Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

sheshbabu.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

371–380 of 434 posts

Re: Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

#371

Post by octopusRex »

empath-nirvana wrote: post #48

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…

I remember spending a lot of time writing comments for the exceptions when automation flagged code with a false positive. A lot of time.

Re: Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

#372

Post by defrost »

bamboozled wrote: post #369
defrost wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is just less people now too. Global population is still increasing and will most likely continue to do so until 2100. > we need more efficient people. It take less people to mine, process, and produce a billion tonne of steel today than it did in the 1970s. Efficiency has steadily increased.

It take less people to mine, process, and produce a billion tonne of steel today than it did in the 1970s. Why do you think that is? Efficiently gains, which is what I said... Global population can't just "go up", you need people who are educated in doing things and using tools efficiently. We also have an incredible amount of elderly people to take care of, that puts a huge burden on younger people. Also don't forge…

> Global population can't just "go up",

It can and it currently is increasing towards what is expected to be a peak and then a decline.

You typed "we need more efficient people" - I responded that efficiency has increased in the past decades.

> Efficiently gains, which is what I said...

I'm not seeing where you typed that.

> We'd be better off with 6 billion people

We have a point of agreement.

> incredible amount of elderly people to take care of, that puts a huge burden on younger people.

Perhaps less than you think, I'm > 60 and I barely take care of my father born in 1935 .. he delivers Meals on Wheels to those ederly that are less able.

There's a lot of scope for bored retiree's to be hired at low cost to hang out with less able elders, reducing the numbers of young people actually required.

Re: Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

#373

Post by bsaul »

agentultra wrote: post #40
bsaul wrote: post #30

", I believe there would still be an underlying formal definition of the business logic generated in the backend" Not just business logic. Technical one too, such as "proove that this critial code can never run into an infinite loop" AI could very well be the revolution needed to bring theorem proover and other formal proof based languages ( coq, idriss, etc) to the mainstream mass of developers.

Only if they can understand the proofs first. However, LLMs aren't capable of writing proofs. They can only regurgitate text that looks like a proof by training on proofs already written. There's no reasoning behind what they produce. So why waste the time of a human to review it? If the provers' kernel and automation make the proof pass but it makes no sense, what use is it? People write proofs to make arguments to…

I didn't mean to have the AI write the proof. On the contrary. Humans would be responsible for writing them, to ensure that the code generated by the AI meet certain constraints (safety for example).

Re: Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

#374

Post by actionfromafar »

flohofwoe wrote: post #355
diego_sandoval wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> machine code → macro assembly → C → Java → Python The increase in productivity, we can all agree on, but a non-negligible portion of HN users would say that each one of those new languages made programming progressively less fun.

I think where people will disagree is how much productivity those steps brought. For instance I think the step from machine code to macro assembler is bigger than the step from a macro assembler to C (although still substantial), but the step from C to anything higher level is essentially negligible compared to the massive jump from machine code to a 'low level high level' language like C.

So many other things happened at the same too, so it's sometimes hard to untangle what is what.

For instance, say that C had namespaces, and a solid package system with a global repo of packages like Python, C# and Java have.

Then you'd be able to throw together things pretty easily.

Things easily cobbled together with Python often aren't attributable to Python the language per se, but rather Python, the language and its neat packages.

Re: Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

#375

Post by agentultra »

adrianN wrote: post #341
agentultra wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It might be that some day, an AI could be just as good as a trained mathematician, but so far, it doesn't look like it. One of the on-going arguments in automated theorem proving has been this central question: would anyone understand or want to read a proof written by a machine? A big part of why we write them and enjoy them is elegance , a rather subjective quality appreciated by people. In computer science we do…

I don't think anyone wants elegant proofs for their software's correctness. As long as the code is proven correct, programmers would be satisfied.

I had mentioned that. This is true today when software developers are writing proofs and why automation is useful.

You would still need to be able to read the proof that a computer generated and understand what it contains in order to judge whether it is correct with respect to your specifications. So in some sense elegance would be useful since the proof isn’t written by a human but has to be understood by one.

If the input here is still plain language prompts… then we’ll have to assume that we eventually develop artificial cognition. As far as I know, there isn’t a serious academic attempting this, only VC’s with shovels to sell.

Re: Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

#376

Post by ToucanLoucan »

Oioioioiio wrote: post #358
ToucanLoucan wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The question is not about what AI can do today but what we assume AI will be able to do tomorrow. And I think many assumptions on this front are products of magical thinking that are discarding limitations of LLMs in favor of waiting for the intelligence to emerge from the machine, which isn't going to happen. ChatGPT and associated tech is cool, but it is, at the end of the day, pattern recognition and reproductio…

Most of the time i'm not 'inventing' anything new too. I get a requirement, find a solution and the solution is 99,99999% not a new algorithm. I actually believe i never invented a new algorithm. Besides the next step is reasoning in GPT-5 and devin shows that GPTs/LLMs can start breaking down tasks. I don't mind being wrong tbh, there is no risk in it for me if AI will not take my job but i don't believe it. I do be…

> I get a requirement, find a solution and the solution is 99,99999% not a new algorithm. I actually believe i never invented a new algorithm.

I can think of tons of things I do in my day-to-day programming that, while certainly not new or remarkable advances in technology, are at least new enough that you're not going to find a Stack Overflow thread for it.

Again, you guys are pointing to a code generator that can generate functions or code snippets to accomplish a particular task, and again, that is cool and I think it has a huge usage if nothing else as an assistive learning tool when you're trying to pick up a new language or get better with a library or what have you. But again, my point is, ask it to do something that doesn't appear in a bunch of those threads. Ask it to solve a particular bugbear problem in your codebase. Ask it to invent a new language, even a high level one.

> It can easily try and do things 1000x fater than us, including reasoning

AI is not a reasoning machine, though. I'd be very interested in what you mean by the word "reasoning" in this context.

Re: Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

#377

Post by jimbokun »

goatlover wrote: post #342
jimbokun wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It will equally eliminate the need for all scientists and engineers. And every other human occupation.

I don't believe that's going to happen. If it were, humans would have stopped playing chess. But not only do lots of people still play chess, people making a living playing chess. There are YT channels devoted to chess. The same thing will be true of almost all sports, lots of entertainment, and lots of occupations where people prefer human interaction. Bar tenders and servers could be automated away, but plenty like…

“It will cease being our society” is the most likely outcome. Current politics demonstrates we have lost the ability to collaborate for our common good. So the processes accelerating AI capabilities will be largely unchecked until it’s too late and the AIs will optimize whatever inscrutable function they have evolved to prioritize.

Re: Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

#378

Post by jimbokun »

goatlover wrote: post #345
jimbokun wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s interesting how all of these articles implicitly assume AI keeps getting more intelligent then at some point just…stops. There’s no reason to think AI won’t also take over all the parts you don’t find appealing, too. The whole point of the Singularity, is that no aspect of human work cannot be performed better by superhumanly intelligent machines.

The point of the Singularity is that it's a futurist prediction, and we all know how often people are wrong about the future.

Kurzweil’s predictions from 20, 30 years ago have been disturbingly on target and there is no clear reason why the current rate of progress will suddenly stop.

Re: Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

#379

Post by eddd-ddde »

quonn wrote: post #356
Towaway69 wrote: post #120

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 realise that I as a developer have put a lot of people out of a job. For most developers this will not be true. Most apps, websites, compilers, desktop software etc. will not have put anyone out of a job. I certainly never ever put someone out of a job. I made some peoples live easier, but their total working hours didn't shorten and they certainly did not change profession or were replaced. In fact the majority…

To my philosophy, the goal of technology should be _precisely_ to get rid of as many jobs as possible.

Unfortunately technology benefits only the 1% in our current society, and job loss is a bad thing (it should not be!)

Re: Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

#380

Post by iteygib »

IggleSniggle wrote: post #62
iteygib wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those are tools humans use to created output directly to speed up a process. The equivalent argument for AI would be if the typewriter wrote you a novel based on what you asked it to write, and then everyone else's typewriter might create the same/similar novel if it's averaging all of the same human data input. This leads to a cultural inbreeding of sorts since the data that went into it was curated to begin with. T…

Humans also need human data. You might be better than I, but at least for myself, I know that I am just a weighted pattern matcher with a some stochasticity mixed in. I don't think the idea of painstakingly writing out a book, and then having a printing press propagate your book so that all can easily reproduce the idea in their own mind, is so very different. I think this is why the real conversation here is about t…

Humans/life don't need data. Life survives off of experience and evolutionary pressures. Data is a watered-down/digitized form of experience meant as a replication of that experience, the same way you can hear/analyze music on your computer. It's just usually close enough that most people can't tell the difference. All of that was fed by human "data", which means AI as ultimately a copy of evolutionary pressures that it never went through.

Typewriter/printing presses are for faster propagation or execution. AI in the cultural sense is about replication, hence the Artificial Intelligence tag. Typewriters aren't attempting to replicate or substitute, they are tools like a hammer. They are designed to be operated by humans since they are analog in nature, like your keyboard. AI doesn't need a keyboard, it's operating off our end contributions directly. It cares about the final, digitized form of the novels we feed it, no how we made it or came up with it.

That is the key difference here. It is the same thing when someone creates something based on their own direct experiences versus someone who is simply copying something. It is why AI art for example is increasingly looking bizarre in my opinion: it's completely recycled/fake.

Post reply on HN