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Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

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Re: Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

#301

Post by hnick »

Aperocky wrote: post #174
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".

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.

From the perspective of the programmer, true. Not necessarily from the perspective of the manager/customer, who can say in broad terms what needs to be done, and the programmer-black-box spits something out.

Re: Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

#302

Post by jameshart »

This is the part where I disagree:

> Business logic must always be defined in an unambiguous format

No. That’s only the case because unambiguous ‘business logic’ is what we have to use when trying to explain to rigid, unthinking machines how we want our business to operate. Business processes aren’t naturally rigid. Computerization has just made us think that they have to be.

What LLMs have the potential to do is to replace rigid unthinking machines with fuzzy contextually aware machines. Instead of emulating mindless bureaucrats only capable of operating on the rigid record formats of their strict filing systems, who’ll reject any form that contains a single error, as computer programs do today, future systems with a grasp on fuzzier language might be able to work with more ambiguity.

Re: Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

#303

Post by nonethewiser »

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?

I do think it’s basically the same. Its further on the same continuum of: Natural language/Machine code.

Re: Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

#304

Post by galdosdi »

dist-epoch wrote: post #151
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…

Most knifes today are mass produced. But there are still knife craftsman. You could become a software craftsman/artist if you enjoy writing software.

> Most knifes today are mass produced. But there are still knife craftsman.

But are there more or less knife craftsmen today than in the old days?

How about more or less knife craftsmen per capita?

Finally, and most importantly, if you are a budding knife crafstman -- is it easier or harder to get a job that pays the bills of a contemporary average lifestyle, today than in the old days (ie, what is the balance of supply and demand)

Re: Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

#305

Post by ptx »

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…

I don't think COBOL's dream was to generate enormous amounts of assembly code that users would then have to maintain (in assembly!) and producing differently wrong results every time you ran it.

Re: Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

#306

Post by maxrecursion »

godelski wrote: post #269
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…

Sorry, can you clarify more? I don't think I understand. The part you enjoy the most is the integrating of systems, right? If that's really your passion, I'm not sure you're in danger of losing your job to AI. AI is not great at nuance and this is exponentially more challenging than what we've done so far. I'm just assuming that since this is your passion (if I'm understanding correctly) that you see it as the puzzle…

This is pretty muchy experience as well. AI is a fantastic helper, and it will make devs more productive, but it is not going to put all software devs out of work. Probably a tiny fraction of them at best.

However, with recent grads flooding into IT for remote work and high pay, they could be hurting as AI reduces the need for entry level roles. Entry level was already saturated, and now it will be more saturated, with AI reducing the need for jobs.

Re: Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

#307

Post by mixmastamyk »

brailsafe wrote: post #157
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.

software engineers already need to be worried about either losing their current job or getting another one. The market is pretty much dead already unless you're working on something AI

Do you know how many hype trains I’ve seen leave the station? :-D

Re: Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

#308

Post by ogogmad »

nyrikki wrote: post #92
visarga wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

To add to this. I was going through devin's 'pass' diffs from SWE bench. Every one I ended up tracing to actual issues caused changes that would reduce maintainablity or introduced potential side effects. I think it may be useful as a suggestion in a red-green-refactor model, but will end up producing hard to maintain and modify code. Note this one here that introduced circular dependencies, changed a function that o…

> You simply can't get past what Gödel and Rice proved with current technology.

Not this again. Those theorems tell you nothing about your concerns. The worst case of a problem is not equal to its usual case.

Re: Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

#309

Post by Clubber »

aibot923 wrote: post #251
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…

> Software is still heavily rate-limited by how much of it developers can write Hmm. We have very different experiences here. IME, the vast majority of industry work is understanding, tweaking, and integrating existing software. There is very little "software writing" as a percentage of the total time developers spend doing their jobs across industry. That is the collective myth the industry uses to make the job seem…

>At least, this is my experience in the large FAANG type companies. We already have so much code. Just figuring out what that code does and what else to do with it constitutes the majority of the work.

That sounds horrible. I've always sought out smaller companies that need stuff built. It certainly doesn't pay as much as SV companies but it's pretty stimulating. Sometimes being a big fish in a small pond is pretty nice.

IMO, maintaining someone else's code is probably the worst type of programming job there is, especially if it's bad /disjointed code. A lot of people can make a good living doing it though. It would be nice if AI could alleviate the pain of learning and figuring out a gnarly codebase.

Re: Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

#310

Post by c-cube »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #235
bluefirebrand wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're already doing all of this work then it's trivial to actually type all the stuff in yourself Is GPT actually saving you any time if it can't actually do the hard part?

It's not really "all this work," once you have good prompts you can use them to crank out a lot of code very quickly. You can use it to crank out thousands of lines of code a day that are somewhat formulaic, but not so formulaic that a simple rules based system could do it. For example, I took text document with headers for table names and unordered lists for table columns, and had it produce a database schema which…

Now your description of "good prompts" to reuse has created an abomination in my mind. I blame you.

The abomination: prompts being reused by way of yaml templating, a Helm chart of sorts but for LLM prompts. The delicious combination of yaml programming and prompt engineering. I hope it never exists.

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