Folks see it wrong. Is not about human vs machine software development. Is about allocating the brightest humans to the most productive activities.
Making sure those productive minds sell ads rather than do science. Value creation!
Thoughts on the Future of Software Development
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Re: Thoughts on the Future of Software Development
#42It's a good overview, but I think there's one important aspect that's not discussed.
We're looking at AI competing with the jobs that programmers do today, but it's likely that these new AI tools will change software itself.
I mean, why have a complicated UI with design/validation/etc when you can just tell your phone you want a plane ticket to Paris tomorrow ? I'm just going to guesstimate that at least half of the apps we use today can be done without a UI or with a very different type of UI+natural language.
Add AI agents that are fine tuned on all your personal data in real time (eg. photos you take, messages you send, etc) which will end up knowing you better than your mom. In a company setting, the AI will know all your JIRA tickets and Slack/Teams conversations, e-mails and so on.
On the backend, instead of API endpoints, you'll have just one - where the AI asks you for data piece by piece, while the client AI provides it. No need to program this, the AIs can just figure it out by themselves.
Definitely interesting times, but change is coming fast.
Re: Thoughts on the Future of Software Development
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
Writing code by typing on a keyboard will be just a hobby? Sure, and who is supposed to understand the code written by AI when we retire? Since writing code by typing on a keyboard will apparently cease to exist, who will write prompts for an AI and put the code together? Person: Hey AI, build me a website that does a, b and c. AI: Here you go. Person: Looks like magic to me, what do I do with all this text? AI: Push…
> Sure, and who is supposed to understand the code written by AI when we retire? Why someone would need to? Do the product/business people who order creating something understand how it is done and what is Git, a webserver etc.? It is based on trust and if you can show the AI system can consistently achieve at least humanlike quality and speed on almost any development task then there is no need to have a technical p…
So there could never be a new provider or a new protocol because AI wouldn't be able to use them or create them.
You can just make websites on pre-approved list.
Re: Thoughts on the Future of Software Development
#44Folks see it wrong. Is not about human vs machine software development. Is about allocating the brightest humans to the most productive activities.
Making sure those productive minds sell ads rather than do science. Value creation!
Yes. The distribution of information is indeed a complex problem, as graph theory shows us.
Regarding science is about one standard deviation further than software development in complexity. It's not necessarily a trade off. On the contrary, software applies scientific breakthroughs.
Re: Thoughts on the Future of Software Development
#45I've been using computers since I was about 12...long time ago. What I've come to the conclusion is this: the best programs and the best tools are the ones that are lovingly (and perhaps with a bit of hate too) crafted by their developers. The best software ecosystems are the ones that are developed slowly and with care. AI coding seems all wrong compared to that world. In fact, the only reason why there is a push fo…
On the one hand, I agree with you. On the other hand, you could make similar arguments for the typewriter, the printing press, or the wheel.
Those are tools humans use to created output directly to speed up a process. The equivalent argument for AI would be if the typewriter wrote you a novel based on what you asked it to write, and then everyone else's typewriter might create the same/similar novel if it's averaging all of the same human data input. This leads to a cultural inbreeding of sorts since the data that went into it was curated to begin with.
The real defining thing to remember is that humans don't need AI, but AI needs human data.
Re: Thoughts on the Future of Software Development
#46Folks see it wrong. Is not about human vs machine software development. Is about allocating the brightest humans to the most productive activities.
Keep in mind there are many more humans that aren't as bright. If there are fewer and fewer ways for them to contribute then they'll find other ways to get what they need.
And as long as robots are where they are. There a lot of jobs in hospitality, and healthcare available. In average, life quality will improve.
Re: Thoughts on the Future of Software Development
#47As long as there is no AGI, no software engineer needs to be worried about their job. And when there is, obviously everything in every field will change and this discussion will soon be futile.
You don’t have to completely replace people with machines to destroy jobs. It suffices if you make people more effective so that fewer employees are needed.
Re: Thoughts on the Future of Software Development
#48I don't really think that thinking of LLMs and related technologies as "Artificial Humans" is the right way to think about how they're going to be integrated into workflows. What is going to happen is that people are going to be adopt these tools to solve particular tasks that are annoying or tedious for developers to do, in a way similar to the way tools like Ansible and Chef replaced the task of logging into ssh servers manually to install stuff, and aws replaced 'sending a guy out to the data center to setup a server' for many companies.
And it's going to be done piecemeal, not all-at-once. Someone will figure out a way to get an AI to do _one_ thing faster and cheaper than a human and sell _that_. Maybe it's automatic test generation, maybe it's automatically remediating alerts, maybe it's code reviews. The scope of work of what a software developer does will be reduced until it's reduced to two categories:
1) Those tasks that it is still currently only possible for a human to do. 2) Those tasks which are easier and cheaper for a human to do.
You don't even really need to think about LLMs as AIs or conscious or whether they pass the turing test or not, it's just like every other form of automation we've already developed. There are vast swathes of work that software developers and IT people did a few decades ago that almost nobody does any more because of various forms of automation. None of that has reduced the overall amount of jobs for software developers because there isn't a limited amount of software development to do. If you make software development less expensive and easier than people will apply it to more tasks, and software developers will become _more_ valuable and not _less_.
Re: Thoughts on the Future of Software Development
#49", I believe there would still be an underlying formal definition of the business logic generated in the backend" Not just business logic. Technical one too, such as "proove that this critial code can never run into an infinite loop" AI could very well be the revolution needed to bring theorem proover and other formal proof based languages ( coq, idriss, etc) to the mainstream mass of developers.
Only if they can understand the proofs first. However, LLMs aren't capable of writing proofs. They can only regurgitate text that looks like a proof by training on proofs already written. There's no reasoning behind what they produce. So why waste the time of a human to review it? If the provers' kernel and automation make the proof pass but it makes no sense, what use is it? People write proofs to make arguments to…
If the proof make it past the validation it’s a valid proof and makes sense by definition.
Re: Thoughts on the Future of Software Development
#50For people worried about jobs. The last diagram showing the big increase in overall market size is the big 'leap in faith' about the future.