Because people suck? Everyone trying to replace everyone.
Why is everyone trying to replace Software Engineers?
101–110 of 145 posts
Re: Why is everyone trying to replace Software Engineers?
#102One word: money. They (CEOs and executives, shareholders, etc) don't like how much it costs to make software. They think software engineers make too much money. You (a human) are always a cost they will try to reduce.
They think software engineers make too much money and answer everything with it depends.
Re: Why is everyone trying to replace Software Engineers?
#103Because the rich would rather spend money on things they can own than spending on people. If I spend a million dollars on an AI cluster to replicate my programmer, it'll never need another vacation, never complain about conditions, never argue, never balk at unethical requests, etc.
Re: Why is everyone trying to replace Software Engineers?
#104Re: Why is everyone trying to replace Software Engineers?
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Adept at prompting and reviewing code instead of writing code. Don't you need to write your own fair share of code (especially bad code) to judge what gets shipped? LLMs solve the problem of "producing code," but I don't think it necessary follows that LLMs solve the more important problem of "delivering value." If you're Organization X and are in partnership with Organization Y to produce an integrated solution, an…
> Don't you need to write your own fair share of code Do you need to be good at playing football to be a coach? (Andy Reid) Do you need to be good at making films to be a good critic of films? (Roger Ebert) Do you need to be a great chef to be a Michelin reviewer or food critic? Do you need to be a great singer to be a good judge of musical talent? (Simon Cowell) I think you can tell if some output is "good" without…
Good point, but maybe a little incomplete. Can you read a contract and tell whether the courts will accept it? No, you need a lawyer for that. Can you look at a bridge or dam and tell how long it will last and under what loads? No, you need an engineer for that. You can, of course, wait for a court to rule on a challenge to a contract and judge how well it was written that way, but by then it's too late, and you've wasted money. Programming can be like that too. You judge a program by throwing it in front of users and accepting the financial (or, worse, human) consequences, but usually it's more economical to hire someone who knows what they're doing.
Re: Why is everyone trying to replace Software Engineers?
#106I think the more realistic long term victims will be implementation specialists and business analysts. The middlemen who sit between product (developer) and customer.
Giving your product the ability to talk & work directly with the customer seems to me a much more valuable activity than covering all the edge cases that would arise during the development of such a solution with an LLM.
Remember, everything is a function [0] and LLMs support calling them. The trick is having the skill and domain expertise to establish bounded contexts and prompts that align with realistic product use cases and transition between them cleanly.
I know there is a lot of doubt that users would enjoy using a chat interface, but I strongly believe it would be popular as long as it actually works. If it's not well designed and the GUI tools are faster even for a novice, you will have wasted a lot of time/money for nothing.
Re: Why is everyone trying to replace Software Engineers?
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Don't you need to write your own fair share of code Do you need to be good at playing football to be a coach? (Andy Reid) Do you need to be good at making films to be a good critic of films? (Roger Ebert) Do you need to be a great chef to be a Michelin reviewer or food critic? Do you need to be a great singer to be a good judge of musical talent? (Simon Cowell) I think you can tell if some output is "good" without…
Good point, but maybe a little incomplete. Can you read a contract and tell whether the courts will accept it? No, you need a lawyer for that. Can you look at a bridge or dam and tell how long it will last and under what loads? No, you need an engineer for that. You can, of course, wait for a court to rule on a challenge to a contract and judge how well it was written that way, but by then it's too late, and you've w…
> Can you read a contract and tell whether the courts will accept it
Erik Spoelstra is a great example. Played basketball and had a short professional stint in lower leagues in Europe. Started off reviewing tape for the Miami Heat and went on to be a very successful coach. He doesn't make the plays, but he knows which players and which plays he needs. He knows when a player makes a good play and when a player makes a bad play. He substitutes players as needed for each situation. He deeply knows the domain, even if he can't himself play at that level.
When the LLM can code 100x faster than you, your job isn't to be a better coder, it's to be a better coach.
Re: Why is everyone trying to replace Software Engineers?
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
Developer productivity tools are developer replacement tools. If the current paradigm is: principal/senior devs design system, implemented by more junior devs, and LLM tools enable the seniors to produce lots of code, then the juniors are the ones getting replaced. The next step up the stack is enabling the PMs and business people to design (and implement) the system. There is no reason to think LLM based tools are i…
IDK, I've been developing software for 40 years now and have been through several of these "developer replacement" hype cycles. Every single time what ended up happening was even more developers were required. I see this as being the same, at least for the next few years. I do believe that the ultimate end point is quite different - developers will be replaced - but that's several years away and will require major ch…
I've been through this cycle as well, but I don't think this works the same way. I mean the only way it would work the same is if AI never reaches its promises, and I don't mean AGI, but never reaches the level of the thinking of a software developer. Then yes, no replacement. But do you really think AI will never get smart enough? Because the second it gets, whoever works on that level flies out the window. A therapeut needs his hands to work, so a very complex hardware interface with a long way ahead to reproduce, but a developer's work happens directly in the computer, zero hardware replacement costs.
Re: Why is everyone trying to replace Software Engineers?
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
If an MD writes software, does that make it "software medicine"?
Did you choose not to give the reverse analogy upon discovering that EEs working on medicine are already called medical engineers?
Either they're doing medicine, or they're building medical equipment.
The former case is unlikely, since, unlike writing software (but like many forms of actual engineering), there are actually formally defined standards for what you have to know before you're allowed to practice medicine. If they are doing medicine, then the word "engineer" is being abused. Medicine is not engineering. Programming isn't engineering either. Programming isn't even much like engineering.
In the latter case, they are of course acting as engineers and the name makes sense. It's not clear what the software counterpart to, say, an artificial heart would be, though, so software engineers in that sense can't exist. I suppose there are software counterparts to medical tools, like stethoscopes and X-ray machines. We usually call the people who design them "electrical engineers" or "computer engineers".
Oh, and other things I might have considered for the analogy were things like "If a philosopher writes software, does that make it software philosophy?" I picked medicine as a random vaguely technically credential.
Re: Why is everyone trying to replace Software Engineers?
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've honestly never had that success. LLMs for me more often get in the way than actually help anything. It may be that it's because I deal mostly in very large code bases with their own nuances.
Counter point though- what if it was trained on your specific code base? Wouldn't it be able to then help with those given nuances? The code base I have I would love to be able to just give some AI free reign and learn the structure since a lot of it is fairly repetitive; I know it would be so easy to say "hey add X just like Y" and it would be able to do it easily.
The rare times where I have no good idea what to do, it is faster to code with an LLM. The rest of the time, when I know just what I want, it takes longer for me to formulate it, query the LLM and discuss and validate its output.
My more experienced/senior colleagues all say roughly the same. It’s great help for our juniors though. They learn a lot and are more capable on their own with the AI assistance.
It’s improving all the time though, so I’m not writing it off at all. I am developing an evaluation suite so I can keep watching the progress in a systematic way..