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

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#81

Post by aspenmartin » Tue, Dec 30, 2025, 12:05 AM UTC

hansmayer wrote: post #77

aspenmartin wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yes you can ask them "to check it for you". The only little problem is as you said yourself "they make mistakes", therefore : YOU CANNOT TRUST THEM. Just because you tell them to "check it" does not mean they will get it right this time. Again, however it seems "fine" to you, please, please, please / have a more senior person check that crap before you inflict serious damage somewhere.

Nope, you read their code, ask them to summarize changes to guide your reading, ask it why it made certain decisions you don’t understand and if you don’t like their explanations you change it (with the agent!). Own and be responsible for the code you commit. I am the “most senior”, and at large tech companies that track, higher level IC corresponds to more AI usage, hmm almost like it’s a useful tool.

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#82

Post by simonw » Tue, Dec 30, 2025, 12:26 AM UTC

underdeserver wrote: post #29

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…

Aren't they also losing money on the marginal inference job?

I think it is very unlikely that they are charging less money for tokens than it costs them to serve those tokens.

If they are then they're in trouble, because the more paying customers they get the more money they lose!

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#83

Post by mikewarot » Tue, Dec 30, 2025, 1:00 AM UTC

>WYSIWYG, drag-and-drop editors like Visual Basic and Delphi were going to end the need for programmers.

VB6 and Delphi were the best possible cognitive impedance match available for domain experts to be able to whip up something that could get a job done. We haven't had anything nearly as productive in the decades since, as far as just letting a normie get something done with a computer.

You'd then hire an actual programmer to come in and take care of corner cases, and make things actually reliable, and usable by others. We're facing a very similar situation now, the AI might be able to generate a brittle and barely functional program, but you're still going to have to have real programmers make it stable and usable.

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#84

Post by JSDave » Tue, Dec 30, 2025, 1:03 AM UTC

doug_durham wrote: post #50

foxygen wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Instead of generating, exporting or copy pasting just seems more reliable to me and also takes very little time.

I think what matters most is just what you're working on. It's great for crud or working with public APIs with lots of examples.

For everything else, AI has been a net loss for me.

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#85

Post by Desafinado » Tue, Dec 30, 2025, 1:07 AM 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,…

That's kind of the point of the article, though.

Sure LLMs can churn out code, and they sort of work for developers who already understand code and design, but what happens when that junior dev with no hard experience builds their years of experience with LLMs?

Over time those who actually understand what the LLMs are doing and how to correct the output are replaced by developers who've never learned the hard lessons of writing code line by line. The ability to reason about code gets lost.

This points to the hard problem that the article highlights. The hard problem of software is actually knowing how to write it, which usually takes years, sometimes up to a decade of real experience.

Any idiot can churn out code that doesn't work. But working, effective software takes a lot of skill that LLMs will be stripping people of. Leaving a market there for people who have actually put the time in and understand software.

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#86

Post by tom_m » Tue, Dec 30, 2025, 2:21 AM 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,…

There will be a need. Don't worry. Most people still haven't figured out how to properly read and interpret instructions. So they build things incorrectly - with or without AI

Seriously. The bar is that low. When people say "AI slop" I just chuckle because it's not "AI" it's everyone. That's the general state of the industry.

So all you have to do is stay engaged, ask questions, and understand the requirements. Know what it is you're building and you'll be fine.

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#87

Post by Deep-Blue » Tue, Dec 30, 2025, 4:15 AM 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,…

As of today NONE of the known AI codebots can solve correctly ANY of the 50+ programming exercises we use to interview fresh grads or summer interns. NONE! Not even level 1 problems that can be solved in fewer than 20 lines of code with a bit of middle school math.

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#88

Post by pfannkuchen » Tue, Dec 30, 2025, 4:44 AM UTC

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 think part of what is happening here is that different developers on HN have very different jobs and skill levels. If you are just writing a large volume of code over and over again to do the same sort of things, then LLMs probably could take your job. A lot of people have joined the industry over time, and it seems like the intelligence bar moved lower and lower over time, particularly for people churning out large volumes of boilerplate code. If you are doing relatively novel stuff, at least in the sense that your abstractions are novel and the shape of the abstraction set is different from the standard things that exist in tutorials etc online, then the LLM will probably not work well with your style.

So some people are panicking and they are probably right, and some other people are rolling their eyes and they are probably right too. I think the real risk is that dumping out loads of boilerplate becomes so cheap and reliable that people who can actually fluently design coherent abstractions are no longer as needed. I am skeptical this will happen though, as there doesn’t seem to be a way around the problem of the giant indigestible hairball (I.e as you have more and more boilerplate it becomes harder to remain coherent).

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#89

Post by emseetech » Tue, Dec 30, 2025, 4:45 AM UTC

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…

Could be speed/efficiency was the wrong dimension to optimize for and its leading the industry down a bad path.

An LLM helps most with surface area. It expands the breadth of possibilities a developer can operate on.

Re: The future of software development is software developers

#90

Post by conductr » Tue, Dec 30, 2025, 5:00 AM UTC

dataviz1000 wrote: post #24

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 was a chef in Michelin-starred restaurants for 11 years. One of my favorite positions was washing dishes. The goal was always to keep the machine running on its 5-minute cycle. It was about getting the dishes into racks, rinsing them, and having them ready and waiting for the previous cycle to end—so you could push them into the machine immediately—then getting them dried and put away after the cycle, making sure t…

If it requires an expert engineer/dishwasher to keep the flow running perfectly, the human is the bottleneck in the process. This sounds a lot more like the past before AI to me. What AI does is just give you enough dishes that they don’t need to be washed at all during dinner service. Just let them pile up dirty or throw them away and get new dishes tomorrow it’s so immaterial to replace that washing them doesn’t always make sense. But if for some reason you do want to reuse them, then, it washes and dries them for you too. You just look over things at the end and make sure they pass your quality standards. If they left some muck on a plate or lipstick on a cup, just tell it not to let that happen again and it won’t. So even your QC work gets easier over time. The labor needed to deal with dirty dishes is drastically reduced in any case.