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Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

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Re: Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

#181

Post by csomar »

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.

Most software is already as bad as this, though. And managers won't care (maybe even shouldn't?) if the execution fairly delivers.

Think of this as Facebook page vs. WordPress website vs. A full custom website. The best option is to have a full custom website. Next, is a cheaper option from someone who can put a few lines together. The worst option is a Facebook page that you can create yourself.

But the Facebook page also does the job. And for some businesses, it's fairly enough.

Re: Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

#182

Post by pphysch »

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…

> passes tests

Okay, so you are just kicking the can down the road to the test engineers. Now your org needs to spend more resources on test engineering to really make sure the AI code doesn't fuzz your system to death.

If you squint, using a language compiler is analogous to writing tests for generated code. You are really writing a spec and having something automatically generate the actual code that implements the spec.

Re: Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

#183

Post by l3mure »

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…

Post some example PRs.

Re: Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

#184

Post by ozten »

aggieNick02 wrote: post #103

The "Framework: Outsourced Software Development" image confuses me. What do the green/yellow/lavender circles represent in each 6x6 grid of circles?

This is how I interpreted it:

Green - non engineers employed by the "the company"

Yellow - In house engineers, or engineers employed by the the company

Lavender - Vendor engineering external to the company

Re: Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

#185

Post by karmakaze »

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".

Funny you should phrase it this way. I know you mean prompts as description, but I would currently prefer declaring/describing what I want in a higher-level functional way rather than doing all the stateful nitty-gritty iterations to get it done. Some folks want to do manual memory management, or even work with a borrow checker, I'm good for most purposes with gc.

The question is always what's your 'description' language and what's your 'painting' language? I see the same in music: DJ's mix and apply effects to pre-recorded tracks, others resample on-the fly, while some produce new music from samples, and others form a collage from generated soundscapes, etc. It's all shades of gray.

Re: Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

#186

Post by ks2048 »

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.

One of the ironies of current generative AIs and LLMs - they are creative, but need human supervision to watch for simple logical errors. Just the reverse of conventional way of looking at humans vs machines.

Re: Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

#187

Post by jarsin »

Gone are the days of hearing our jobs were going to be outsourced to India. Now AI is going to do our jobs.

I know quite a few people in my circle who never got into tech because they believed all this outsourcing crap. After 20 years I can say without a doubt I am much better off than any of them.

How many now will never get into tech due to AI?

Re: Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

#188

Post by nopinsight »

rented_mule wrote: post #153
falcor84 wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 would…

I'm not sure that there is an endpoint, only a continuation of the transitions we've always been making. What we've seen as we transitioned to higher and higher level languages (e.g., machine code → macro assembly → C → Java → Python) on unimaginably more powerful machines (and clusters of machines) is that we took on more complex applications and got much more work done faster. The complexity we manage shifts from t…

> But also more of our time thinking about higher level, hard, technical problems (e.g., how do we use math to build a system that dynamically optimizes itself for whatever metric we care about?).

It’s likely that a near-future AI system can suggest suitable math and implement it in an algorithm for the problem the user wants solved. An expert who understands it might be able to critique and ask for a better solution, but many users could be satisfied with it.

Professionals who can deliver added value are those who understand the user better than the user themselves.

Re: Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

#189

Post by marcosdumay »

agentultra wrote: post #56
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.

This is what I meant, thanks for clarifying. I might also add that, “they,” on the first line are software developers. Most are not trained to read proofs. Few enough can write a good test let alone understand when a test is insufficient evidence of correctness. I had to learn on my own. Even if LLMs could start dropping proofs with their PRs would they be useful to people if they couldn’t understand them or what the…

Yeah, people fixated on the meaning of "makes no sense" to evade accepting that the proofs LLMs output are not useful at all.

On a similar fashion, almost all LLM created tests have negative value. They are just easier to verify than proofs, but even the bias into creating more tests (taken from the LLM fire hose) is already harmful.

I am almost confident enough to make a similarly wide claim about code. But I'm still collecting more data.

Re: Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

#190

Post by samatman »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #171
samatman wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fo…

> you need to refine what you choose to use them for

This is making assumptions about the work I do which don't happen to be valid.

For example:

> libraries that [...] have star counts in the high thousands at least

Play little to no role in my work, and

> I'll let it convert css/style objects/etc into tailwind

Is something I simply don't have a use for.

Clearly your mileage varies, and that's fine. What I've found is that for the sort of task I farm out to the chatbots, the time spent explaining myself clearly, showing it counterexamples when it gets things wrong, and otherwise verifying that the code is fit to purpose, is right around the time I would spend on the task to begin with.

But it's less effort, which is good. I find that at least as valuable if not more so.

> producing documentation

Yikes. Not looking forward to that in the future.

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