Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

sheshbabu.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 434 posts

Re: Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

#91

Post by visarga »

estebank wrote: post #80
visarga wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

hahaha funny

Let me tell you a story - a company was using AI for invoice processing, and it misread a comma for a dot, so they sent a payment 1000x larger than expected, all automated of course because they were very modern. The result? they went bankrupt. "Bankrupted by AI error" might become a thing

Re: Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

#92

Post by nyrikki »

visarga wrote: post #79
pizzafeelsright wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

To add to this.

I was going through devin's 'pass' diffs from SWE bench.

Every one I ended up tracing to actual issues caused changes that would reduce maintainablity or introduced potential side effects.

I think it may be useful as a suggestion in a red-green-refactor model, but will end up producing hard to maintain and modify code.

Note this one here that introduced circular dependencies, changed a function that only accepted points to one that appears to accept any geometric object but only added lines.

Domain knowledge and writing maintainable code is beyond generative transformers.

https://github.com/CognitionAI/devin-swebench-results/blob/m...

You simply can't get past what Gödel and Rice proved with current technology.

It is like when visual languages were supposed to replace programmers. Code isn't really the issue, the details are.

Re: Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

#93

Post by ActionHank »

JohnFen wrote: post #83

> In summary, I believe there would still be a market for Software Developers in the foreseeable future, though the nature of work will change This is precisely what I dread. When it comes to software development specifically, the parts that the AI cheerleaders are excited about AI doing are exactly the parts of the job that I find appealing. If I wanted to be a glorified systems integrator, I would have been doing t…

Also if there are fewer humans involved in the code production there is a lot of room for producing code that "works", but is not cohesive or maintainable. Invariably there will be a point at which something is broken and someone will need to wade through the mess to find why it's broken and try to fix it.

Re: Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

#94

Post by dartos »

couchand wrote: post #16
dartos wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean it’s definitely a weaker argument than 2 years ago. AI may very well plateau, but it might not.

> I mean it’s definitely a weaker argument than 2 years ago. Is it? I see no evidence that machines are any closer to "thinking creatively" than they ever have been. We certainly have been developing our capacity for computation to a great extent, but it's not at all evident that statistical methods and creativity are the same thing.

I can ask my computer to write a backstory for my dnd character, give it a few details, and it makes one.

Sometimes it adds an extra detail or two even!

A few years ago that was almost unthinkable. The best we had was arithmetic over abstract language concepts (KING - MAN = QUEEN)

We don’t have a solid definition of “creativity” so the goalpost can move around a lot, but the idea that a machine can not create new prose, for example, is just not true anymore.

That’s not the same as creativity, sure, but it definitely weakens the “computers can’t be creative” argument.

Re: Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

#95

Post by agentultra »

Tainnor wrote: post #78
marcosdumay wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wou…

> 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.

One of the on-going arguments in automated theorem proving has been this central question: would anyone understand or want to read a proof written by a machine?

A big part of why we write them and enjoy them is elegance, a rather subjective quality appreciated by people.

In computer science we don't tend to care so much for this quality; if the checker says the proof is good that's generally about as far as we take it.

But endearing proofs that last? That people want to read? That's much harder to do.

Re: Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

#96

Post by shrimp_emoji »

JohnFen wrote: post #83

> In summary, I believe there would still be a market for Software Developers in the foreseeable future, though the nature of work will change This is precisely what I dread. When it comes to software development specifically, the parts that the AI cheerleaders are excited about AI doing are exactly the parts of the job that I find appealing. If I wanted to be a glorified systems integrator, I would have been doing t…

In the limit, it's all professions. :p Software development tomorrow, $other_profession the day after tomorrow.

But same; if AI starts writing code and my job becomes tweaking pre-written code, I'm planning an exit strategy. :D

Re: Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

#97

Post by warbled_tongue »

JohnFen wrote: post #83

> In summary, I believe there would still be a market for Software Developers in the foreseeable future, though the nature of work will change This is precisely what I dread. When it comes to software development specifically, the parts that the AI cheerleaders are excited about AI doing are exactly the parts of the job that I find appealing. If I wanted to be a glorified systems integrator, I would have been doing t…

This resonates strongly with me. I don't want to describe the painting, I want to paint it. If this is indeed where we end up, I don't know that I'll change professions (I'm 30+ years into it), but the joy will be gone. It will truly become "just a job".

Re: Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

#98

Post by ioblomov »

politician wrote: post #84
supriyo-biswas wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Speaking of Leetcode... is anyone selling a service to boost Leetcode scores using AI yet? It seems like that's fairly low hanging fruit at this point.

Based on their demos, HackerRank is doing this as part of their existing products. Which makes sense since prompt engineering will soon become a minimum requirement for devs of any experience level.

Re: Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

#99

Post by pksebben »

JohnFen wrote: post #83

> In summary, I believe there would still be a market for Software Developers in the foreseeable future, though the nature of work will change This is precisely what I dread. When it comes to software development specifically, the parts that the AI cheerleaders are excited about AI doing are exactly the parts of the job that I find appealing. If I wanted to be a glorified systems integrator, I would have been doing t…

At the risk of exposing my pom-poms, it's not the writing of the code or the design of the systems that I find the current batch of AI useful for.

Probably the biggest thing that GPT does for me these days is to replace google (which probably wouldn't be necessary if google hadn't become such hot garbage). As I say this, I'm made aware of the incoming rug-pull when the LLMs start spitting SEO trash in my face as well, but right now they don't which is just the best.

A close second is having a rubber duck that can actually have a cogent thought once in a while. It's a lot easier to talk through a problem when you have something that will never get tired of listening - try starting with a prompt like "I don't want advice or recommendations, but instead ask me questions to elaborate on things that aren't completely clear". The results (sometimes) can be really, really good.

Re: Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

#100

Post by ToucanLoucan »

JohnFen wrote: post #83

> In summary, I believe there would still be a market for Software Developers in the foreseeable future, though the nature of work will change This is precisely what I dread. When it comes to software development specifically, the parts that the AI cheerleaders are excited about AI doing are exactly the parts of the job that I find appealing. If I wanted to be a glorified systems integrator, I would have been doing t…

Call me a cynic (many have, especially on this topic) but I can't help but think that the majority of what AI will "successfully" replace in terms of craftsmanship is going to be stuff that would've never been produced the "correct" way if you will. It's going to be code created for and to suit the interests of the business major class. Just like AI art isn't really suitable for anything above hobby fun stuff like generating your D&D character's avatar, or product packaging stock photo junk or header images for LinkedIn blog posts. Anything that's actually important is going to still need to be designed, and that goes for creative work like design, and proper code-work for development too, IMO.

Like sure, these AI's can generate code that works. Can they generate replacement code when you need to change how something works? Can they troubleshoot code that isn't doing what it's meant to? And if you can generate the code you want but then need to tweak it after to suit your purpose, is that... really that much faster than just writing the thing in your style, in a way you understand, that you can then change later as required?

I dunno. I've played with these tools and they're neat, and I think they can be good for learning a new language or framework, but once I'm actually ready to build something, I don't see myself starting with AI generation for any substantial part of it.

Post reply on HN