Is the Werewolf Slain?

Focus of this blog post: AI doesn’t solve the “Essence”. It definitely is the ultimate tool for the “Accident”.

No, I’m not talking about Taylor Lautner. I’m talking about software engineering. In the article by Frederick P Brooks Jr. No Silver Bullet, software engineering is called a werewolf because of outward innocent-looking appearance (to non-technical) but often disastrous hidden form.

My dev team consists of four members (CTO, Senior, Mid-level, Junior (me)), and AI has vastly improved our productivity. But maybe the true strength isn’t just the coding speed improvements.

With a small team like this, squeezing out every ounce of productvity has been a major focus for us. We overlook complex internal systems (Portfolio Management, Trade Inserters, Price Retrievers) and we have leveraged AI to accelerate production support. Example: Created a @able bot in teams that will respond to users, create, tasks, investigate bugs, and generate reports for our team of developers. Yes, maybe we lose some of the “muscle” of debugging. But these automations save hours daily. As team we can focus on architecting, projecting, and envisioning essential processes while letting AI do the tasks that simply don’t have the cost-benefit ratio a small team can undertake. AI is definintely the ultimate for the “Accident”. In other words, we can focus on the “Essential”.