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Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

sheshbabu.com

241–250 of 434 posts

Re: Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

#241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The sectors of work that have been largely pushed out of economy in recent decades have not been defended by serious state policy. In fact there are whole groups of crucial workers, like teachers or nurses, who are kept around barely surviving in many countries. The groups protected by the state tend to be heavily organized and directly related to exploitation of natural strategic resources, like farmers or miners. T…

> There is no particular sympathy towards programmers in society, I don't think.

The concern policy makers have is not about programmers, but about boatloads of other people having no time to adapt to the massive wave these policymakers see coming.

There a strong signals that anyone who produces text, speech, pictures or whatever is going to be affected by it. If the value of labor goes down, if a large part of humanity cannot reach a level anymore to meaningfully contribute, if productivity eclipses demand growth, you simply will see lots of people left behind.

Strong societies depend on strong middle classes. If the middle class slips, so will the economy, so no good news for blue collar as well. AI has the potential to suffocate the organism that created it.

Re: Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

#242

> Though coding all day sounds very appealing, most of software development time is spent on communicating with other people or other admin work instead of just writing code This sounds very...big corp, which inevitably needs many professional box drawers, expert negotiators, smooth communicators, miracle alignment workers, and etc. But guess what, if you are in a core group in a small company, you function as a grad…

The big corp eng might not write a lot of code, but their code might get executed far more often.

Re: Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

#243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> When the tide of stupidity grows insurmountable, and The People cannot be stopped from self-harm, you get collapse,

Yes, people are unfortunately highly unaware of what societal ecosystem they depend on, and so cannot prioritize on what is important. These topics don't sell in media shows.

Re: Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

#244

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…

Exactly my take.

I'd further state that LLMs appear to do ok with generating limited amounts of new code. Telling them "Here's a class, generate a bunch of unit tests" works. However, telling them "Generate me a todo application" will give mixed results at best.

Further, it seems like updating and changing code is simply right out of their wheelhouse. That's where I think devs will be primarily valuable. Someone needs to understand the written code for when the feature request eventually bubbles through "Now also be able to do x". I don't think you'll be able to point an LLM at a code repository and instruct it "Update this project so that it can do feature X"

Re: Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

#245
post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I've heard one CEO been asked about gen-ai tools to be used in the company. The answer was vague, like they are evaluating the tooling. However one good example was made: chatgpt is really good in writing mails, and in summarizing text as well. He said they don't want to have situation when sender is using chatgpt to write a fancy mail and recipient is using chatgpt to read it. However I think that it is the directio…

This sort of thing is already being rolled out for emails and even pull requests in some large companies.

Re: Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

#246

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…

This is really well put and level-headed, I particularly like the comparison to AWS and in-field ops work.

Re: Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

#247
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…

> 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 softwar…

Even with a junior there is generally a logic to the mistake and a fairly direct path to improving in future. I just don't know if the next token was chosen to be x statistically is going to be able to get to that level.

Re: Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

#248
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has been my cope mantra so far. I don't mind if my job changes a lot (and ideally loses the part I dislike the most — writing the actual code), and if I find myself in a position where my entire skillset doesn't matter at all, then well a LOT of people are in trouble.

The worst future is where there still are plenty of jobs, but all of them consist of talking to an AI and hoping you use the right words that gets them to do what you need it to.

Not really. As long as there is no universal basic income, any job with decent salary beats unemployment. The job may suck, but the money allows you to do fun stuff after work.

Re: Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

#249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being a developer, I heartily agree with you. Being a human, I realise that I as a developer have put a lot of people out of a job. Those folks have had to adapt to that change. I guess now it's our time to adapt to change. At least it keeps me on my feet!

> I guess now it's our time to adapt to change. I'm just saddened by the prospect that, for me, "adapting to change" would mean "no longer being able to make a living doing what I actually enjoy". that's why if this is the future, it's a career-killing one for me. Whether or not I stay in the industry, there is no future in my chosen career path, and the alternative paths that people keep bringing up all sound pretty…

If AI does achieve the hyped heights then we're all out of a job, regardless of what we do.

Many people suffer through bullshit jobs[1] so we are privileged to have - at least for a time - done what we really enjoy and got paid for it.

[1] David Graeber father of the term "bullshit jobs"

Re: Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

#250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 com…

If humans fundamentally work in the same way as any such hypothetical AGI, then they can be copied in the same way.
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