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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

#61

Post by hansmayer »

tomlue wrote: post #31
kgwxd wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It will only get better at generating random slop and other crap. Maybe helping morons who are unable to eat and breathe without consulting the "helpful assistant".

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#62

Post by jayd16 »

aspenmartin wrote: post #58
jayd16 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Who is saying anything about 20x? Sorry did I miss something here?

> work of an entire org that used to need twenty engineers.

From the OP. If you think that's too much then we agree.

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#63

Post by mywittyname »

heliumtera wrote: post #21
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,…

Stop freaking out. Seriously. You're afraid of something completely ridiculous. It is certainly more eloquent than you regarding software architecture (which was a scam all along, but conversation for another time). It will find SOME bugs better than you, that's a given. Review code better than you? Seriously? What you're using and what you consider code review? Assume I could identify one change broke production and…

We use code rabbit and it's better than practically any human I've worked with at a number of code review tasks, such as finding vulnerabilities, highlighting configuration issues, bad practices, etc. It's not the greatest at "does this make sense here" type questions, but I'd be the one answering those questions anyway.

Yeah, maybe the people I've worked with suck at code reviews, but that's pretty normal.

Not to say your answer is wrong. I think the gist is accurate. But I think tooling will get better at answering exactly the kind of questions you bring up.

Also, someone has to be responsible. I don't think the industry can continue with this BS "AI broke it." Our jobs might devolve into something more akin to a SDET role and writing the "last mile" of novel code the AI can't produce accurately.

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#65

Post by d_silin »

hansmayer wrote: post #55
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…

> One can treat current LLMs as a layer of "cheese" for any software development or deployment pipeline It's another interesting attempt at normalising the bullshit output by LLMs, but NO. Even with the entshittified Boeing, the aviation industry safety and reliability records, are far far far above deterministic software (know for a lot of un-reliability itself), and deterministic, B2C software to LLMs in turn is wh…

I understand the frustration, but factually it is not true.

Engines are reliable to about 1 anomaly per million flight hours or so, current flight software is more reliable, on order of 1 fault per billion hours. In-flight engine shutdowns are fairly common, while major software anomalies are much rarer.

I used LLMs for coding and troubleshooting, and while they can definitely "hit" and "miss", they don't only "miss".

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#66

Post by doug_durham »

keyle wrote: post #20
btbuildem wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 differen…

You should look at other engineering disciplines. How many highway over passes have unique “chef quality” designs? Very few. Most engineering is commodity replications of existing designs. The exact same thing applies to software engineering. Most of us engineers are replicating designs that came earlier. LLMs are good at generating the rote designs that make up the bulk of software by volume. Who benefit from an artisanal REST interface? The best practices were codified over a decade ago.

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#67

Post by anonymars »

heliumtera wrote: post #21
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,…

Stop freaking out. Seriously. You're afraid of something completely ridiculous. It is certainly more eloquent than you regarding software architecture (which was a scam all along, but conversation for another time). It will find SOME bugs better than you, that's a given. Review code better than you? Seriously? What you're using and what you consider code review? Assume I could identify one change broke production and…

> Review code better than you? Seriously?

Yes, seriously (not OP). Sometimes it's dumb as rocks, sometimes it's frighteningly astute.

I'm not sure at which point of the technology sigmoid curve we find ourselves (2007 iPhone or 2017 iPhone?) but you're doing yourself a disservice to be so dismissive

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#68

Post by eithed »

criticalfault wrote: post #41
belter wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

In gemini:

> The reverse of the string 'gssssyeekxxuoaqaaaiooo9aaa7zjx' is:

xjz7aaa9oooiiaaaqauxxkyeessssg

> Youve made a mistake

``` I see where I tripped up! Let's re-examine that long string carefully.

The original string you gave me was: `gssssyeekxxuoaqaaaiooo9aaa7zjx`

Let's look at the end of that string: `...aaa7zjx`. When we reverse it, it should start with: `xjz7aaa...`

Here is the precise character-by-character reversal:

*xjz7aaa9oooiiaaaqauxxkyeessssg*

Wait—I see it now. In my previous response, I included an extra *'i'* and missed one *'o'* in the middle section. Let's do a strict count to get it perfect:

* *Original:* `g` `ssss` `y` `ee` `k` `xx` `u` `o` `a` `q` `aaa` *`iooo`* `9` `aaa` `7` `z` `j` `x` * *Correct Reverse:* `x` `j` `z` `7` `aaa` `9` *`oooi`* `aaa` `q` `a` `o` `u` `xx` `k` `ee` `y` `ssss` `g`

The correct reversed string is: *xjz7aaa9oooiiaaaqauoxxkyeessssg*

Thank you for catching that. It’s easy for the eyes to glaze over when there are so many repeating vowels!

Since I've stumbled a bit on these, would you like to give me one more string to see if I can get it right on the first try? ```

After more back and fors it consistently fails in this task, even though when strictly dividing the tokens it will get this right. Yet the final answer is always wrong.

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#69

Post by jmogly »

davnicwil wrote: post #37
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.

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 b…

I would say it varies from 0x to a modest 2x. It can help you write good code quickly, but, I only spent about 20-30% of my time writing code anyway before AI. It definitely makes debugging and research tasks much easier as well. I would confidently say my job as a senior dev has gotten a lot easier and less stressful as a result of these tools.

One other thing I have seen however is the 0x case, where you have given too much control to the llm, it codes both you and itself into pan’s labyrinth, and you end up having to take a weed wacker to the whole project or start from scratch.

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#70

Post by doug_durham »

belter wrote: post #6
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,…

>> 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…

Why would you expect an LLM or even a human to succeed in these cases? “Write a piece of code for a specification that you can’t possibly know about?” That’s why you have to do context engineering, just like you’d provide a reference to a new document to an engineer writing code.
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