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The future of software development is software developers

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Re: The future of software development is software developers

#31

Post by tomlue »

kgwxd wrote: post #17
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.

how sure are you that an llm won't be better at reviewing code for safety than most humans, and eventually, most experts?

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#32

Post by aspenmartin »

63stack wrote: post #19
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.

No it doesn’t read like shilling and advertisement, it’s tiring hearing people continually dismiss coding agents as if they have not massively improved and are driving real value despite limitations and they are only just getting started. I’ve done things with Claude I never thought possible for myself to do, and I’ve done things where Claude made the whole effort take twice as long and 3x more of my time. It’s not like people are ignoring the limitations, it’s that people can see how powerful the already are and how much more headroom there is even with existing paradigms not to mention the compute scaling happening in 26-27 and the idea pipeline from the massive hoarding of talent.

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#33

Post by jayd16 »

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,…

My experience with these tools is far and away no where close to this.

If you're really able to do the work of a 20 man org on your own, start a business.

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#34

Post by nrhrjrjrjtntbt »

simonw wrote: post #2

I nodded furiously at this bit: > The hard part of computer programming isn't expressing what we want the machine to do in code. The hard part is turning human thinking -- with all its wooliness and ambiguity and contradictions -- into computational thinking that is logically precise and unambiguous, and that can then be expressed formally in the syntax of a programming language. > That was the hard part when program…

Hardest part of programming is knowing wtf all the existing code does and why.

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#35

Post by cmrdporcupine »

simonw wrote: post #2

I nodded furiously at this bit: > The hard part of computer programming isn't expressing what we want the machine to do in code. The hard part is turning human thinking -- with all its wooliness and ambiguity and contradictions -- into computational thinking that is logically precise and unambiguous, and that can then be expressed formally in the syntax of a programming language. > That was the hard part when program…

Indeed, while DeepSeek 3.2 or GLM 4.7 are not Opus 4.5 quality, they are close enough that I could _get by_ because they're not that far off, and are about where I was with Sonnet 3.5 or Sonnet 4 a few months ago.

I'm not convinced DeepSeek is making money hosting these, but it's not that far off from it I suspect. They could triple their prices and still be cheaper than Anthropic is now.

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#36

Post by jayd16 »

aspenmartin wrote: post #32
63stack wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No it doesn’t read like shilling and advertisement, it’s tiring hearing people continually dismiss coding agents as if they have not massively improved and are driving real value despite limitations and they are only just getting started. I’ve done things with Claude I never thought possible for myself to do, and I’ve done things where Claude made the whole effort take twice as long and 3x more of my time. It’s not l…

When prices go down or product velocity goes up we'll start believing in the new 20x developer. Until then, it doesn't align with most experiences and just reads like fiction.

You'll notice no one ever seems to talk about the products they're making 20x faster or cheaper.

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#37

Post by davnicwil »

63stack wrote: post #19
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.

I would say while LLMs do improve productivity sometimes, I have to say I flatly cannot believe a claim (at least without direct demonstration or evidence) that one person is doing the work of 20 with them in december 2025 at least.

I mean from the off, people were claiming 10x probably mostly because it's a nice round number, but those claims quickly fell out of the mainstream as people realised it's just not that big a multiplier in practice in the real world.

I don't think we're seeing this in the market, anywhere. Something like 1 engineer doing the job of 20, what you're talking about is basically whole departments at mid sized companies compressing to one person. Think about that, that has implications for all the additional management staff on top of the 20 engineers too.

It'd either be a complete restructure and rethink of the way software orgs work, or we'd be seeing just incredible, crazy deltas in output of software companies this year of the type that couldn't be ignored, they'd be impossible to not notice.

This is just plainly not happening. Look, if it happens, it happens, 26, 27, 28 or 38. It'll be a cool and interesting new world if it does. But it's just... not happened or happening in 25.

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#38

Post by manmal »

memoriuaysj wrote: post #15
treespace8 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bet…

Both the before and after are better done manually. What you are describing is fine for the heck of it (I‘ve vibe coded a whisper related rust port today without having any actual rust skills), but I’d never use fully vibed software in production. That’s irresponsible in multiple ways.

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#39

Post by cmrdporcupine »

berdon wrote: post #10

There is a guaranteed cap on how far LLM based AI models can go. Models improve by being trained on better data. LLMs being used to generate millions of lines of sloppy code will substantially dilute the pool of good training data. Developers moving over to AI based development will cease to grow and learn - producing less novel code. The massive increase in slop code and loss of innovation in code will establish an…

But they're not just training off code and its use, but off a corpus general human knowledge in written form.

I mean, in general not only do they have all of the crappy PHP code in existence in their corpus but they also have Principia Mathematica, or probably The Art of Computer Programming. And it has become increasingly clear to me that the models have bridged the gap between "autocomplete based on code I've seen" to some sort of distillation of first order logic based on them just reading a lot of language... and some fuzzy attempt at reasoning that came out of it.

Plus the agentic tools driving them are increasingly ruthless at wringing out good results.

That said -- I think there is a natural cap on what they can get at as pure coding machines. They're pretty much there IMHO. The results are usually -- I get what I asked for, almost 100%, and it tends to "just do the right thing."

I think the next step is actually to actually make it scale and make it profitable but also...

fix the tools -- they're not what I want as an engineer. They try to take over, and they don't put me in control, and they create a very difficult review and maintenance problem. Not because they make bad code but because they make code that nobody feels responsible for.

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#40

Post by manmal »

belter wrote: post #26
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…

Ask a model to "Write a chess engine where pawns move backward and kings can jump like nights" It will keep slipping back into real chess rules. It learned chess, it did not understand the concept of "rules" Or Ask it to reverse a made up word like "Reverse the string 'glorbix'" It will get it wrong on the first try. You would not fail. Or even better ask it to... "Use the dxastgraphx library to build a DAG scheduler…

I‘ve just tried the dxastgraphx one in pi with Opus 4.5. This was its response:

    I couldn't find a library called dxastgraphx in either pip (Python) or npm (JavaScript) package registries. This library doesn't appear to exist.

    Did you perhaps mean one of these popular DAG/graph libraries?

    Python:
    - networkx - comprehensive graph library with DAG support
    - graphlib - Python standard library (3.9+) with TopologicalSorter
    - dask - parallel computing with DAG task scheduling

    JavaScript/TypeScript:
    - graphlib - graph data structures
    - dagre - DAG layout

    Would you like me to build a DAG scheduler using one of these existing libraries, or would you like me to implement one from scratch? Let me know which language and approach you prefer.
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