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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

#41

Post by criticalfault »

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…

just tried to reverse the string you provided using Gemini. it worked fine on the first try

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#42

Post by hansmayer »

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…

> I’ve done things with Claude I never thought possible for myself to do,

That's the point champ. They seem great to people when they apply them to some domain they are not competent it, that's because they cannot evaluate the issues. So you've never programmed but can now scaffold a React application and basic backend in a couple of hours? Good for you, but for the love of god have someone more experienced check it before you push into production. Once you apply them to any area where you have at least moderate competence, you will see all sorts of issues that you just cannot unsee. Security and performance is often an issue, not to mention the quality of code....

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#43

Post by hansmayer »

jayd16 wrote: post #36
aspenmartin wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

+1 - I wish at least one of these AI boosters had shown us a real commercialised product they've built.

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#45

Post by to11mtm »

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,…

It's definitely scary in a way.

However I'm still finding a trend even in my org; better non-AI developers tend to be better at using AI to develop.

AI still forgets requirements.

I'm currently running an experiment where I try to get a design and then execute on an enterprise 'SAAS-replacement' application [0].

AI can spit forth a completely convincing looking overall project plan [1] that has gaps if anyone, even the AI itself, tries to execute on the plan; this is where a proper, experienced developer can step in at the right steps to help out.

IDK if that's the right way to venture into the brave new world, but I am at least doing my best to be at a forefront of how my org is using the tech.

[0] - I figured it was a good exercise for testing limits of both my skills prompting and the AI's capability. I do not expect success.

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#46

Post by foxygen »

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,…

I think I've been using AI wrong. I can't understand testimonies like this. Most times I try to use AI for a task, it is a shitshow, and I have to rewrite everything anyway.

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#47

Post by hansmayer »

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…

> 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?

Just for the fun of it, and so you lose your "virginity" so to speak, next time when the magic machine gives you the answer about "what it thinks", tell it its wrong in a strict language and scold it for misleading you. Tell it to give you the "real" best practices instead of what it spat out. Then sit back and marvel at the machine saying you were right and that it had mislead you. Producing a completely, somewhat, or slightly different answer (you never know what you get on the slot machine).

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#48

Post by aspenmartin »

hansmayer wrote: post #42
aspenmartin wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> I’ve done things with Claude I never thought possible for myself to do, That's the point champ. They seem great to people when they apply them to some domain they are not competent it, that's because they cannot evaluate the issues. So you've never programmed but can now scaffold a React application and basic backend in a couple of hours? Good for you, but for the love of god have someone more experienced check it…

Seems fine, works, is fine, is better than if you had me go off and write it on my own. You realize you can check the results? You can use Claude to help you understand the changes as you read through them? I mean I just don’t get this weird “it makes mistakes and it’s horrible if you understand the domain that it is generating over” I mean yes definitely sometimes and definitely not other times. What happens if I DONT have someone more experienced to consult with or that will ignore me because they are busy or be wrong because they are also imperfect and not focused. It’s really hard to be convinced that this point of view is not just some knee jerk reaction justified post hoc

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#49

Post by boogieknite »

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…

maybe not the MOST valuable part of prompting an LLM during a task, but one of them, is defining the exact problem in precise language. i dont just blindly turn to an LLM without understanding the problem first, but i do find Claude is better than a cardboard cutout of a dog

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#50

Post by doug_durham »

foxygen wrote: post #46
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,…

I think I've been using AI wrong. I can't understand testimonies like this. Most times I try to use AI for a task, it is a shitshow, and I have to rewrite everything anyway.

I don’t know about right/wrong. You need to use the tools that make you productive. I personally find that in my work there are dozens of little scripts or helper functions that accelerate my work. However I usually don’t write them because I don’t have the time. AI can generate these little scripts very consistently. That accelerates my work. Perhaps just start simple.
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