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AutoDev: Automated AI-driven development by Microsoft

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Re: AutoDev: Automated AI-driven development by Microsoft

#81

Post by anoy8888 »

ThalesX wrote: post #68

I'm a software and product guy; what I don't get, is how we're going to replace us lowly engineers and not a substantial percentage of a company's Human stack. Close to engineering, what about the SCRUM masters? The testers. What about the product owners? What about devops? Further from us, what about the people signing up on our vacation? Or the ones signing up on our daily budgets when traveling, or hell, even the…

Agree. We developers try to create AI to replace ourselves first while making the bosses rich

Re: AutoDev: Automated AI-driven development by Microsoft

#82

Post by Smaug123 »

mkleczek wrote: post #61
davedx wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I am quite confident my job is not in danger. Sure - scaffolding and boilerplate can be automated using ML - but problem solving - not at all. The reason is simple - to find a solution is to create a program that has a specific set of properties. This - by Rice's Theorem - is not possible to realise using a Turing Machine. So as long as the solution search space is small (ie. we are talking about very similar program…

The world contains a great many arguments invoking Rice (or equivalently the halting problem) to "prove" non-mathematical statements, and they are almost all specious. a) the mere fact that there is no fully general procedure to do some particular task doesn't imply some human can do that task any better than the best procedure we can find, and b) even if you believe there's something noncomputable about the human mind, it still allows the existence of a procedure that will solve all instances of that task which will actually arise in reality.

It's a purely empirical question about the extent to which Church-Turing holds of the real world.

Re: AutoDev: Automated AI-driven development by Microsoft

#83

Post by ardaoweo »

osigurdson wrote: post #80
margorczynski wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But how many experts do you need? Most dev jobs are mostly repetitive plumbing and those might disappear very fast because 1 dev + LLM >= 5 devs without. So what we'll see is an increase in company margins and an elimination of a large swathe of the middle class. The alternative theory is that if everyone can now quickly create systems multiple companies and competing products will pop off which will drive down the m…

>> Most dev jobs are mostly repetitive plumbing Those jobs should go away. Basically, the elimination of anything boring is ultimately a net good for humanity.

Only if you provide an alternative way for the newly unemployed to earn a living. Otherwise you just get crime, hunger and eventually war.

Re: AutoDev: Automated AI-driven development by Microsoft

#85

Post by grbsh »

bigyikes wrote: post #56
bregma wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone will still need to review the reams and reams of bullshit code generated by these Markov chains. It'll be like all your code gets written by first-term co-op students who have discovered alcohol for the first time and think it's pretty neat, but you're still responsible for the final output and don't get to do any of the fun and interesting stuff. Just constant, mind-numbing code reviews of something that mig…

You described v1. Just wait for v2. You can’t possibly think these things will remain clowns forever. These things aren’t “Markov chains” - the architecture is significantly more scalable, which is exactly why this time is different.

A Markov Chain is a mathematical structure, not a machine learning architecture. If there are a finite number of states, and a function to determine the probability to transition to any given state from any other state, then it’s a Markov chain.

Transformers with finite block size have a finite number of states, so they are Markov chains.

Re: AutoDev: Automated AI-driven development by Microsoft

#86

Post by polycaster »

osigurdson wrote: post #80
margorczynski wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But how many experts do you need? Most dev jobs are mostly repetitive plumbing and those might disappear very fast because 1 dev + LLM >= 5 devs without. So what we'll see is an increase in company margins and an elimination of a large swathe of the middle class. The alternative theory is that if everyone can now quickly create systems multiple companies and competing products will pop off which will drive down the m…

>> Most dev jobs are mostly repetitive plumbing Those jobs should go away. Basically, the elimination of anything boring is ultimately a net good for humanity.

Hey over there. I’m very much grateful for the privilege of this boring job, which is not 100% of my job, but a huge part of it. Grateful because it allows me to feed a family of four. I’m sure in your Musk’esque utopia without boring work is place enough for all mankind. But please, don’t forget to draft a bridge that will bring us all over there and not just a bunch of filthy rich Silicon Valley assholes. Because that wouldn’t be a utopia. Thank you.

Re: AutoDev: Automated AI-driven development by Microsoft

#87

Post by visarga »

ThalesX wrote: post #68

I'm a software and product guy; what I don't get, is how we're going to replace us lowly engineers and not a substantial percentage of a company's Human stack. Close to engineering, what about the SCRUM masters? The testers. What about the product owners? What about devops? Further from us, what about the people signing up on our vacation? Or the ones signing up on our daily budgets when traveling, or hell, even the…

AI doesn't seem like it's able to automate software development yet. It's not autonomous enough. The examples shown in the paper are toys. It might become more capable after training LLMs against code execution, to iterate based on feedback, because that way of generating training data is scalable. But strangely I haven't seen much progress yet.

Another domain where I expect to see lots of progress but nothing shows is training from chat logs. I estimate "OpenAI" is making 1T tokens per month from 100M users. That's some serious corpus of text, on-policy data, alternating LLM outputs and human feedbacks, we should see iterative improvements. Why are there no papers? weird

Re: AutoDev: Automated AI-driven development by Microsoft

#88

Post by yashasolutions »

ThalesX wrote: post #68

I'm a software and product guy; what I don't get, is how we're going to replace us lowly engineers and not a substantial percentage of a company's Human stack. Close to engineering, what about the SCRUM masters? The testers. What about the product owners? What about devops? Further from us, what about the people signing up on our vacation? Or the ones signing up on our daily budgets when traveling, or hell, even the…

Well, I am not sure why this is confusing. Engineers do things the rest of the company don't understand and everyone depends on.

Removing dependencies and lack of clarity are two principles you would apply to your own code base. The Human stack, like you called it, is doing the same with the company and staff : remove dependencies and increase clarity.

I am not saying this is the correct approach, but this is the approach.

At the same time, we can understand that real product building and architecture require more than codegen, with or without AI.

Generally, I look at the AI recent progresses similarly to what spreadsheets did to accounting a long time ago. It removed a lot of the dummy work and make everything more efficient. But we still need accountant and they are not wasting their day doing basic math. Of course the one who knew only how to make fast math but not accounting or business logic didn't make the cut on the long run, but I don't think anyone would want to come back to accounting like it was 60 years ago.

Re: AutoDev: Automated AI-driven development by Microsoft

#89

Post by hackerlight »

visarga wrote: post #87
ThalesX wrote: post #68

I'm a software and product guy; what I don't get, is how we're going to replace us lowly engineers and not a substantial percentage of a company's Human stack. Close to engineering, what about the SCRUM masters? The testers. What about the product owners? What about devops? Further from us, what about the people signing up on our vacation? Or the ones signing up on our daily budgets when traveling, or hell, even the…

AI doesn't seem like it's able to automate software development yet. It's not autonomous enough. The examples shown in the paper are toys. It might become more capable after training LLMs against code execution, to iterate based on feedback, because that way of generating training data is scalable. But strangely I haven't seen much progress yet. Another domain where I expect to see lots of progress but nothing shows…

Forget the question of full automation. Think about the percentage increase in productivity, meaning companies can fire lots of people without impacting output. Obviously companies can also choose to keep the same number of people and simply produce more. But not all will.

Re: AutoDev: Automated AI-driven development by Microsoft

#90

Post by MetaWhirledPeas »

ThalesX wrote: post #68

I'm a software and product guy; what I don't get, is how we're going to replace us lowly engineers and not a substantial percentage of a company's Human stack. Close to engineering, what about the SCRUM masters? The testers. What about the product owners? What about devops? Further from us, what about the people signing up on our vacation? Or the ones signing up on our daily budgets when traveling, or hell, even the…

I feel like no matter how productive AI becomes, it will always be more productive when paired with humans. Since all companies will have AI, and since they will continue to play the same game as before--sell a good or service that provides a better value than the competition--that means that humans will still be the differentiator.
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