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Writing Code Was Never the Bottleneck

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Re: Writing Code Was Never the Bottleneck

#111

Post by vages »

AbstractH24 wrote: post #72
dizhn wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - Many bugs were of a new kind (to me), the code would look like it does the right thing but actually not work at all, or just be much more broken than code with that level of "polish" would normally be. This reminded me of a quarter million dollar software project one of my employers had contracted to a team in a different country. On the face of it - especially if you go and check by the spec sheet - everything w…

Cheap labor with low EI is/has been what will suffer most from generative AI.

What does EI mean in this sentence? Tried looking it up and found no definition that stood out.

Re: Writing Code Was Never the Bottleneck

#112

Post by bluefirebrand »

alkonaut wrote: post #63

I agree with most of this. Writing code is one of the easy bits of Software Development. Writing the specifications about what to write is hard. Once you can specify what to create, and do it well, then actually creating it is quite cheap. However, as a software developer that often feel I'm pulled into 10 hours of meetings to argue the benefits of one 2-hour thing over the other 2-hour thing, my view is often "Lets…

> AI's produce sub par code very quickly. And there are good uses for that: it's a sketch tool for code

The problem is that the business bleepheads see the thing work (badly) and just say "looks great as is, let's ship it" and now you're saddled with that crap code forever

Re: Writing Code Was Never the Bottleneck

#113

Post by gexla »

In addition to the poor code we spend time on, we get to lose even more time endlessly talking about it and working on ways around the issues. I swear I have spent as much time tinkering with these models and the tooling as it took for me to bring my first skills up to a level to get hired. For people who are asking me if "ChatGPT can build a web app," they're really asking if they can build this thing without learning anything. I have bad news for them...

Re: Writing Code Was Never the Bottleneck

#114

Post by steveBK123 »

xiphias2 wrote: post #106
andrelaszlo wrote: post #22

My most recent example of this is mentoring young, ambitious, but inexperienced interns. Not only did they produce about the same amount of code in a day that they used to produce in a week (or two), several other things made my work harder than before: - During review, they hadn't thought as deeply about their code so my comments seemed to often go over their heads. Instead of a discussion I'd get something like "go…

I work alone, not in teams, but use LLM (codex-1) a lot, and it's extremely helpful. I accepted that in return the code base is much lower quality than if I would have written it. What works for me is that after having lots of passing tests, I start refactoring the tests to get closer to property testing: basically prove that the code works by allowing it to go through complex scenarios and check that the state is go…

I wonder how this trade-off will age. I'm not a Mag7/Saas/SV startup tech guy, so I've tended to work on systems that are in service & maintained for upwards of 10 years. It's not unusual to see 20 year old codebases in my field.

We scoff at clever code thats hard to understand leading to poor ability for teams to maintain, but what about knowingly much lower quality code?

Re: Writing Code Was Never the Bottleneck

#115

Post by steveBK123 »

vages wrote: post #111
AbstractH24 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cheap labor with low EI is/has been what will suffer most from generative AI.

What does EI mean in this sentence? Tried looking it up and found no definition that stood out.

Emotional intelligence

Re: Writing Code Was Never the Bottleneck

#116

Post by imiric »

fhd2 wrote: post #93
AbstractH24 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are writing code to solve a one off task the first category is ok. What boggles my mind is people are writing code that’s the foundation of products like that. Maybe it’s imposter syndrome though to think it wasn’t already being done before the rise of LLMs

In my experience, it was. And if we're getting real for a moment, the vast majority of programmers gets paid by a company that is, first and foremost, interested in making more money. IMHO all technical decisions are business decisions in disguise. Can the business afford to ship something that fails for 5% of their users? Can they afford to find out before they ship it or only after? What risks do they want to take?…

I agree with your sentiment, but not with the conclusion.

Sure, technical decisions ultimately depend on a cost-benefit analysis, but the companies who follow this mentality will cut corners at every opportunity, build poor quality products, and defraud their customers. The unfortunate reality is that in the startup culture "move fast and break things" is the accepted motto. Companies can be quickly started on empty promises to attract investors, they can coast for months or years on hype and broken products, and when the company fails, they can rebrand or pivot, and do it all over again.

So making uninformed bets can still be profitable. This law of averages you mention just doesn't matter. There will always be those looking to turn a quick buck, and those who are in it for the long haul, and actually care about their product and customers. LLMs are more appealing to the former group. It's up to each software developer to choose the companies they wish to support and be associated with.

Re: Writing Code Was Never the Bottleneck

#117

Post by [deleted] »

Sammi wrote: post #79
dizhn wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - Many bugs were of a new kind (to me), the code would look like it does the right thing but actually not work at all, or just be much more broken than code with that level of "polish" would normally be. This reminded me of a quarter million dollar software project one of my employers had contracted to a team in a different country. On the face of it - especially if you go and check by the spec sheet - everything w…

I'm expecting to see so much more poor quality software being made. We're going to be swimming in an ocean of bad software. Good experienced devs will be able to make better software, but so many inexperienced devs will be regurgitating so much more lousy software at a pace never seen before, it's going to be overwhelming. Or as the original commenter described, they're already being overwhelmed.

[deleted]

Re: Writing Code Was Never the Bottleneck

#118

Post by al_borland »

The most outspoken person against LLMs on my team would bring this up a lot. Though the biggest bottleneck he identified was the politics and actually coming to agreements on spec of what to write. Even with perfect AI software engineers, this is still the issue, as someone still needs to tell the AI what to do. If no one is willing to do that, what’s the point of any of this?

Re: Writing Code Was Never the Bottleneck

#120

Post by whatevsmate »

Wow a lot of the stories people are writing here are super depressing. If a junior developer is delivering you a pile of code that doesn’t work, hasn’t been manually tested and verified by them, hasn’t been carefully pared down to its essential parts, and doesn’t communicate anything about itself either through code style, comments or docs … then you are already working with an LLM ; it just so happens to be hosted in - or parsed thru - a wetware interface. Critical thinking and taking responsibility for the outcome is the real job and always has been.

And, cynically, I bet a software LLM will be more responsive to your feedback than the over-educated and overpaid junior “engineer” will be. Actually I take it back, I don’t think this take is cynical at all.

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