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Great achievement, but what a horrible future we are facing. Instead of progressing towards more powerful programming interfaces with less cause for misinterpretation, we are going to automate the silly process of writing redundant unit tests to check if the behavior that we wanted was encoded properly. Why not skip this nonsense and have the code generated from the behavior in the first place?
If LLM/Agents contribute to software development, how does the role of software engineers evolve? SE should focus on : - System design - Integrations - Project management etc or the job will disappear in 10 years ?
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Yeah. The shocking speed of progress on AI - especially for coding - tells me quite clearly what the future holds for much of software engineering. Despite the human factors (yes, requirements gathering and specification is messy) our profession is intrinsically automatable at the end of the day. Being in denial is pointless.
Those requirements will be specified as tests or in a very high level language that doesn't allow for ambiguous meanings. Which is essentially another programming language just more high level.
Great achievement, but what a horrible future we are facing. Instead of progressing towards more powerful programming interfaces with less cause for misinterpretation, we are going to automate the silly process of writing redundant unit tests to check if the behavior that we wanted was encoded properly. Why not skip this nonsense and have the code generated from the behavior in the first place?
Because test define the behaviour. The hardest part of requirements is describing exactly what you want. Tests are great way of doing that. I think AI software development is going to involve writing tests, which the AI agents then get passing. Or some other requirements language that allows for exactness where English can fall down.
This is kinda the problem that Tesla has for FSD; they are endlessly patching it and it's endlessly finding ways to go wrong.
If LLM/Agents contribute to software development, how does the role of software engineers evolve? SE should focus on : - System design - Integrations - Project management etc or the job will disappear in 10 years ?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because test define the behaviour. The hardest part of requirements is describing exactly what you want. Tests are great way of doing that. I think AI software development is going to involve writing tests, which the AI agents then get passing. Or some other requirements language that allows for exactness where English can fall down.
My experience is that the more complex a loss function that you write for optimisation the lower the likelihood of a "natural" or robust result. So, the software is highly likely to work for all the test cases, and nothing else. This is kinda the problem that Tesla has for FSD; they are endlessly patching it and it's endlessly finding ways to go wrong.
Think property based testing. That way it can't overfit.
As with prose, good human crafted content will always be highly valued and rewarded.
If LLM/Agents contribute to software development, how does the role of software engineers evolve? SE should focus on : - System design - Integrations - Project management etc or the job will disappear in 10 years ?
It would be like steering offshore teams, with the difference the team are now AI agents. Better look for architecture and management jobs, only a few select ones would still be allowed into the magic tower. Naturally after a heavy round of letcode interviews that have nothing to do with writing AI algorithms.