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.
The future of software development is software developers
71–80 of 588 posts
Re: The future of software development is software developers
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 art…
This is just a transition.
re-Rest API, you're right. But again, we use roombas to vacuum when the floor layout is friendly to them. Not all rooms can be vacuumed by roombas. Simple Rest api can be emitted one shot from an LLM and there is no room for interpretation. But ask a future LLM to make a new kind of social network and you'll end up with a mash up of the existing ones.
Same thing, you and I won't use a manual screwdriver when we have 100 screws to get in, and we own an electric drill.
That didn't reinvent screws nor the assembly of complex items.
I'm keeping positive in the sense that LLMs will enable us to do more, and to learn faster.
The sad part about vibe coding is you learn very little. And to live is to learn.
You'll notice people vibecoding all day become less and less attached to the product they work on. That's because they've given away the dopamine hits of the many "ha-ha" moments that come from programming. They'll lose interest. They won't learn anymore and die off (career wise).
So, businesses that put LLM first will slowly lose talent over time, and business that put developers first will thrive.
It's just a transition. A fast one that hits us like a wall, and it's confusing, but software for humans will be better made by humans.
I've been programming since the 80s. The level of complexity today is bat shit insane. I welcome the LLM help in managing 3 code bases of 3 languages spread across different architectures (my job) to keep sane!
Re: The future of software development is software developers
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
+1 - I wish at least one of these AI boosters had shown us a real commercialised product they've built.
AI boosters? Like people are planted by Sam Altman like the way they hire crowds for political events or something? Hey! Maybe I’m AI! You’re absolutely right! In seriousness: I’m sure there are projects that are heavily powered by Claude, myself and a lot of other people I know use Claude almost exclusively to write and then leverage it as a tool when reviewing. Almost everyone I hear that has this super negative ho…
If you want to show me how to "guess where things are heading" / I am actually one of the early adopters of LLMs and have been engineering software professionally for almost half my life now. Why do you think I was an early adopter? Because I was skeptical or afraid of that tech? No, I was genuinely excited. Yes you can produce mountains of code, even more so if you were already an experienced engineer, like myself for example.
Yes you can even get it to produce somewhat acceptable outputs, with a lot of effort at prompting it and fatigue that comes with it. But at the end of the day, as an experienced engineer, I am not being more productive with it, I will end up being less productive because of all the sharp edges I have to take care of, all the sloppily produced code, unnecessary bloat, hallucinated or injected libraries etc.
Maybe for folks who were not good at maths or had trouble understanding how computers work this looks like a brave new world of opportunities. Surely that app looks good to you, how bad can it be? Just so you and other such vibe-coders understand, here is a parallel.
It is actually fairly simple for a group of aviation enthusiasts to build a flying airplane. We just need to work out some basic mechanics, controls and attach engines. It can be done, I've seen a couple of documentaries too. However, those planes are shit. Why? Because me and my team of enthusiast dont have the depth of knowledge of a team of aviation engineers to inform my decisions.
What is the tolerance for certain types of movements, what kind of materials do I need to pick, what should be my maintenance windows for various parts etc. There are things experts can decide on almost intuitively, yet with great precision, based on their many years of craft and that wonderful thing called human intelligence. So my team of enthusiasts puts together an airplane. Yeah it flies. It can even be steered. It rolls, pitches and yawns. It takes off and lands. But to me it's a black-box, because I don't understand many, many factors, forces, pressures, tensors, effects etc that are affecting an airplane during it's flight and takeoff. I am probably not even aware WHAT I should be aware of. Because I dont have that deep educaiton about mechanical engineering, materials, aerodynamics etc. Neither does my team. So my plane, while impressive to me and my team, will never take off commercially, not unless a team of professionals take it over and remakes it to professional standards. It will probably never even fly in a show. And if me or someone on my team dies flying it, you guessed it - our insurance sure as hell won't cover the costs.
So what you are doing with Claude and other tools, while it may look amazing to you, is not that impressive to the rest of us, because we can see those wheels beginning to fall off even before your first take off. Of course, before I can even tell that, I'd have to actually see your airplane, it's design plans etc. So perhaps first show us some of those "projects heavily powered by Claude" and their great success, especially commercial one (otherwise its a toy project), before you talk about them.
The fact that you are clearly not an expert on the topic of software engineering should guide you here - unless you know what you are talking about, it's better to not say anything at all.
Re: The future of software development is software developers
#75Earlier 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…
There are lots of things like perfectly machined nails, tools, etc. that are much better done by machines. Why couldn't software be one of those?
Re: The future of software development is software developers
#76There 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…
Re: The future of software development is software developers
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 DO…
Re: The future of software development is software developers
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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
#79Re: The future of software development is software developers
#80I 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.
And of course, getting to the point where you can write a good foundation has always been the bulk of the work. I don't see that changing anytime soon.