691–700 of 1001 posts
Some part of that involves knowing how AI would help, most doesn't.
I am 61, I have been a full time developer since I was about 19. I have lost count of the number of 'next thing to replace developers' many many times. many of them showed promise. Many of them continue to be developed. Frameworks with higher and higher levels of abstraction. I see LLMs as the next higher level of abstraction. Does this mean it will replace me? At the moment the output is so flawed for anything but t…
I have seen this happening since the 70s. My father made a tool to replace programmers. It did not and it disillusioned him greatly. Sold very well though. But this time is different though; I have often said that I thought chatgpt like AI was at least 50 years out still but it's here; it does replace programmers every day. I see many companies inside (I have a troubleshoot company; we get called to fix very urgent s…
Privacy is a fundamental right.
And companies should care about not leaking trade secrets, including code, but the rest as well.
US companies are known to use the cloud to spy on competitors.
Companies should have their own private LLM, not rely on cloud instances with a contract that guarantees "privacy".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have a decade of experience writing web code professionally, in my experience, LLM is a true waste of time regarding web. On the other side, I'm switching to game dev and it became a very useful companion, outputing well known algorithms. It's more like an universal API rather than a junior assistant. Instead of me taking time to understand the algo in the details then implementing, I use GPT4o to expand the Unreal…
> I have a decade of experience writing web code professionally, in my experience, LLM is a true waste of time regarding web. As someone who knows web front end development only to the extent I need it for internal tools, it’s been turning day-long fights into single hour dare I say it pleasurable experiences. I tell it to make a row of widgets and it outputs all the div+css soup (or e.g. material components) that on…
Is there a difference between soup and slop? Do you clean up the "soup" it produces or leave it as is?
I am 61, I have been a full time developer since I was about 19. I have lost count of the number of 'next thing to replace developers' many many times. many of them showed promise. Many of them continue to be developed. Frameworks with higher and higher levels of abstraction. I see LLMs as the next higher level of abstraction. Does this mean it will replace me? At the moment the output is so flawed for anything but t…
I have seen this happening since the 70s. My father made a tool to replace programmers. It did not and it disillusioned him greatly. Sold very well though. But this time is different though; I have often said that I thought chatgpt like AI was at least 50 years out still but it's here; it does replace programmers every day. I see many companies inside (I have a troubleshoot company; we get called to fix very urgent s…
Idk if the cheap price is really cheap price or promotion price, where after that the enshittification and price increase happen, which is a trend for most tech companies.
And agree, llm will weed bad programmers further, though in the future, bad alternatives (like analyst or bad llm users) may emerge
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My personal take is that LLMs and near future evolutions thereof won't quite replace the need for a qualified human engineer understanding the problem and overseeing the design and implementation of software.
However it may dramatically change the way we produce code.
Tools always begat more tools. We cannot build most of the stuff that's around us if we didn't first build other stuff that was built with other stuff. Consider the simple example of a screw or a bolt or gears.
Tools for software development are quite refined and advanced. IDEs, code analysis and refactoring tools etc.
Even the simple text editor has been refined through generations of developers mutually fine tuned their fingers together with the editor technology itself.
Beyond the mechanics of code input we also have tons of little things we collectively refined and learned to use effectively: how to document and consult documentation for libraries, how to properly craft and organize complex code repositories so that code can be evolved and worked on by many people over time.
"AI" tools offer an opportunity to change the way we do those things.
On one hand there is a practical pressure to teach AI tools to just keep using our own existing UX. They will write code in existing programming languages and will be integrated in IDEs that are still designed for humans. The same for other parts of the workflow.
It's possible that over time these systems will evolve other UXs and that the new generation of developers will be more productive using that new UX and greybeards will still cling to their keyboards (I myself probably will).
The biggest threat to your career is not LLMs but it's younger engineers that will adapt to the new tools.
Personally I hope it will take a lot of eng work, especially the menial work. If it could also help management understand their own issues and how to integrate solutions into their software, then it would be great! The core here is, that if engineering is going, then law is going, marketing is going and a lot of other professions are also going. This means that we have structural issues we need to solve then. And in…
> The core here is, that if engineering is going, then law is going, marketing is going and a lot of other professions are also going The difference is reliance costs. We go to a doctor or a lawyer instead of a book because the risk of mistake is too high. But development work can be factored; the guarantees are in the testing and deployment. At the margins maybe you trust a tech lead's time estimates or judgment cal…
Let me put it like this: when LLMs write system scale software that is formally verifiable or completely testable, I promise you that you don't trust your doctor more than you trust the ai.
Already now we see indications that diagnosing is better without human (doctors) intervention.
Fast forward ten years with that development and nobody dares to go to the doctor.
I am 61, I have been a full time developer since I was about 19. I have lost count of the number of 'next thing to replace developers' many many times. many of them showed promise. Many of them continue to be developed. Frameworks with higher and higher levels of abstraction. I see LLMs as the next higher level of abstraction. Does this mean it will replace me? At the moment the output is so flawed for anything but t…
Yes, and if you look back on the history of the tech industry, each time programmers were supposedly on the verge of replacement was an excellent time to start programming.
What really happened: this is used by programmers to improve their workflow
Rather than discuss the current “quality of code produced” it seems more useful to talk about what level of abstraction it’s competent at (line, function, feature), and whether there are any ceilings there. Of course the effective level of abstraction depends on the domain but you get the idea, it can generate good code at some level if promoted sufficiently well.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have seen this happening since the 70s. My father made a tool to replace programmers. It did not and it disillusioned him greatly. Sold very well though. But this time is different though; I have often said that I thought chatgpt like AI was at least 50 years out still but it's here; it does replace programmers every day. I see many companies inside (I have a troubleshoot company; we get called to fix very urgent s…
"Large companies are still thinking about privacy of data etc but all of that will simply not matter in the long run." Privacy is a fundamental right. And companies should care about not leaking trade secrets, including code, but the rest as well. US companies are known to use the cloud to spy on competitors. Companies should have their own private LLM, not rely on cloud instances with a contract that guarantees "pri…