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Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

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Re: Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

#171

Post by CuriouslyC »

samatman wrote: post #133
imbnwa wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If chatbots aren't saving you time you need to refine what you choose to use them for. They're absolutely amazing at refactoring, producing documentation, adding comments, translating structured text files from one format to another, implementing well known algorithms in newer/niche languages where repository versions might not exist, etc. On the other hand, I've mostly stopped asking GPT4 to write quickstart code for libraries that don't have star counts in the high thousands at least, and while I'll let it convert css/style objects/etc into tailwind I it's pretty bad at styling in general, though it is good at suggesting potentially problematic styles when debugging layout.

Re: Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

#172

Post by jackling »

acedTrex wrote: post #109
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…

I have yet to see either copilot or gpt4 generate code that I would come close to accepting in a PR from one of my devs, so I struggle to imagine what kind of domain you are in that the code it generates actually makes it through review.

What's your domain?

Re: Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

#173

Post by sorokod »

threecheese wrote: post #158
sorokod wrote: post #149

The highest level would be like delegating part of your project or the entire project to a developer. These “AI coders” would take in the requirements, write the code, fix errors and deploy the final product to production. About the "write the code" part - what code is that? Machine code, Assembly, JS? Who creates the languages, compilers, interpreters and the plethora of tools required to operate these and deploy to…

This is where I’m stuck. The ecosystem we have today has evolved over >40y in lockstep with new hardware and technology, in a feedback loop of technological development. It is pretty resilient (from an evolutionary perspective). It includes layers of abstraction that hide enough complexity for humans to use it, but an AI doesn’t need this crutch; if we delegate the code writing responsibilities to it then what happen…

In the limit, languages will be designed by AI for AI and the same goes for hardware. This assumes that languages higher then machine code will be needed which is not obvious.

Will this be acheived in a few years or a a few decades or never I can't tell.

Re: Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

#174

Post by Aperocky »

warbled_tongue wrote: post #97
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".

Except that's what low code is today. You'll have to describe it in such detail that you might as well as paint it yourself.

Maybe it will abstract away setting up the paint and brush and the canvas, that part I'm fine with though.

Re: Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

#175

Post by brabel »

JohnFen wrote: post #90
pegasus wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> is it? It is. And I bet most people would agree with GP. Most people (including engineers building these systems) have experienced surprise with some of the outputs of these models. Is there anything better to gauge creativity by than perceived surprise?

> Is there anything better to gauge creativity by than perceived surprise? I think there has to be, since such surprise can be generated through purely random mechanisms, and I don't think anyone would call a purely random mechanism "creative".

If it were purely random it would generate rubbish.

Re: Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

#176

Post by Normalcy294812 »

AlwaysRock wrote: post #114
ActionHank wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is the future imagined by A Fire Upon the Deep and its sequel. While less focused on the code being generated by ai, it features seemingly endless amounts of code and programs that can do almost anything but the difficulty is finding the program that works for you and is safe to use. To some extent... This is already the world we live in. A lot of code is unreadable without a lot of effort or expertise. If all c…

Thanks for the Book Title. It looks like an interesting read.

Re: Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

#177

Post by doktrin »

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…

This doesn’t vibe with my experience at all. We also use LLMs and it’s exceedingly rare that a non-trivial PR/MR gets waved through without comment.

Re: Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

#178

Post by Hoasi »

dartos wrote: post #6
chrisjj wrote: post #2

> the main argument against automating these tasks was that machines can’t think creatively. Now this argument gets weaker by the day. Citation needed.

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

Not really. Large language models' output is creative only insofar as you prompt them to mix data. It allows you to create combinations that nobody has seen before. On its own, an LLM is incapable of producing anything creative. Hallucinating due to a lack of data is the closer it comes to autonomous creativity. Happy accidents are an unreliable creativity source. This type of creativity is amusing but doesn't solve any existing problem today.

Re: Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

#179

Post by robotnikman »

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…

I have accepted using these tools to help when it comes to generating code and improving my output. However when it comes to dealing with more niche areas (in my case retail technology) it falls short.

You still need that domain knowledge of whatever you are writing code for or integrating with, especially is the technology is more niche, or documentation was never made available publicly and scraped by the AI

But when it comes to writing boilerplate code it is great, or when working with very commonly used frameworks (like front end javascript frameworks in my case)

Re: Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

#180

Post by WesolyKubeczek »

Can’t GPT—4 replace a middle manager today already? Why aren’t useless ticket pushers afraid?

“Reformulate this problem statement for a programmer to implement” straight from executive’s mouth and then “given these status updates, tell me if we are there and if anyone is trying to bullshit” is a perfect thing for an LLM.

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