Did we just swap "compilation time" for "completion time"?

 

The style has changed but the substance remains the same!

I've been a software engineer for long enough to have seen our workflows evolve dramatically.

Waiting for the Toolchain

I vividly remember the days when the biggest drag on my train of thought was the compile-build-test cycle. It was a constant interruption, a forced coffee-break that usually shattered my thought-flow. 

As an industry, we used our smarts and there it was: incremental compilation, continuous testing, parallelisation, etc.

And to our credit, we made things a lot better. A. Lot.

But now, a new interruption has quietly taken its place.

Waiting for the Genie 

With the rise of LLMs (the "genies," as Kent Beck so perfectly calls them) my workflow has shifted.

The core creative loop is no longer just me and the code; it's a conversation. And in that conversation, there's a lot of waiting.

1. Prompt the genie to write code.
2. Wait for completion.
3. Review.
4. Prompt the genie to write tests.
5. Wait for completion (again).
6. Review.
7. Go to 1.

The primary interruption to my thought-flow has shifted from the rather predictable rhythm of compiling to the ambiguous latency of completion and review.

This new type of waiting feels quite different. It is almost completely opaque, less deterministic, and in some ways, more frustrating.

It looks like we've traded a known quantity for an unknown one.

Waiting for the...Punchline? 

Our industry is brilliantly efficient at optimising away these bottlenecks. It's the nature of capitalism to squeeze every last nanosecond of productivity out of the margin, after all. To my mind, this is clearly the next one on the list.

For those of you deep in this new world of "Augmented Coding", does this resonate? What are the new, unexpected sources of friction you're finding in your own work?

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