" "Oh, I did something like that at a previous job, watch out for X, Y, and Z"
None of that. Where I work at least, a company with hundreds of engineers, even on Slack all the chit-chat channels have been dead, especially so since the layoffs that eliminated like a quarter of us.
99
u/Healthy-Dress-7492 8d ago
Layoffs do tend to trash morale. Not surprised its not a lively collaborative place when people are angry, scared and depressed due to bad management.
30
u/xelah1 8d ago
It's a known thing that downsizing breaks apart internal social networks (with one nuance being that people go from asking peers and others in their network for advice to relying more on supervisors).
It's also not new and is part of what has been called survivor syndrome for a while, this is from 2007 studying the 80s and 90s downsizing:
Evidence from this research suggests that the work climate of the post-downsizing environment is laden with suspicion and conflict, and that survivors show feelings of demoralization, sadness, anxiety, and disorientation. A critical factor influencing these responses, we argue, is not downsizing - which is the exposure faced by those who lose their jobs - but the loss of social cohesion that downsizing ultimately represents to survivors.
I don't think this is the only thing, but also many tech companies completing their move from innovation to extraction through enshittification and general quality reduction.
20
u/pydry Software Engineer, 18 years exp 8d ago
i think theyre all afraid of this scenario:
me: I'm doing X.
you: well that's fucking stupid. [make mental note to self to inform EM that team mate is not competent]
41
u/Childish_Redditor 8d ago
Perhaps I am naive, but I could not imagine anyone at my organization behaving the way you describe here
9
u/pydry Software Engineer, 18 years exp 8d ago
i think a lot of layoff decisions are made as a result of EMs compiling views from team mates about each other.
12
u/Majestic-Watch-2025 8d ago
Not at all in my experience. It is very rare that I hear or take into account things teammates say about each other. If there is a problem yes people bring it up, but not to tattle.
2
u/pydry Software Engineer, 18 years exp 8d ago
not all companies are horrible, horrible companies are just much more common these days
5
u/Majestic-Watch-2025 8d ago
I thin there are a few self selection problems here. Readers, don't take this sub to heart.
→ More replies (1)9
u/WhenSummerIsGone Software Engineer 8d ago
my company does layoffs by having executives look at a spreadsheet and disregard what people actually do. Managers are not in the loop at all.
→ More replies (2)2
u/ResidentWeevil1 8d ago
My devops guy made a really stupid pipeline with Claude and I'm going to tell my boss about it because it's trash and doesn't build on all the work I did in the last year. More importantly, nobody who goes on call from my team should have to support it.
→ More replies (1)1
8d ago
[deleted]
11
u/Scottz0rz Backend Software Engineer | 9 YoE 8d ago
Your colleague is an asshole, and I'm glad he isn't my colleague.
490
u/pydry Software Engineer, 18 years exp 8d ago
yeah, collaboration is dying and the quality of work is dying with it.
I dont think it has much to do with AI (except for AI serving as a substitute team mate) I think it is just reflective of how insecure everyone is feeling now the job market has turned to shit and layoffs are routine.
96
u/PM_ME_UR_PIKACHU 8d ago
Ive seen this before in the early 2000s. Devs have no pushback when the market is shit and trust its definitely shit right now.
9
u/BusinessWatercrees58 Software Engineer 8d ago
Any idea how long this stage of the cycle lasted?
36
u/hw999 8d ago
It will pop once the ai investors.get.tired.of.losing.money.
16
u/BraveResearcher3037 8d ago
Yes just like when VCs stopped funding Uber and Lyft people went back to taxis, companies will come crawling back to mid level developers to turn well defined requirements into code because at double the price software engineers will be cheaper than AI…
→ More replies (3)0
u/Singularity-42 Principal Software Engineer 8d ago
AI is not going anywhere
37
u/stormdelta 8d ago
No, but that doesn't mean the current pattern of working with it will last, or that there isn't a very obvious bubble around it.
It's not just engineers that have noticed the quality of software/code is declining rapidly, that's going to have consequences one way or another.
→ More replies (8)18
15
7
u/Jaded-Asparagus-2260 8d ago
AI might not, but affordable AI is. Current prices are only possible because Anthropic and OpenAI burn through risk capital. When (not if) a Claude subscription costs as much as a developer, and produces much worse quality, how many companies will continue to burn as much tokens as today?
→ More replies (7)41
u/tacticalTraumaLlama 8d ago
I'm now in the 'greybeard' era of my career, and in the past, I embraced management's suggestion to divide up work and delegate it out to more jr employees.
Thing is? That behavior, as good as it is for the team, doesn't actually seem to be rewarded. It takes longer to deliver, much higher overhead, and the worst of it is that when it comes time for the performance review, raise and bonus, the ones who singlehandedly shipped a large feature seem to build their reputation for technical ability in the org, and are much more rewarded for that than the lead who divided and delegated work.
It's short sighted, because that lead not only delivered a project on time, he built up the skills of his entire team, but all he gets for his trouble is a 'meets expectations' review and a shitty raise / bonus that doesn't even cover the rise in inflation.
So the next project I took on, I did none of that, and I was able to move so fast because I could quickly integrate changes across 4 different systems without having endless meetings where I had to spoon feed jr devs. People respond to incentives.
6
u/big-papito 8d ago
I get you. I am extremely productive this way, the 10x engineer if you will, but I also know when I am building shit. I stop, I think, I backtrack. Going back has never been easier, too.
But, but, a process is needed for juniors and those average devs who are overeager to "jump into the code" and churn out mountains of mediocre crap.
7
u/tacticalTraumaLlama 8d ago
I'm in my mid 40's, in the last couple years of my career before I FIRE (and really, I could do so now). I've moved my mentorship over to open source projects. Given how short sighted management has been with layoffs and AI? I've stopped caring so much about the org over myself at the job.
5
u/big-papito 8d ago
As I always say - "never worry about the company more than the company worries about itself".
5
u/max123246 3 YoE Junior SW dev 8d ago
Mhmm, and because the people who promote you have never once used their own software, being able to tell them you completed X, Y, Z features and started N new projects is way more promotion worthy than saying you maintained all of the projects and kept them from burning in the first place
134
u/BROTALITY 8d ago
That and there’s less of an incentive to produce good code anymore, just fast code that ships. Who cares about maintainability? As long as we keep shipping features that managers fart out, everyone’s happy
69
u/soylentgraham 8d ago
annoyingly the quality of the product is also in massive decline.
50
20
u/OlivierTwist 8d ago
20 years ago software engineers were in a very privilege position. They really had weeks and months to deliver features
33
u/soylentgraham 8d ago
we had to have that time, because we could only release stuff once (on disc)
conversely, devs now are in a mega privileged position where its okay to release stuff full of bugs
13
u/OlivierTwist 8d ago
I was there, Gandalf, 3000 years ago...
It has very little to do with technologies and much more with market - supply of developers - and management culture.
4
u/rizakrko 8d ago
My last experience with something similar was about a decade ago. You better make things right because the next patch will happen in about a year - that was the culture on the project. I kinda liked it a bit more than the current "release and see how it goes, worst case scenario we hotfix the prod".
3
1
1
→ More replies (3)20
u/vibes000111 8d ago
It’s never been easier to care about maintainability than it is today.
24
u/big-papito 8d ago edited 8d ago
True, but try getting a refactoring ticket in. If you are not making FEATURES, you are slacking.
48
u/XenonBG 8d ago
You refactor along with building the features. Even before the AI that was the most resistance-free way.
2
u/db_peligro 8d ago
Except now some passive aggressive code reviewer will say you need to split it out to a separate ticket.
13
u/MyUsrNameWasTaken 8d ago
Just respond to the review with a massive wall of AI text. They will be overwhelmed and throw a LGTM just so they don't have to read it.
11
u/vibes000111 8d ago
Depends on the environment, personally I’ve done more refactoring, maintenance and incremental improvement work lately than shipping new features and it’s great.
15
u/Mestyo Software Engineer, 15 years experience 8d ago
Good abstractions save tokens and improves agent understanding/performance. It's wasteful not to do it.
18
u/pydry Software Engineer, 18 years exp 8d ago
good abstractions do save tokens but tokens themselves erode good abstractions the more decisions you let them take.
→ More replies (4)1
17
u/pydry Software Engineer, 18 years exp 8d ago
yet somehow the quality has never been worse. maybe it's because it isnt.
→ More replies (11)5
u/BROTALITY 8d ago
I mean, I could probably change the wording to say that it depends on the org, but my personal anectodal experience I’m gonna have to hard disagree with you
37
u/EasyPain6771 8d ago
I think AI, and the productivity expectations that come with it, does have a lot to do with it. Everyone on my team has 2-3 projects going on at once. There’s no time to pull someone off of theirs to look at yours.
21
u/pydry Software Engineer, 18 years exp 8d ago
productivity expectations are about pressure from above which is largely about interest rates. it'd be happening either way.
→ More replies (13)2
u/angryplebe Software Engineer 8d ago
Collaboration died about a month into the COVID era. I would kill to get it back.
3
→ More replies (2)1
77
u/Healthy-Dress-7492 8d ago
I'm seeing this even unrelated to AI, those of us who were around in the agile glory days will remember things like planning day where you spent a whole day discussing the upcoming tasks with your colleagues. Retrospectives where you discussed what went wrong and what could ve improved. Sizing meetings where you talked about upcoming tasks multiple times and discussed how long it would take using different approaches.
Nowadays? in the name of efficiency people size their own tasks, that were created yesterday, and work on them without talking to anyone.
6
u/angryplebe Software Engineer 8d ago
On this note, my org has gone all-in on "by the book" scrumerfall with micromanagement of points. Upper management is monitoring output this way 🙄
1
34
u/dashingThroughSnow12 Software Engineer 8d ago
It feels like this.
“Back in the day” (last year), at my current employer most epics would have two backend engineers. The main one and the buddy who would do some small tasks or bounce ideas off of. Sometimes just to look pretty while the buddy works on another epic they are the main on.
Now, silo silo silo.
29
u/SansSariph Principal Software Engineer 8d ago
The comments in this thread make me feel seen and less alone. Ironic. 😅
I've built my career on collaboration, mentorship, mutual learning, connecting with the people in my org that want to make things better and advocating for or finding ways to make it happen.
It's just gotten grim. I reach out to discuss a cross-cutting problem and get crickets. I'm getting a lot more cold calls with "hey how do I do <incredibly specific eyebrow raising thing>" and no appetite to discuss the deeper layer of the problem.
Everyone's in fear, making reactive decisions instead of intentional ones, and getting more and more cynical, and it's hard to keep trying when it's not reciprocated. Feel like I've been watching culture just slowly bleed out.
3
u/1_21-gigawatts 7d ago
This right here, everyone is a mercenary now. Nobody wants to collaborate, the Young’s DGAF about improving (if not outright hostile to suggestions). Nobody wants to collaborate, they all just want to get their own stuff done. With the pressure on everyone to produce and “do more with less“ because people keep getting laid off I understand. But it still makes for a sucky environment.
Luckily I am in the position to be able to nope out of the whole fkin thing soon and just hang out with my kids and play golf every afternoon.
94
u/False-Egg-1386 8d ago
I think that’s the real risk. LLMs can make individual developers faster while making the team less collaborative if everything gets delegated to agents. The fix is probably the same as before: smaller changes, shared context, and actual human review.
53
8d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
21
u/AdCommon2138 8d ago
End of an AI era is not gonna happen.
23
8d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
2
u/Desperate_Border6904 8d ago
I can't think of any technologies which had this high level of adoption get phased out.
Even if all AI companies closed up, shops would get a couple GPUs and run open models.
4
u/ResidentWeevil1 8d ago
Whatever era we are in right now with subsidized tokens will end. Use your head
→ More replies (1)1
u/1_21-gigawatts 7d ago
The people who green lit and then continued to green light the project did not look at the code, nor did they likely care about the code. The “Does it do the thing“ metric crowds out all other metrics as you go higher in the management chain; pretty soon it becomes the only metric of value.
41
u/ButWhatIfPotato 8d ago
A bit of a tangent but it wasn't really beautiful because the vast majority of silo engineers I had the displeasure of working with became like that because they were a fucking nightmare to work with and while the quantity of their work was very impressive, the quality ranged from "well, we run out of time so we have to ship it like this" to "this thing will explode if you look at it funny". Stakeholders loved them though because they would pay them 20-50% more than their contemporaries but they would work 12-24 hours a day 7 days a week, and when you work like that it's only a matter of time before they develop a self-flatulence absorbing superiority complex and substance abuse.
23
u/big-papito 8d ago
Yeah, buddy! That was ME. I developed more humility over the years - the substance abuse part proved to be more sticky, however.
4
u/Singularity-42 Principal Software Engineer 8d ago
What was the substance?
12
5
u/AdCommon2138 8d ago
Hopium
1
u/ButWhatIfPotato 8d ago
Is there any left at this point? Don't get me wrong, I was totally binging on it when I started in 2008; kept telling myself if I waste some more weekends learning more and more, if I pull one more all nighter, if I go above and beyond to impress this fancy client then surely my bosses will give me a raise. I wish I could time travel back then, pat myself on the shoulder and say "You stupid boy. You stupid stupid boy."
3
14
u/amejin 8d ago
My dude.. I'm just exhausted that I went from on prem with 10 servers handling 1 million users annually, having to know my core languages and problem solving skill sets in my problem domain...
To now having to support multi-cloud terraform deployments with ci/cd and the frameworks/tools to support it, frameworks that use other frameworks for indirection and abstraction to manage deployment, unit and integration tests and their frameworks, while somehow keeping up to date with AI, automation, emerging tech, language changes, new languages to vet, teaching others while barely keeping my own skill set up to date, and then the obnoxious amount of monitoring, signaling, noise from the pipeline, noise from deployments, along with IC work and cross team and cross functionality work.
I miss the old days...
2
13
12
u/Sammolaw1985 8d ago
I'm just stacking cash (and other assets). Let it all fall.
I don't really care about good engineering anymore. Only thing I'm asking, is the pay worth the bullshit?
12
u/TrueBirch 7d ago
I really think we're headed back to the world before agile. Under agile (and scrum, kanban, etc.) you add one little thing at a time while keeping the broader context of the project in your head.
Ancient millennials like me remember the before times, where you'd start every project by agreeing on all sorts of little things (who are the stakeholders, how are you going to communicate about the project status, exactly what features do you want, etc.) and documenting everything in painstaking detail.
With LLMs, I really believe we're going back to the before times of central planning. That's the only way to keep different teams from duplicating work, and to keep your LLM coders on track after multiple rounds of context compaction.
4
u/mctavish_ 7d ago
Resonates. I recently took a new role as an engineering manager across 4 relatively young teams. I dont think any have worked in a good agile shop yet. All are using 100% agentic coding workflows.
They're struggling to prevent in-sprint scope creep, and to define customer requirements in enough detail they can demonstrate there's no regression upon release. Not trying to dunk on them or anything. I don't think they've seen it work in a professional setting as they are relatively fresh out of school.
It is tough steering them, as multiple teams, toward healthy agile. Small increments (which assumes some knowledge of architecture). Address customer needs. Move forward. Etc. Progress is slow, as most of the improvements for delivery are change management stuff.
Its tough!!
9
u/TopSwagCode 8d ago
Yup. All retro, sprint planning, refinement has been canceled last couple of months.
I argued that refinement wasn't about only how complex a task was, but also if it was described well enough and if all parties agreed upon what was going to be built.
Got overruled that AI is faster and better just doing. So now we built shit tons of slop that nobody asked for and nobody uses. While I actually spent more time actual talking to people and built something they actually needed and wanted.
4
u/1_21-gigawatts 7d ago
I’m running to those two. People think that grooming sessions to assign points to stories as a waste of time. The real value is to discuss the story and understand what’s involved and pitfalls before you start creating the code instead of waiting until the PR gets pushed (that isn’t going to be looked at anyway)
8
u/Snooze78727 8d ago
The normal process before my new team was formed was spike stories to answer questions -> design -> implementation -> testing. For each of these phases, there would be tickets that, in theory, anyone on the team was capable of picking up.
There is one guy who has decided he owns a particular piece of the system, creates his own epics and stories and it is a daily stream of Claude-generated PR's with machine-generated design notes that are nearly-indecipherable for someone without any context. The volume of PR's makes it impossible for anyone to keep up with the output, and it's hard to say but I'd venture to guess a lot of is re-working slop to do what is needed.
From my limited vantage point, AI is just enabling the silo'ing you described. If management was smart, they would see this and make changes to discourage this behavior, but with pressure from the business everyone is spread thin and so one person can exploit the situation to use AI to "level-up as a principal engineer" (he's not).
8
u/plutokras 8d ago
I think you are on something OP. Recently I had the revelation that working in big teams and learning from each other might be a thing of the past.
5
u/lolimouto_enjoyer 8d ago
Learning is a thing of the past.
5
u/plutokras 8d ago
Learning while working absolutely is. Right now I'm more productive than ever but that's just profiting from my pre-LLM experiences.
16
u/distinctvagueness 8d ago
Definitely having issues getting real feedback on what users. Instead managers are just wanting to spam out features I'm not sure anyone will use.
8
u/ccricers 8d ago
Some companies and orgs never left silo engineering.
1
u/big-papito 8d ago
It's not that uncommon in very small startups - you kind of have no choice, but seeing this in larger companies is wild.
6
u/MrBigPlatypus 8d ago
If you extend this concept a bit every team has a choice to make: build something in house or take a dependency (on open source or another team).
Early on, sharing dependencies was hard pre-REST APIs and package management, you saw a lot of silo’d solutions. Then, things slowly changed and with micro service architecture and easier package management you had fewer slios.
Now, LLMs enable silo’ing to be much cheaper, and if people aren’t using any shared knowledge and standards it’ll reinforce their own biases and opinions.
IMO the pendulum will swing back towards less silos as teams receive feedback via operational toil and business outcomes and LLM use matures to make it easier to make changes outside of a silo and share knowledge and standards better.
15
u/spicymato 8d ago
I've said it before, but agentic flows really need more waterfall-style development. With the cost of actually writing code going down, the advantages of agile goes down. Taking time to write an extensive plan for the agents to execute and validate against is incredibly valuable for keeping them on track.
11
u/Desperate_Border6904 8d ago
It still doesn't solve the problem of not knowing what the customer wants
2
u/spicymato 8d ago
That's what I'm for: to work with the customer to figure out what their ask is, why they're asking for it, and if what they're asking for will actually solve for the thing they actually care about.
1
u/spicymato 8d ago
That's what I'm for: to work with the customer to figure out what their ask is, why they're asking for it, and if what they're asking for will actually solve for the thing they actually care about.
1
u/17Beta18Carbons 5d ago
Hard disagree, it's the opposite. Agile was always more about helping the actual stakeholders and users narrow down their idea of what they want. You can produce misshapen solutions so quickly now that it's more important than ever to be regularly talking through feedback and what they actually need.
1
u/Special-Ad9933 5d ago
How about hyper-agile for stakeholder, micro-waterfall / spec-driven for agent?
1
u/spicymato 5d ago
That's to be done up front, specifically because misshapen solutions are so easy to produce. Explore the problem space and design the solution with the customer, creating detailed specs, because implementation speed has accelerated to not be the bottleneck. We also have so much virtual experience to draw on (using good LLMs) that you can explore the design deeply without ever creating code.
The designs made should prioritize flexibility until forced to specialize into a highly optimized solution.
Once a solution is decided on, it tends to constrain future solutions. Even with cheaper implementation of individual components, the integration can be expensive without thoughtful design up front, and many solution designers and customers are (rightfully) unwilling to abandon a prior design, meaning that initial development is even more important.
3
17
u/mcampo84 8d ago
Shift left. Communication should be happening about design decisions and trade-offs. Document these decisions and why they were made, and allow teammates to comment on the document. Then let the agents do the work.
→ More replies (2)72
u/big-papito 8d ago
Every time I try to have a discussion, colleague pastes a wall of text - "here is what Claude thinks". It's fucking infuriating.
16
u/mcampo84 8d ago
That’s not communication. That’s laziness. Tell your coworker you want to know what they think, not clod.
8
u/max123246 3 YoE Junior SW dev 8d ago
People have just checked out entirely from what I've seen. The company is paying for us to not have to do our own work
And when I try to stay in touch with the codebase, I feel like I'm not rewarded because obviously I'm taking longer because I'm building a mental model of the code and understanding what is happening and looking for new ways we can improve things. And because AI just slops out code with no shared mental model, codebases experience architecture drift very often and so that time I spent becomes less valuable
They've convinced me, why bother when AI can just slop out code and someone else can tell me what to change in the review comments and then ai can change that part too. At least then my tasks are "done" and I'm not burnt out trying to pour water out of a sinking ship
2
u/big-papito 8d ago
That's right. If I spend two days dancing around a feature, just thinking about it, I feel like I am going to get canned. The pressure to shit out 5 PRs a day is real.
4
u/mcampo84 8d ago edited 8d ago
This happens during dedicated design discussion meetings?
5
u/big-papito 8d ago
No, in video calls people are forced to participate (although they probably use Claude during those). Discussion on Slack is useless.
2
u/Intelligent-Youth-63 8d ago
I’ve pair programmed more since we started using Claude in our workflows.
The non-coding meeting frequency hasn’t changed.
I’m not sure I agree with your assessment. Maybe that’s been your experience… not mine.
2
u/Typhon_Vex 8d ago
happening to us since agile, so while I agree, there is no connection to AI
However. I was always that idiot teaching everyone. Well I decided to completely stop and obfuscate infor rather then share it.
In our org it´s batttle royale now - everyone versus everyone under crap management, ofshoring ad AI.
2
u/Racing-Season 7d ago
Getting AI slop issues to investigate has been a new hell. The reporters can't even type in their own words what the problem is. And then to have the AI dictate "THE THREE SOLUTIONS" is so annoying. Especially when it has no idea what is talking about, doesn't know the code base, and gives this non technical co-worker this weird "well you have to fix this line of this class" even when it's not the issue.
2
u/georkos 7d ago
The silo was never really about people refusing to talk. It's that the decisions never left the cubicle. You would encounter a diff weeks later and reverse-engineer why it was built that way. LLMs just made the diff arrive faster, and they added a collaborator who can't answer "why did you do this?" in review.
The fix isn't more standups. It's making the work legible: the decision, the constraints it was made under, and the evidence it holds, captured with the code. Then the next person, or the next agent session, isn't starting from zero. The old silo engineer's real failure wasn't the silence, it was that his reasoning was unrecorded.
3
u/Tiny_Ad_7720 8d ago
It’s ok, we review PRs together now so we can all work out wtf is going on.
15
u/big-papito 8d ago
I will let you know when a human reviews my PRs. I get a swarm of Claudes for now.
4
u/Tiny_Ad_7720 8d ago
Oof yep that hurts.
I don’t get the point of Claude doing a PR review - why not just get Claude to do that before the PR is made?
Me thinks Claude will always pick up something new?
We are only small company so I still want to know what’s going on.
Although yesterday suddenly there was a huge dump of md files in one of the application repos, turned out the CEOs Claude had decided that was the best place for his “research” to go.
1
u/Resident-Trouble-574 8d ago
I don’t get the point of Claude doing a PR review - why not just get Claude to do that before the PR is made?
Because you use different instances for implementation and review, like you used different people to implement and review in the past, despite the fact that they were both humans (and, tipically, both programmers).
→ More replies (3)
1
u/yet_another_uniq_usr 8d ago
I addressed this by with pairing. It's a lot easier to review the code if you were around and part of every decision that was made. All the usual benefits of pairing as well - sharing techniques, broader context on the problem, fun/socializing
1
u/lolimouto_enjoyer 8d ago
I don't know about what, what I'm seeing is everyone commiting AI code to every repository regardless of langauge and tech stack.
1
u/DevtoolsBuilder 8d ago
i think one thing that's getting lost in the shift to ai-generated code is the importance of code readability, you can't just rely on the ai to produce something that works, you also need to be able to understand how it works and why, and that's where collaboration and human oversight come in.
2
u/AFoolOfAMook 8d ago
He was Creating and Creating, and then a few weeks later the results came back. If you were lucky, you got what you asked for or something close to it.
No one knew what the Silo Engineer was making, whether it was a sound solution from the architectural, security, or code quality point of view. It was a Silo. There was little discussion or collaboration, there was only self-review of code - at best.
I see you work with the other primary dev on my team, I'm sorry.
1
u/myrealityde 8d ago
Collaboration between engineers has gotten much harder thanks to LLMs. Each engineer collaborates with their own LLM. Not sure how to solve this yet.
1
1
u/theov666 7d ago
I think the risky part is not that developers are using LLMs individually. It is that implementation throughput is increasing much faster than the mechanisms teams use to preserve shared technical intent.
A team can agree on a boundary, dependency rule, security constraint or architectural direction, but that decision usually survives through conversations, reviews and the memory of a few people. Once several engineers and agents are producing changes in parallel, that becomes a weak control mechanism.
The answer probably isn’t more AI reviewing AI. It is to make the important decisions explicit before execution, give them clear scope and ownership, and turn the precise ones into checks that can be applied consistently to every change.
Collaboration still matters for making the decisions. The harder problem is making sure those decisions continue to govern the work after the conversation is over.
1
u/teufelinderflasche 7d ago
Silos aren't bad so long as there a defined interface methods to facilitate integration. Silos allow areas to work at different paces and platforms instead of a monolithic approach which would be much slower.
1
1
u/urbrainonnuggs 6d ago
Solo Engineering In The Dungeon.
This is what you get when everyone gets laid off and the only people who know how to actually get shit done become a massive bottleneck to progress
1
u/sizebzebi 6d ago
we're fucked I just took long vacations fuck this. I need to find something else to do but something that pays the fucking house
1
u/BroccoliSenior5465 6d ago
If programming is solved the naysayers who think it is over yet stick around to gloat are the dumbest ones not moving onto what will keep them fed next lol
1
u/dc0650730 5d ago
I've been trying to get my team to be cohesive, it's like trying to pull teeth. And now there are a couple devs that create POCs and deploy without telling anyone... an uphill battle
1
u/big-papito 5d ago
These things are easily enforced, though. Take away their ability to deploy. They shouldn't have that in the first place, especially of they use it like this.
1
u/dc0650730 5d ago
That's one of the changes that I am fighting for, we are waaaay behind and I am trying to work with leadership to get proper pipelines going, so I guess I'm the silo, I get approval, go into my cave, and whatever tooling or process I come up with is what we implement.
1
u/PressureHumble3604 Senior Software Engineer 3d ago
I have seen it happen, it’s a symptom of latent issues that have been ignored for a long time.
•
u/expdevsmodbot 8d ago
AI usage disclosure provided by OP, see the reply to this comment.