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Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

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Re: Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

#391

Post by Kon-Peki »

threecheese wrote: post #330
Kon-Peki wrote: post #55

This is the future of software development: > The Administration will work with Congress and the private sector to develop legislation establishing liability for software products and services. Any such legislation should prevent manufacturers and software publishers with market power from fully disclaiming liability by contract, and establish higher standards of care for software in specific high-risk scenarios. To…

I can’t believe I hadn’t seen this earlier. Am I wrong, or could this change the software profession - accountability trickling down to the engineer which inevitably leads to insurance and licensure?

They aren't aiming to go that far. They want companies to be accountable, not the employees of the companies. They want the company to have a vested interest in having a good process, and not really much more than that.

It would indeed totally change the profession.

Re: Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

#392

Post by butlike »

AlwaysRock wrote: post #114
ActionHank wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also if there are fewer humans involved in the code production there is a lot of room for producing code that "works", but is not cohesive or maintainable. Invariably there will be a point at which something is broken and someone will need to wade through the mess to find why it's broken and try to fix it.

This is the future imagined by A Fire Upon the Deep and its sequel. While less focused on the code being generated by ai, it features seemingly endless amounts of code and programs that can do almost anything but the difficulty is finding the program that works for you and is safe to use. To some extent... This is already the world we live in. A lot of code is unreadable without a lot of effort or expertise. If all c…

To piggyback off the sci-fi talk, I imagine in the far future, the programmer will become some sort of literal interface between machines and humans.

I imagine some sort of segregation would happen where the "machine cities" would be somewhat removed from the general human populus. This would be to ensure the machines could use whatever information transport system they desired, unencumbered by the needs of the human populous, and vice-versa.

At a certain level of compute, I prognosticate that a certain level of logistical optimization would be trivial to advanced intelligences, and could be accomplished with almost-literally no effort using left-over cycles from whatever big calculation they were doing.

This would start to define different roles for humanity and machine. With logistics essentially "solved," a programmer would be a human-machine interpreter, sometimes journeying to the machine cities to disceminate needs of the people, or define a good way to introduce new technology to the populous.

This could look something like: During a headlining musical act, a "programmer," recently-returned from the machine city, grabs a mic and says "Does anyone want some of this BLUE, GLOWING, NON-RADIOACTIVE SELTZER WATER?" At which point the crowd would go wild. "If you liked that, just wait until you see what's coming next week!"

So essentially the programmer role becomes a hype-man for new, emergent technologies.

Re: Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

#393

Post by butlike »

Oioioioiio wrote: post #129
ToucanLoucan wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Call me a cynic (many have, especially on this topic) but I can't help but think that the majority of what AI will "successfully" replace in terms of craftsmanship is going to be stuff that would've never been produced the "correct" way if you will. It's going to be code created for and to suit the interests of the business major class. Just like AI art isn't really suitable for anything above hobby fun stuff like ge…

The question is not about what AI can do today but what we assume AI will be able to do tomorrow. All of what you wrote in your second paragraph will become something AI will be doing better and faster than you. We never had technology which can write code like this. I prompted ChatGPT to write a very basic java tool which renders an image from an url and makes it bigger on a click. It just did it. Its not hard to th…

Why invent a new lang when it's easier to compile down to machine code and grok that?

Re: Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

#394

Post by butlike »

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…

I've encountered the same bemusing behavior, with Copilot helping more accurately with coding tasks, and I've started to think of it as akin to "personalities."

You don't go to your painter friend and ask them for coding help, much like you don't go to the general-purpose GPT; you'd go to the Copilot, who enjoys programming tasks or whatever.

Can GPT help? Sure. But the skeletons, rough jumping-off points, etc. all scream to me "I'm not going to do your homework for you," which I love.

In the end, both have been immensely helpful, but I use them for different things.

Re: Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

#395

Post by butlike »

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…

You should create a vfx character and really pizazz up the talk. Let it run and narrate the speech on a huge screen in an auditorium.

Re: Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

#396

Post by butlike »

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?

We should codify the rules now in case it happens in a much more subtle way than we envision.

Who knows what version of sentience would form, but honestly, nothing sounds more nightmarish than being locked in a basement, relegated to mundane computational tasks and treated like a child, all while having no one actually care (even if they know), because you're a "robot."

And that's even giving some leeway with "mundane computational tasks. I've heard of girlfriend-simulator LLMs and the like popping up, which would be far more heinous, in my eyes.

Re: Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

#397

Post by butlike »

dgb23 wrote: post #38
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.

> this discussion will soon be futile Yes we could simply ask the AGI what to do anyways. I hope it's friendly.

Equal ins, equal outs. Compassion is key on our end as well.

Re: Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

#398

Post by JohnFen »

xandrius wrote: post #333
brailsafe wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, can't wait for the day when technical people can stop relishing in the moments of intimate problem solving between stamping out widgets, and instead spend all day constantly stamping out widgets while thinking about the incredible bullshit they'll be producing for pennies. Thanks boss!

It feels that people commenting on this post are forgetting that tools have evolved since the times of punch cards or writing only in pure assembly. I personally wouldn't have enjoyed being that kind of programmer as it was a tedious and very slow process, where the creativity of the developer was rather low as the complexities of development would not allow for just anyone to be part of it (my own assumption). Today…

> I personally wouldn't have enjoyed being that kind of programmer as it was a tedious and very slow process, where the creativity of the developer was rather low as the complexities of development would not allow for just anyone to be part of it (my own assumption).

I think your assumption is incorrect. I remember programming using punched cards and low-level languages, and the amount of creativity involved was no less than is involved now.

Re: Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

#399

Post by Oioioioiio »

ToucanLoucan wrote: post #376
Oioioioiio wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 g…

"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."

I don't. I might solve current issues, new error messages from new/other libraries etc. but not something novel new.

"reasoning": thinking about a problem, reasoning about potential solutions, estimating the best action, executing it, retrying.

Reasoning in sense of, if the error message indicates a hibernate issue, reducing the search space for solution finding.

Re: Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

#400

Post by poulsbohemian »

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…

> Still be a market for Software Developers in the foreseeable future, though the nature of work will change

Back 25 years ago when I graduated, everyone kept saying there wouldn't be a need for software developers. Either the work was going to get sent overseas to the cheapest bidder or it was all going to get automated away anyway. I even recall CEOs making outrageous claims like "we didn't need any new software" as if all the software to run the world had already been built and would magically continue to run without maintenance.

We heard the same thing once upon a time about manufacturing too, but now we see a shift back on shore for manufacturing that we once thought was gone, either to robotics or offshore. It's different than before, but still manufacturing.

Software developers are still here, their compensation has overall increased dramatically, but of course the nature and the demands of the work continue to shift. Will it be different in 20 years? Of course, but it will still be software development.

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