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AutoDev: Automated AI-driven development by Microsoft

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131–140 of 232 posts

Re: AutoDev: Automated AI-driven development by Microsoft

#131

I'm currently looking for a new job in development... should I be looking for an exit instead?

I think you either need to specialize in something quite niche, or work on really hard problems where the main hurdle is problem solving and not coding CRUD apps, or work on legacy systems where the hurdle is understanding twenty years of garbage code, or get closer to product management so you can direct a much more automated programming process

Re: AutoDev: Automated AI-driven development by Microsoft

#132
post #84

Imagine we had this technology 20 years ago and we switched to fully automated web design. I bet all web design would still be deeply nested tables. I doubt that something like React, Vue, Svelte would exist.

As I see it, the issue with using tables for layout is that they made it difficult for humans to maintain and iterate over time, but I don't have a problem with an LLM working at that level. Equivalently, I don't care that the machine code that my system gets compiled into is full of GOTOs if I don't ever need to concern myself with that level.

Think of all the improvements browser got because we wanted to replace tables as positioning tool.

Not to mention the inefficiency of a pure table approach, so much wasted render time and energy.

Re: AutoDev: Automated AI-driven development by Microsoft

#134

I don't think so AI will replace SW jobs. It will definitely change the way engineers work. Software development involves: 1. Understanding the requirement 2. Solving the problem with given constraints (and thereby innovate) 3. Talking to stakeholders 4. Code (& unit tests) 5. Review #4 6. Troubleshoot in testing 7. Troubleshoot in prod, both perf & subtle issues (this is hard) 8. Take the input from #6 & #7 and use…

[deleted]

Re: AutoDev: Automated AI-driven development by Microsoft

#136
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 think we’re seeing the beginning upward trend of an exponential curve for humanoid robotics too, which will likely take 90% of construction jobs because humans are especially poorly equipped for difficult manual labor on a daily basis.

Re: AutoDev: Automated AI-driven development by Microsoft

#137

I'm currently looking for a new job in development... should I be looking for an exit instead?

IMO software engineering has a solid 5-10 years left.

Afterwards, you better be in the top 10% of engineers, or be doing something novel like research.

Re: AutoDev: Automated AI-driven development by Microsoft

#138

I don't think so AI will replace SW jobs. It will definitely change the way engineers work. Software development involves: 1. Understanding the requirement 2. Solving the problem with given constraints (and thereby innovate) 3. Talking to stakeholders 4. Code (& unit tests) 5. Review #4 6. Troubleshoot in testing 7. Troubleshoot in prod, both perf & subtle issues (this is hard) 8. Take the input from #6 & #7 and use…

You can't look at them independently. Code generation is not it's own task separate from requirements gathering, Q&A with stakeholders, testing, etc... As we get agents that bring those other factors into the loop of code generation, I feel like code generation itself will get much better. They all are related.

Re: AutoDev: Automated AI-driven development by Microsoft

#139
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 problem is software development is 95% stuff that has been done a million times before. If you disagree you’re probably not exposed to enough of the industry to see this.

Re: AutoDev: Automated AI-driven development by Microsoft

#140

I don't think so AI will replace SW jobs. It will definitely change the way engineers work. Software development involves: 1. Understanding the requirement 2. Solving the problem with given constraints (and thereby innovate) 3. Talking to stakeholders 4. Code (& unit tests) 5. Review #4 6. Troubleshoot in testing 7. Troubleshoot in prod, both perf & subtle issues (this is hard) 8. Take the input from #6 & #7 and use…

AI _will_ replace software jobs. It's undeniable. The only thing to argue about is when.

I think most people would agree that AI will probably advance enough in the next 100 years to make engineers obsolete. Some people might think 100 years is actually 5/10/20/50, but it's going to happen unless AI is heavily regulated.

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