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Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

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Re: Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

#71

Post by supriyo-biswas »

pizzafeelsright wrote: post #65
clktmr wrote: post #26

As 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.

I would argue future engineers should be worried a bit. We no longer need to hire new developers. I was not trained professionally yet I'm writing production code that's passing code reviews in languages I never used. I will create a prompt, validate it compiles, passes tests, have it explain so I understand it was written as expected and write documentation about the code, write the PR, and I am seen as a competent…

To be fair, Leetcode was never a good indicator of developer skills, though primarily because of the time pressure and the restrictive format that dings you for asking questions about the problem.

Re: Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

#72

Post by zeroonetwothree »

clktmr wrote: post #26

As 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.

I still think it’s much more an “if” than a “when”. (Of course I am perhaps more strict with my definition)

Re: Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

#73

Post by zeroonetwothree »

adrianN wrote: post #47
clktmr wrote: post #26

As 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.

Just like when IDEs made programmers more effective so that fewer were needed. Oh wait, the opposite happened.

Re: Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

#74

Post by throwaway_08932 »

spacebuffer wrote: post #35
squigz wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think "shiny new thing" posts getting more upvotes indicate anything about the hacker population.

I think he's refering to posts like this[0] rather than the shiny new tool people usually get excited about. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30803589

Correct.

Re: Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

#75

Post by zeroonetwothree »

fullstackchris wrote: post #59
clktmr wrote: post #26

As 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.

and does even AGI change the bigger picture? we have 26.3 million AGIs currently working in this space [1]. I've never seen a single one take all the work of the others away... [1] https://www.griddynamics.com/blog/number-software-developers... .

What do you think the “A” stands for?

Re: Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

#76

Post by zeroonetwothree »

pookha wrote: post #64

Software Developers (humans) are the horses, the models are the mechanical cars, and the analysts and business experts are the drivers. Software's only job is to empower the end user, and that's exactly what these models are doing. We're going to see a massive paradigm shift in how software technology is built in the next decade.

More like the developers are the drivers, the dev environment is the horse, and the analysts and business folks are the passengers. And how they love to backseat drive…

Re: Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

#77

Post by Vinnl »

Toutouxc wrote: post #32
clktmr wrote: post #26

As 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.

This has been my cope mantra so far. I don't mind if my job changes a lot (and ideally loses the part I dislike the most — writing the actual code), and if I find myself in a position where my entire skillset doesn't matter at all, then well a LOT of people are in trouble.

The worst future is where there still are plenty of jobs, but all of them consist of talking to an AI and hoping you use the right words that gets them to do what you need it to.

Re: Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

#78

Post by Tainnor »

marcosdumay wrote: post #51
adrianN wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the proof make it past the validation it’s a valid proof and makes sense by definition.

It means your proof proves something . Whether it's something you care about, or even something that should be true at all is out of scope.

It's almost always easier to understand theorems than proofs. People could be writing down properties of their programs and the AI could generate a proof or produce a counterexample. It is not necessary to understand the proof in order to know that it is correct.

At least in principle. Practically, any system as least as powerful as first-order logic is undecidable, so there can never be any computer program that would be able to do this perfectly. It might be that some day, an AI could be just as good as a trained mathematician, but so far, it doesn't look like it.

Re: Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

#79

Post by visarga »

pizzafeelsright wrote: post #65
clktmr wrote: post #26

As 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.

I would argue future engineers should be worried a bit. We no longer need to hire new developers. I was not trained professionally yet I'm writing production code that's passing code reviews in languages I never used. I will create a prompt, validate it compiles, passes tests, have it explain so I understand it was written as expected and write documentation about the code, write the PR, and I am seen as a competent…

Yeah, it sounds to me your teammates are going to pick up the tab at the end, when subtle errors will be 10x harder to repair, or you are working on toy projects where correctness doesn't really matter.

Re: Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

#80

Post by estebank »

visarga wrote: post #68
empath-nirvana wrote: post #48

I 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 se…

> 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. I agree, but "1" must include all tasks where a mistake could lead to liabilities for the company, which is probably most tasks. LLMs can't be held responsible for their fuckups, they can't be punished, they have no body. It's like the genie from the bottle, it will grant your th…

"A COMPUTER CAN NEVER BE HELD ACCOUNTABLE THEREFORE A COMPUTER MUST NEVER MAKE A MANAGEMENT DECISION" — IBM slide from 1979.
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