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Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

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Re: Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

#211

Post by tomjakubowski »

pksebben wrote: post #99
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…

For me the principal benefit of ChatGPT is it helps me to maintain focus on a problem I'm solving, while I wait for a slow build or test suite or what ever. I can bullshit about it without annoying my coworkers with Slack messages. And sometimes I'll find the joy reveling in the chatbot's weird errors and hallucinations.

I suppose my lunch is about to be eaten by all these people who will use it to automate the software engineer job away. So it goes

Re: Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

#212

Post by uticus »

> Apart from what the AI model is capable of, we should ask think in terms of how accurate the solutions are. Initially these models were prone to hallucinations or you need to prompt them in specific ways to get what you want.

Today's prompts are yesterday's intermediate languages & toolkits. Today's hallucinations are yesterday's compiler bugs.

Re: Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

#213

Post by kaba0 »

vczf wrote: post #170
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…

The endpoint is that being a programmer becomes as obsolete as being a human "calculator" for a career. Millions, perhaps billions of times more lines of code will be written, and automated programming will be taken for granted as just how computers work. Painstakingly writing static source code will be seen the same way as we see doing hundreds of pages of tedious calculations using paper, pencil, and a slide rule.…

> The endpoint is that being a programmer becomes as obsolete as being a human "calculator" for a career.

Yeah, the same time the singularity happens, and then your smallest problem will be eons bigger than your job.

But LLMs can’t solve a sudoku, so I wouldn’t be too afraid.

Re: Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

#214

Post by Nevermark »

I think a lot of issues with language model coding come down to three issues.

The first is the models themselves:

1. A lack of longer context, i.e. white boarding or other means of breaking down problems into components, being able to focus context in and out, etc. This is a direction models are going to go.

Just like us, they are going to benefit from organizational tools.

The other two are just the need for normal feedback, like we developers get:

2. They need a code, run, evaluate, improve cycle. With a hard feedback cycle today's models do much better.

They quickly respond to iterative manual feedback. Which is just an inefficient form of direct feedback.

3. A lack of multiple perspectives. Groups of models competing and critiquing each other on each task should improve results for the more tricky problems.

--

I personally think it is astounding that models generate somewhat reasonable, somewhat buggy code on their first pass.

Just like I do!

I don't know any coder that doesn't repeatedly tweak code they just wrote due to feedback. The fact that models can output first pass code so quickly without feedback today, suggests they are going to be very very good once they can test their own code, and converge on a solution informed by different attempts by different models.

A group of models can also critique each others' code organization for simplicity, readability and maintainability.

Re: Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

#216

Post by vczf »

withinboredom wrote: post #210
vczf wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The endpoint is that being a programmer becomes as obsolete as being a human "calculator" for a career. Millions, perhaps billions of times more lines of code will be written, and automated programming will be taken for granted as just how computers work. Painstakingly writing static source code will be seen the same way as we see doing hundreds of pages of tedious calculations using paper, pencil, and a slide rule.…

Yet, we still have programmers writing assembly code and hand-optimizing it. I believe that for most software engineers, this will be the future. However, experts and hobbyists will still experiment with different ways of doing things, just like people experiment with different ways of creating chairs. An AI can only do what it is taught to do. Sure, it can offer unique insights from time to time, but I doubt it will…

You might be underestimating the potential of an automated evolutionary programming system at discovering novel and surprising ways to do computation—ways that no human would ever invent. Humans may have a better distribution of entropy generation (i.e. life experience as an embodied human being), but compared to the rate at which a computer can iterate, I don't think that advantage will be maintained.

(Humans will still have to set the goals and objectives, unless we unleash an ASI and render even that moot.)

Re: Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

#217

Post by javajosh »

exceptione wrote: post #197
javajosh wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The market is different, and so is the supply. The market for artisanal cutlery is basically an art market. The programmer supply today is an approaching-standardization factory worker. There IS an art market for software, in the indie gaming space, so perhaps that will survive (and AI could actually really help individual creators tremendously). But the work-a-day enterprise developer's days are numbered. The great…

Since AI has been trained on the generous gifts of the collective (books, code repos, art, ..), it begs the question why normal societies would not start to regulate them as a collective good. I can foresee two forces that will work against society to claim it back: - Dominance of neoliberalism thought, with its strong belief that for any disease markets will be the cure. - Strong lobby from big corporates. You don't…

>AI has been trained on the generous gifts of the collective

Will be interesting to see how various copyright lawsuits pan out. In some ways I hope they succeed, as it would mean clawing back those gifts from an amorphous entity that would displace us (all?). In some ways I hope that we can resolve the gift problem by giving every human equity in the products produced by the collective value of the training data they produced.

>winner takes it all means economic and scientific stagnation

Given the apparent lack of awareness or knowledge of philosophy, history, or current events, it seems like a tough row to hoe getting the general public on board with this (correct) idea. Heck, we can't even pass a law overturning Citizens United, the importance of which is arguably even less abstract.

When the tide of stupidity grows insurmountable, and The People cannot be stopped from self-harm, you get collapse, and the only way to survive it is to live within a pocket of reason, to carry the torch of civilization forward as best you can.

Re: Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

#218

Post by kaba0 »

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…

Meanwhile I’m paid for editing a single line of code in 2 weeks, and nothing less than singularity will replace me.

But sure, call me back when AI will actually reason about possible race conditions, instead of spewing out the definition of one it got from wikipedia.

Re: Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

#219

Post by hathawsh »

schaefer wrote: post #198
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.

If AGI and artificial sentience comes hand in hand, I fail to see how our plans to spin up AGI's as a black box to "do the work" is not essentially a new form of slavery. Speaking from an ethics point of view: at what point do we say that AGI has crossed a line and deserves self autonomy? And how would we ever know when the line is crossed?

Humans can't be copied. It seems like the inability to copy people is one of the pillars of our morality. If I could somehow make a perfect copy of myself, would I think about morality and ethics the same way? Probably not.

AGI will theoretically be able to create perfect copies of itself. Will it be immoral for an AGI to clone itself to get some work done, then cause the clone to cease its existence? That's what computer software does all the time. Keep in mind that both the original and the clone might be pure bits and bytes, with no access to any kind of physical body.

Just a thought.

Re: Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

#220

Post by dartos »

samatman wrote: post #190
CuriouslyC wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

> producing documentation

I remember watching this really funny video where a writer, by trade, was talking about recent AI products they were exploring.

They saw a "Make longer" button which took some text and made it longer by fluffing it out. He was saying that it was the antithesis of his entire career.

As a high schooler who really didn't care, I would've loved it, though.

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