The future of software development is software developers • Hacker News Board

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#11

Post by ravenstine » Mon, Dec 29, 2025, 9:33 PM UTC

mohsen1 wrote: post #3

I really really want this to be true. I want to be relevant. I don’t know what to do if all those predictions are true and there is no need (or very little need) for programmers anymore. But something tells me “this time is different” is different this time for real. Coding AIs design software better than me, review code better than me, find hard-to-find bugs better than me, plan long-running projects better than me,…

Yeah, it makes me wonder whether I should start learning to be a carpenter or something. Those who either support AI or thinks "it's all bullshit" cite a lack of evidence for humans truly being replaced in the engineering process, but that's just the thing; the unprecedented levels of uncertainty make it very difficult to invest one's self in the present, intellectually and emotionally. With the current state of things, I don't think it's silly to wonder "what's the point" if another 5 years of this trajectory is going to mean not getting hired as a software dev again unless you have a PhD and want to work for an AI company.

What doesn't help is that the current state of AI adoption is heavily top-down. What I mean is the buy-in is coming from the leadership class and the shareholder class, both of whom have the incentive to remove the necessary evil of human beings from their processes. Ironically, these classes are perhaps the least qualified to decide whether generative AI can replace swathes of their workforce without serious unforeseen consequences. To make matters worse, those consequences might be as distal as too many NEETs in the system such that no one can afford to buy their crap anymore; good luck getting anyone focused on making it to the next financial quarter to give a shit about that. And that's really all that matters at the end of the day; what leadership believes, whether or not they are in touch with reality.

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#12

Post by treespace8 » Mon, Dec 29, 2025, 9:43 PM UTC

joefourier wrote: post #8

belter wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> From where I’m standing, it’s scary. You are being fooled by randomness [1] Not because the models are random, but because you are mistaking a massive combinatorial search over seen patterns for genuine reasoning. Taleb point was about confusing luck for skill. Dont confuse interpolation for understanding. You can read a Rust book after years of Java, then go build software for an industry that did not exist when…

Have you used an LLM specifically trained for tool calling, in Claude Code, Cursor or Aider? They’re capable of looking up documentation, correcting their errors by compiling and running tests, and when coupled with a linter, hallucinations are a non issue. I don’t really think it’s possible to dismiss a model that’s been trained with reinforcement learning for both reasoning and tool usage as only doing pattern matc…

I'm using Claude code to help me learn Godot game programming.

One interesting thing is that Claude will not tell me if I'm following the wrong path. It will just make the requested change to the best of its ability.

For example a Tower Defence game I'm making I wanted to keep turret position state in an AStarGrid2D. It produced code to do this, but became harder and harder to follow as I went on. It's only after watching more tutorials I figured out I was asking for the wrong thing. (TileMapLayer is a much better choice)

LLMs still suffer from Garbage in Garbage out.

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#13

Post by btbuildem » Mon, Dec 29, 2025, 9:44 PM UTC

mohsen1 wrote: post #3

I really really want this to be true. I want to be relevant. I don’t know what to do if all those predictions are true and there is no need (or very little need) for programmers anymore. But something tells me “this time is different” is different this time for real. Coding AIs design software better than me, review code better than me, find hard-to-find bugs better than me, plan long-running projects better than me,…

They do all those things you've mentioned more efficiently than most of us, but they fall woefully short as soon as novelty is required. Creativity is not in their repertoire. So if you're banging out the same type of thing over and over again, yes, they will make that work light and then scarce. But if you need to create something niche, something one-off, something new, they'll slip off the bleeding edge into the comfortable valley of the familiar at every step.

I choose to look at it as an opportunity to spend more time on the interesting problems, and work at a higher level. We used to worry about pointers and memory allocation. Now we will worry less and less about how the code is written and more about the result it built.

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#14

Post by heliumtera » Mon, Dec 29, 2025, 9:45 PM UTC

d_silin wrote: post #7

In aviation safety, there is a concept of "Swiss cheese" model, where each successful layer of safety may not be 100% perfect, but has a different set of holes, so overlapping layers create a net gain in safety metrics. One can treat current LLMs as a layer of "cheese" for any software development or deployment pipeline, so the goal of adding them should be an improvement for a measurable metric (code quality, uptime…

Interesting concept, but as of now we don't apply this technologies as a new compounding layer. We are not using them after the fact we constructed the initial solution. We are not ingesting the code to compare against specs. We are not using them to curate and analyze current hand written tests(prompt: is this test any good? assistant: it is hot garbage, you are inferring that expected result equals your mocked result). We are not really at this phase yet. Not in general, not intelligently. But when the "safe and effective" crowd leave technology we will find good use cases for it, I am certain (unlike uml, VB and Delphi)

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#15

Post by memoriuaysj » Mon, Dec 29, 2025, 9:51 PM UTC

treespace8 wrote: post #12

joefourier wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you used an LLM specifically trained for tool calling, in Claude Code, Cursor or Aider? They’re capable of looking up documentation, correcting their errors by compiling and running tests, and when coupled with a linter, hallucinations are a non issue. I don’t really think it’s possible to dismiss a model that’s been trained with reinforcement learning for both reasoning and tool usage as only doing pattern matc…

I'm using Claude code to help me learn Godot game programming. One interesting thing is that Claude will not tell me if I'm following the wrong path. It will just make the requested change to the best of its ability. For example a Tower Defence game I'm making I wanted to keep turret position state in an AStarGrid2D. It produced code to do this, but became harder and harder to follow as I went on. It's only after wat…

before coding I just ask the model "what are the best practices in this industry to solve this problem? what tools/libraries/approaches people use?

after coding I ask it "review the code, do you see any for which there are common libraries implementing it? are there ways to make it more idiomatic?"

you can also ask it "this is an idea on how to solve it that somebody told me, what do you think about it, are there better ways?"

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#16

Post by 9dev » Mon, Dec 29, 2025, 9:52 PM UTC

btbuildem wrote: post #13

mohsen1 wrote: post #3

I really really want this to be true. I want to be relevant. I don’t know what to do if all those predictions are true and there is no need (or very little need) for programmers anymore. But something tells me “this time is different” is different this time for real. Coding AIs design software better than me, review code better than me, find hard-to-find bugs better than me, plan long-running projects better than me,…

They do all those things you've mentioned more efficiently than most of us, but they fall woefully short as soon as novelty is required. Creativity is not in their repertoire. So if you're banging out the same type of thing over and over again, yes, they will make that work light and then scarce. But if you need to create something niche, something one-off, something new, they'll slip off the bleeding edge into the c…

I think your image of LLMs is a bit outdated. Claude Code with well-configured agents will get entirely novel stuff done pretty well, and that’s only going to get better over time.

I wouldn’t want to bet my career on that anyway.

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#17

Post by kgwxd » Mon, Dec 29, 2025, 9:53 PM UTC

d_silin wrote: post #7

In aviation safety, there is a concept of "Swiss cheese" model, where each successful layer of safety may not be 100% perfect, but has a different set of holes, so overlapping layers create a net gain in safety metrics. One can treat current LLMs as a layer of "cheese" for any software development or deployment pipeline, so the goal of adding them should be an improvement for a measurable metric (code quality, uptime…

LLMs are Kraft Singles. Stuff that only kind of looks like cheese. Once you know it's in there, someone has to inspect, and sign-off on, the entire wheel for any credible semblance of safety.

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#18

Post by skydhash » Mon, Dec 29, 2025, 9:56 PM UTC

btbuildem wrote: post #13

mohsen1 wrote: post #3

I really really want this to be true. I want to be relevant. I don’t know what to do if all those predictions are true and there is no need (or very little need) for programmers anymore. But something tells me “this time is different” is different this time for real. Coding AIs design software better than me, review code better than me, find hard-to-find bugs better than me, plan long-running projects better than me,…

They do all those things you've mentioned more efficiently than most of us, but they fall woefully short as soon as novelty is required. Creativity is not in their repertoire. So if you're banging out the same type of thing over and over again, yes, they will make that work light and then scarce. But if you need to create something niche, something one-off, something new, they'll slip off the bleeding edge into the c…

> So if you're banging out the same type of thing over and over again, yes, they will make that work light and then scarce.

The same thing over and over again should be a SaaS, some internal tool, or a plugin. Computers are good at doing the same thing over and over again and that's what we've been using them for

> But if you need to create something niche, something one-off, something new, they'll slip off the bleeding edge into the comfortable valley of the familiar at every step.

Even if the high level description of a task may be similar to another, there's always something different in the implementation. A sports car and a sedan have roughly the same components, but they're not engineered the same.

> We used to worry about pointers and memory allocation.

Some still do. It's not in every case you will have a system that handle allocations and a garbage collector. And even in those, you will see memory leaks.

> Now we will worry less and less about how the code is written and more about the result it built.

Wasn't that Dreamweaver?

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#19

Post by 63stack » Mon, Dec 29, 2025, 9:56 PM UTC

mohsen1 wrote: post #3

I really really want this to be true. I want to be relevant. I don’t know what to do if all those predictions are true and there is no need (or very little need) for programmers anymore. But something tells me “this time is different” is different this time for real. Coding AIs design software better than me, review code better than me, find hard-to-find bugs better than me, plan long-running projects better than me,…

This reads like shilling/advertisement.. Coding AIs are struggling for anything remotely complex, make up crap and present it as research, write tests that are just "return true", and won't ever question a decision you make.

Those twenty engineers must not have produced much.

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#20

Post by keyle » Mon, Dec 29, 2025, 9:57 PM UTC

btbuildem wrote: post #13

mohsen1 wrote: post #3

I really really want this to be true. I want to be relevant. I don’t know what to do if all those predictions are true and there is no need (or very little need) for programmers anymore. But something tells me “this time is different” is different this time for real. Coding AIs design software better than me, review code better than me, find hard-to-find bugs better than me, plan long-running projects better than me,…

They do all those things you've mentioned more efficiently than most of us, but they fall woefully short as soon as novelty is required. Creativity is not in their repertoire. So if you're banging out the same type of thing over and over again, yes, they will make that work light and then scarce. But if you need to create something niche, something one-off, something new, they'll slip off the bleeding edge into the c…

Take food for example. We don't eat food made by computers even though they're capable of making it from start to finish.

Sure we eat carrots probably assisted by machines, but we are not eating dishes like protein bars all day every day.

Our food is still better enjoyed when made by a chef.

Software engineering will be the same. No one will want to use software made by a machine all day every day. There are differences in the execution and implementation.

No one will want to read books entirely dreamed up by AI. Subtle parts of the books make us feel something only a human could have put right there right then.

No one will want to see movies entirely made by AI.

The list goes on.

But you might say "software is different". Yes but no, in the abundance of choice, when there will be a ton of choice for a type of software due to the productivity increase, choice will become more prominent and the human driven software will win.

Even today we pick the best terminal emulation software because we notice the difference between exquisitely crafted and bloated cruft.