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Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

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Re: Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

#131

Post by falcor84 »

sanity wrote: post #119
warbled_tongue wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

I remember back in the 80s I had friends who enjoyed coding in assembly and felt that using higher-level languages was "cheating" - isn't this just a continuation of that?

Yeah, that's a good way of looking at it. We gradually remove technical constraints and move to a higher level of abstraction, much closer to the level of the user and the business rather than the individual machine. But what's the endpoint of this? There will probably always be a need for expert-level troubleshooters and optimizers who understand all the layers, but for the rest of us, I'm wondering if the job wouldn't generally become more product management than engineering.

Re: Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

#132

Post by wongarsu »

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…

> I agree, but "1" must include all tasks where a mistake could lead to liabilities for the company, which is probably most tasks

If you hire a junior programmer and they make a mistake, they aren't held liable either. Sure, you can fire them, but unless there's malice or gross negligence the liability buck stops at the company. The same can be said about the wealth of software currently involved in producing software and making decisions. The difficulty of suing Microsoft or the llvm project over compiler bugs hasn't stopped anyone from using their compilers.

I don't see how LLMs are meaningful different from a company assuming liability for employees they hire or software they run. Even if they were AGI it wouldn't meaningfully change anything. You make a decision whether the benefits outweigh the risks, and adjust that calculation as you get more data on both benefits and risks. Right now companies are hesitant because the risks are both large and uncertain, but as we get better at understanding and mitigating them LLMs will be used more.

Re: Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

#133

Post by samatman »

imbnwa wrote: post #123
jayd16 wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand your feelings but I do also wonder if its not similar to complaining about compilers or garbage collection. I'm sure there are people that love fiddling with assembly and memory management by hand. I assume there will be plenty of interesting/novel problems no matter the tooling because, fundamentally, software is about solving such problems.

Software engineering as an occupation grew because of static analysis and GCs (literally why the labor market is the size that it is as we speak); the opposite appears to be the outcome of AI advances.

I'll take the other side of that bet.

It's reasonable to expect that sometime relatively soon, AI will be a clear-cut aid to developer productivity. At the moment, I consider it a wash. Chatbots don't clearly save me time, but they clearly save me effort, which is a more important resource to conserve.

Software is still heavily rate-limited by how much of it developers can write. Making it possible for them to write more will result in more software, rather than fewer developers. I've seen nothing from AI, either in production or on the horizon, that suggests that it will meaningfully lower the barrier to entry for practicing the profession, let alone enable non-developers to do the work developers do. It will make it easier for the inexperienced to do tasks which need a bit of scripting, which is good.

Re: Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

#134

Post by Oioioioiio »

vouaobrasil wrote: post #10

I'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…

My dream is to get a farm and start doing a lot of things which already exist and explore them by myself.

Doing pottery, art, music etc.

I do call myself a hacker and what i do for a living is very aligned with one of my biggest hobbies "computer" but that doesn't mean shit to me tbh.

I will leverage AI to write the things i wanna write but know that i don't have the time for doing those 'bigger' projects.

Btw. very few people actually write good software. For most its a job. I'm really good in what i do because there are not that many of us out there in a normal company.

Re: Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

#135

Post by falcor84 »

Jensson wrote: post #111
bluefirebrand wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah, you just throw it out and have the AI generate an all new one with different problems!

I really look forward to all programs now having new strange bugs every release. They already do, but I expect AI to do that more at first.

I don't know if AIs will ever get really good at QA in general, but I do think that AIs can get quite good quickly at regression testing.

Re: Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

#136

Post by falcor84 »

nyrikki wrote: post #117
ekidd wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for reading the diffs and reporting on them. And to be fair, lots of humans are already at least this bad at writing code. And lots of companies are happy with garbage code so long as it addresses an immediate business requirement. So Devin wouldn't have to advance much to be competitive in certain simple situations where people don't care about anything that happens more than 2 quarters into the future. I…

Architectural erosion is an ongoing problem for humans, but they don't produce tightly coupled low cohesion code by default at the SWE level the majority of the time. With this quality of changes it won't be long until violations stack up to where further changes will be beyond any algorithms ability to unravel. While lots of companies do only look out in the short term, human programers are incentivized to protect t…

Can't we just RLHF code reviews?

Re: Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

#137

Post by samatman »

vouaobrasil wrote: post #10

I'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…

> AI seems antithetical to the hacker ethic

I disagree, chatbots are arguably best for hacks: dodgy kludged-up software that works if you don't sneeze on it, but accomplishes whatever random thing I wanted to get done. They're a great tool for hackers.

A bunch of clueless managers are going to fall for the hype and try and lean on the jank machine to solve problems which aren't suitable to a quick hack, and will live to regret it. Ok, who am I kidding, most of them are going to fail up. But a bunch of still-employed hackers will curse their name, while cashing the fat paycheck they're earning for cleaning up the mess.

Re: Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

#138

Post by broast »

ActionHank wrote: post #93
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.

Certainly many of us here already have a good amount of experience debugging giant legacy spaghetti code-bases written by people you can't talk to, or people who can't debug their own code. That job may not change much.

Re: Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

#139

Post by Oioioioiio »

IggleSniggle wrote: post #17
vouaobrasil wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope, there is a fundamental difference that people who point out this analogy ALWAYS fail to acknowledge: AI is a mechanism to replace people at work that is largely considered creative. Yes, AI may not be truly creative, but it does replace people doing jobs, and those people feel they are doing something creative. The typewriter, the printing press, the wheel, never did anything of the sort. And, you're also ignor…

I absolutely disagree regarding handwriting, and maybe also on maintaining your own typewriter. The task of producing the written document, and I don't just mean the thoughts conveyed, but each stroke of each letter , was a creative act that many enjoyed. Increasingly, there is only a very small subset of enthusiasts that are "serious" about writing by hand. Most "normal" people don't see the value in it, because if…

The first iPhone came out 2007. 17 years and less what it took a modern and connected society to just solve mobile communication.

This includes development of displays, chips, production, software (ios, android), apps etc.

AI is building upon this speed and only has software and specialized hardware and the AI we are currently building is already optimizing itself (copilot etc.).

And the output is not something 'new' which changes a few things like navigation, post service, banking but basically/potentially everything we do (including the physical world with robots).

If this is any indication, its very realistic to assume that the next 5-15 years will be very very interesting.

Re: Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

#140

Post by Oioioioiio »

dt3ft wrote: post #33
alatriste wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember when people used to say similar things about using ASM, and then about the craft of writing things in C instead of managed languages like Java. At the end of the day most people will only care about how the tool is solving the problem and how cheaply. A cheap, slow, dirty solution today tends to win over a expensive, quick, elegant one next year. Now there are still some people writing ASM, and a lot of th…

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…

Have you seen devin the ai developer demo?

Business already doesn't know what security is, they will jump head first into everything which allows them to get rid of those weird developer dudes which they have to cater to and give a lot of money.

I personally would also assume that there might be a new programming language AI will invent. Something faster, more optimized for AI.

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